Great things start small

In season 8, episode 2 of The Office, Kevin Malone, an accountant, started to talk in an unusual way, even for his characters standards. Here is an excerpt from that episode:

“Kevin: Me mechanic not speak English. But he know what me mean when me say “car no go”, and we best friends. So me think: why waste time, say lot word when few word do trick?

Andy: Kevin, I appreciate what you’re trying to do.

Kevin: Thank.

Andy: Here, we have a word code, the same way we have a dress code. And what we’re talking about is…basically the speech equivalent… to just wearing underpants. Sometimes words, you no need use…but need need for talk talk.

Kevin: But save time. More success.

Jim: Does it save time though? ‘Cause we’ve been here for about an hour.

Kevin: No me fault.

Pam: Kevin, at most you’re saving a microscopic amount of time.

Kevin: Many small time make big time.

Andy: What are you gonna do with all this time?

Kevin: See world.

Pam: Kevin, you cannot possibly save enough time to see the world.

Jim: K, Kevin, are you saying “See the world”? or “Sea World?”

Kevin: See world. Oceans. Fish. Jump. China.

Jim: No, see? Right there, that’s the problem with your method. ‘Cause I still don’t know if you’re saying “Sea World” or “see the world,” and it’s taking a lot of time to explain it.

Kevin: Fine, fine. I’ll talk normally.”

Although I disagree with his way of thinking when it comes to finding shortcuts with everyday language, I do, however, agree with his way of thinking. “Many small time make big time” is an idea, if properly translated, means “the accumulation of small things created something big in the end”. Confucius said, “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” While we might not see any changes in the beginning of moving small stones, we end up forming mountains as a result of our actions.

It is the small things we do in life that makes the biggest of differences. You don't become obese overnight nor do you lose your wealth instantly. It is all a compound effect of bad decisions taken almost every day over a considerable period of time. The same goes for gaining muscle mass or becoming the most successful real-estate broker of your city. Success, in any form, does not happen overnight. And if it seems that way, trust me, there was a lot of actions and failures happening behind closed doors that you might not have witnessed or heard about.

One of the best books I read, The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, talks specifically about this. The Compound Effect is based on the principle that decisions shape your destiny. Little, everyday decisions will either take you to the life you desire or to disaster by default. Darren Hardy, the publisher of Success Magazine, presents The Compound Effect, a distillation of the fundamental principles that have guided the most phenomenal achievements in business, relationships, and beyond. The Compound Effect is the strategy of reaping huge rewards from small, seemingly insignificant actions. If it was a mathematical formula, it would look something like this:

Small choices + consistency + time = significant results

It's not big choices, but ones that you think don't matter or count for much that derail us or elevate us towards success. You don't consciously think about it, but these small decisions can really change things.

The other day I was listening to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and I found it amazing how this book originally started:

“I prepared a short talk. I called it ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ I say ‘short.’ It was short in the beginning, but it soon expanded to a lecture that consumed one hour and thirty minutes.”

After giving this talk for some time, Carnegie found that the attendees started discussing their experiences and some “rules” emerged. Eventually, the talk became a course, and there was a need for a textbook of sorts.

“We started with a set of rules printed on a card no larger than a postcard. The next season we printed a larger card, then a leaflet, then a series of booklets, each one expanding in size and scope. After fifteen years of experimentation and research came this book.”

I found that absolutely fascinating – the book came out of a short talk and a few notes on a postcard-sized piece of card. If you really think about it, success does not happen overnight. We cannot build Rome in a day. Although that saying might be an extreme form of an exaggeration it does prove a point. Something that big was not created in one day.

The challenge for a lot of us is that when we go about our lives, we interact with so many “big” things and we forget or do not even know how they originally started. It’s difficult to understand how the evolutionary process of products and brands contributes and is vital to what they are today. We also all have big aspirations and want to get there fast. But just like everything that comes fast and easy is not always good. Dreaming big is great because it sets our sights towards a goal we are trying to achieve. But trying to achieve these big dreams with big actions does not always yield the results we want.

I’ve personally made the mistake of trying to jump to “big” too soon many times before. One of those times was when I first started out working as an Insurance broker. I was working under my father who was a successful broker in the Russian community of our city. He had a lot of experience and shared a lot of knowledge with me. The biggest advantage I had was that I could speak more languages than him when I first started working in this business compared to him where he was just learning English and French.

Though I vaguely remembered how he first started out, I was working with him and saw what he achieved and how he spent his time working. Thinking to myself “this is the life, I want a piece of that pie”, I began making moves. My first contract was a friend of mine who I ended up getting a good commission on. I helped him save money while providing the right coverage for his auto and home. Thinking to myself, “if that’s how it starts, it will take me a lot less time to achieve the same amount of success as it took my father when he first started out.” Little to my knowledge, I did not see what was happening behind closed doors. I did not realize that after three months hustle and work, he made the same amount of money as I did with one client. I did not see how he went from place to place distributing his business cards. While my mother was working as a life insurance broker, going to meetings and conferences, he was going with her only to distribute his cards and get his name out there. For the first year, he consistently took action with a goal in mind – earn more than two thousand dollars per month. Although it took him a bit more time than a year to accomplish that goal, he was still able to attain it.

I, on the other hand, did not start with small actions. Instead, I was thinking big right off the bat without a clear vision of how I was going to accomplish my goals and I underestimated the level of actions I needed to take to get to the same level as my father. It took me a while before I created a professional business Facebook page; before I put my ad in the news paper; before I began sending people messages, inviting them to like my page, contacting them about insurance, and so on.

I can see how this might not seem like much, but when you break it down to what it is I had to do, there are a lot of small actions needed to be completed before I could cross off each step I needed to take in order to get to the next level.

