Just get to B.
Advice from my dad, the payoff of persistence and small steps to solving big problems.
Mantra: Just get to B.
Performing at the highest level is a relentless process of striving and problem solving.
What’s holding me back? Where can I improve? What is getting in the way?
It demands maintaining both a deep understanding of the present and a clear vision for the future - a way of thinking that necessarily shines a gap on the distance between where you are and where you want to be.
I have spent a lot of time exploring and seeking to understand the problems that account for that gap - and that stand in the way of me delivering my best performances on the World Cup Stage. As I have continued to make changes this season, some of those challenges have become very clear. And while understanding a problem is the first step in solving it, seeing the gap clearly doesn’t always make it feel more manageable. Sometimes, it makes it feel bigger.
On a ride this week with my dad, he gave me some great advice.
"You can't just go from A to Z. You are at A right now and it's a big gap. But you just need to find B. Once you have designed the right process for making and measuring progress, you will."
That idea really stuck with me.
When you are taking on a big problem, goal or challenge - it is so easy to imagine the outcome you want to achieve. But when you actually commit to doing it, the process often starts with a recognition of how far away you are.
Part of what makes that initial step feel overwhelming is that it seems like too big of a problem to solve all at once. And if it’s a worthy challenge, it probably is. In the wise words of Tom Courtney, you can’t just go from A to Z.
Instead, reaching that end goal may actually start with solving a much simpler problem - how can I make and measure progress from my starting point?
How can I get to B?
Message: every hit counts…
"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before."
- Jacob Riis
Musing: start moving…
Where in your life are you paralyzed by the task of trying to leap from A to Z?
What if the breakthrough isn’t in finding a way to Z — but in finding B?
As a strategist and as dad who also loves “soul miles” with his daughter (that’s what she calls them - we talk about life and feed the soul), I appreciated this on many levels. Great advice.
Love you, love your dad.