The Power of “Small-Chunking” it
Happy Independence Day!
One of the things I’ve read recently in many articles is about how people today all want the elusive “magic pill” and the quick fix that will solve all their problems. Then there is the cliché (but true) advice that nothing happens overnight and that everything takes time and hard work.
While I agree with this advice, I think it can be discouraging at times to anybody trying to improve their health, wealth, or relationships in some way. I believe a reframe is definitely in order. Reading over Neil Strauss’s archive which chronicles his journey and ascension to mastery of his dating life as described in The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, one of my favorite pieces of advice that he would give was about “small-chunking” pieces to your game. If he wanted to meet a woman, he knew he would have to become proficient at opening a group of people until he had mastery over that skill. He would then have to add the next piece to his repertoire and so on until he was competent enough to have navigated an entire interaction and was dating the woman he wanted to date.
This advice is excellent and is much more valuable to me than “everything takes time and hard work”. Well of course it does! But what a wonderful attitude to have towards any task you undertake in your personal development.
Take this website for instance. It is still in its fetal stage as I am writing this article. In order to learn the skills necessary to get to this point, I have gone through many transition phases as I learn what it takes to get a blog up and running and I am far from done. I had a blog on Blogger, and then figured out that I preferred Wordpress. I knew virtually nothing about HTML and CSS, but now I know a little and that body of knowledge is growing. I knew nothing about advertising, marketing, and traffic-building and I am slowly integrating these things into my routine. I hadn’t seriously written anything other than a term paper, and now I have a venue to express my opinions, experience and creativity and craft them in a way that will help and bring value to others. The best part is I’m still learning and I am enjoying the journey. I consider my website or any venture I undertake to be a work of art and I am the artist, consistently molding and refining and improving the work.
This is the way to be with any undertaking of personal development and improving your health, wealth, and relationships. Consider your self to be both the art and the artist. Decide what it is that you want yourself to be and “upgrade” yourself in small chunks. Here is a step-by-step process to getting there.
1. Write down what you want. Do you want a better job? A better body? A better significant other? Or all three? Write your desires down on paper. Make them more tangible and more real. Some might call this goal-setting. Try to be as specific as possible. Write the position you want in the company and how much you want to be paid, the target weight and body fat percentage you wish to have, and the type of special someone you’d like to have complete with a list of qualities they should possess. This helps you in the next step.
2. Focus on each goal. Focus is one of the most important skills that you already have and don’t even realize it. If you’re anything like me your focus gets derailed many times throughout every day. The skill is in how you can avoid the distractions or deal with them quickly and get back on track. Another thing to keep in mind is not multitasking. When you try to do more than one thing at once, you will not do justice to any of them. You can work on all your goals at once, but NOT AT THE SAME TIME. Read a chapter from that book that will give you a leg up on getting that job over your peers, THEN go to the gym for an hour, THEN go talk to that attractive man/woman you see while you’re having drinks at the happy hour. Make active attempts to FOCUS on what you want and then take action.
3. If you don’t know where to start, model someone who has the skill you want to have. This is of mass importance. If you got to hang out with Michael Jordan in the gym, Warren Buffett in the boardroom, and Neil Strauss in the nightclub for a whole week you’d better believe your basketball, investing, and social acuity would be several notches better than they were before. Now think of somebody you know who is good at these skills on a smaller scale like a friend or family member. Go to that person and talk to them about how they do what they do. The insight you can get from these interactions will blow your mind. Start emulating the things this person does in the areas that you want to improve and watch yourself get better. Then find another person to model and then another. Pretty soon you will be a master and hopefully be able to mentor someone else.
4. Don’t panic or get frustrated into stopping your pursuit of excellence if you get stuck or appear to hit a plateau. Simply go to your mentor, look for available information on Google, or ask somebody who might know and push through it. There are so many times I get stuck with code or HTML or adding something to this site. I’m usually able to model someone else’s site who has what I want to have or I can just Google the question over and over in different ways until I find the answer. People are out there who want to help you answer your questions. You just have to be assertively and aggressively seeking them out. What you will find usually is that once you plow through that roadblock, it will be followed by a rapid series of success and progression. Think of it as your skill set catching up on lost time from the plateau. Keep this in mind and maintain a positive attitude, even through the pain periods.
5. Once you have mastered one skill in the skill set you are working towards, build on it by going after the next one with just as much vigor. Stay at it! Continue to write about your journey. It doesn’t just end with writing the goals down. Write down in a journal what you are going through and repeat the processes you encountered in your mind. Think about what you could have done differently or better. You will gain mastery a lot faster this way by reliving your successes (competence builds confidence) and learning from your failures (the value of knowing what NOT to do).
6. Once you master the skills you desire, enjoy them and also help others who are on similar paths. This comes back to modeling. Help someone else who was in your shoes. This serves two purposes: Not only do you help someone who is in need, but you also learn more and gain greater mastery for yourself. It has been said that you are not truly a master of something unless you can teach it. Your student can bring questions and issues to your attention and possibly give you perspectives on the skills you possess in ways you had not previously thought of. This is the only path to true mastery. If there is enough demand for your skill set and you desire to do so, you can earn extra income or build a business off of it and charge for your time and expertise. This could be in the form of a book, a weekend seminar, or a consulting session. What greater compliment and respect for your skills than to be paid to help others develop their own?
Realize that anything you TRULY want in life can be yours. It’s just a matter of defining what those things are, using others to help you along the way bit by bit, and ultimately helping others once you get to where you want to be. Be the Michelangelo AND the David of your life simultaneously and sculpt yourself, a small chunk at a time.