For example, in order to place an ad in a news paper, I had to do some research on what my options were. To do that research, I had to find out which group of people I was targeting. More precisely, I had to find out which neighborhood did I want to do business with. When I decided on which borough I wanted to focus on, I researched on what local newspapers were being distributed. The next step was to get their phone number so I could contact them and acquire information on what they had to offer in terms of advertisement for my line of work. After the phone call was made, I had to submit a photo of my with a description of which services I offered and my contact information for the advertisement. Next, came the negotiations on the prices. Yes, my friends, everything is negotiable in life. When it was all said and done, my newspaper ad was up. And I felt great. I received a few (very few) calls, I deemed it to be a success. Success in the sense that I got my name out there. It was in writing. In a way, I felt that my new business venture was a real thing. Even though I received my license and I was already working in a firm, I felt that at that point, I was truly an independent broker.

While it was a huge failure, I took that loss and turned it into a lesson. The reason I consider it to be a failure is that of the return of/on investment I made, meaning I poured more money into the ad than I ended up making. But, I took that loss and turned it into a lesson. As captain Jack Sparrow once said: “the problem is not the problem. The problem is the attitude towards the problem.” And so, I went back to the drawing boards and worked on a different approach.

One of the very clever ways I procrastinate is by telling myself I need to set aside big blocks of time to focus on a particular area of my business. Placing my ad in a newspaper or in social media, for example, was one of those “I just need to find a day to get stuck into that” type of thinking I was filling my head with.

“You are busy with your work, with your partners' work, with your personal projects, with your family, with your boyfriend or girlfriend, with life… you are never going to find the time you are looking for!”

How many times have you found yourself thinking that? I know I have caught myself a few times. The thing is we are all busy. But are we busy for the sake of being busy in order to avoid tasks or are we busy by being productive with our day? Finding an entire day to focus on a task that you most likely hate doing is never going to happen. Let’s face it, if we enjoyed that task we would probably be on top of it already. Finding big chunks of time is near impossible, finding big chunks of time AND the motivation to start and finish that task is as likely as riding a donkey naked down the middle of the highway. Not going to happen. At least I speak for myself. I know a few people who would actually do that.

How do we start? We can GO BIG or go home. And most of us end up going home because GOING BIG requires us to have BIG TIME. So, let us not go wild and start small. As the great philosopher/accountant/avid eater once said: “Many small time make big time.”

Stop punishing yourself by trying to find these magical big empty blocks of time and start small. Like I said earlier, I have caught myself a few times before. When I was told I had to get my name out there, I thought to myself I had to take a day off to get everything done. Even when I did find that magical free day I would spend it doing something else instead. I took the full day off to deal with this task but went to a cafe and napped instead, I just couldn’t get motivated. Then came the flood of guilt and self-loathing… I could not understand why, even though I set a lot of time aside, I could not do it.

“Many small time make big time”

When you take small daily or weekly actions you will get results. It is like exercise, head out to the gym for a five-hour session and you will be mentally scarred for life. You will want to go back for another year or ever again. Take a 20-minute walk each day and not only will you feel great, you will be making small steps in the right direction instead of one massive, exhausting, overwhelming leap.

Remember that there are very few people who love every single aspect of running their business. Some tasks that we know we should be doing but just cannot find the energy, motivation and time to tackle them. But we should not beat ourselves up. What worked for me was scheduling 20 minutes each day to get started on them. Doing as much as I could in 20 minutes, then moved on with my day. No more waiting for a full uninterrupted day to arrive.

Wondering how to get started? Choose one area of your business that you know you need to spend time on. Set an alarm for the next week at the same time each day. As soon as the alarm buzzes set a 20-minute timer and get stuck into that activity you really do not want to do. When your 20 minutes is up, you can get back to what you were doing. If you are like me, when your 20 minutes is up, you will be on a roll and want to keep going. I found that to happen more often than I predicted. And these once dreaded tasks seemed easy. Following this tip for two weeks will amount to at least 3 hours we spend on that project that we previously did not “have time” for.

Bruce Lee once said: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” If you practice a technique once or twice - or a few times - you won't be that good at it. If you practice something 10,000 times you will drill it into your muscle memory, work out all the details of alignment and geometry - then it will be a real weapon in your arsenal. Also, someone who is willing to do that level of investigation and training on one kick is probably someone who is like that with their entire martial arts study. That motto can be applied to anything in life, not just martial arts.

Executing one small action many times is not what I am trying to convey. What I do want to express is that small actions, taken daily can lead to something greater than we thought it could be. Spending small amounts of time on something we have been putting off will lead to us completing the project we set ourselves to accomplish in the first place.

There are myriad reasons why we don’t invest in our selves and become more successful in our careers: we can’t find the time to do so, we don’t know what to do, or what we do doesn’t work. I encourage you to invest just a few minutes each day for yourself and your projects, your career, the tasks you have been putting off. What holds people back from their greatness? It is not one BIG thing that stops people, it is a series of small actions not taken. Letting your mind over complicate things, allowing procrastination to creep in, or having standards that are unrealistic.

When you take action and complete one or two small items every day, over time, you will accomplish more than you might imagine. We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a short period of time, say one year, and underestimate what we can accomplish in a longer period of time, perhaps a decade. What shape would your body be in, if over the course of 5 years you did body weight exercises at home for 30 minutes a day, every day? What books might be written with 20 minutes of focused writing each evening? Adding one task to your calendar that will take no more than 30 minutes total will result in the creation of a project. You can take that time and divide it into two or three small blocks of time that you can assign for your day. You will experience a greater sense of completion and satisfaction. It is the small things done consistently over time that create results.

Or as Kevin Malone said: “Many small time make big time”.