Why Making Progress Is the Most Powerful Motivator Achieve your goals one small win at a time.
By Aytekin Tank
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Long before Festivus and "yada yada" became baked into our cultural lexicon, Jerry Seinfeld was just another comedian, touring the country in hopes of making people laugh. It was during this time that software developer Brad Isaac, then an aspiring comic himself, had the chance to ask Seinfeld if he had any tips. It turns out, he did.
Seinfeld told Isaac that the way to be a better comic was to write better jokes, and the way to write better jokes was to practice every day. His system for holding himself accountable was to use a big wall calendar containing a whole year on one page. For each day he did his joke writing, Seinfeld put a big red X over that day.
"After a few days you'll have a chain," Seinfeld explained. "Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."
Seinfeld didn't become one of the best known comedians on Earth overnight. He worked on writing jokes every day, treating it like any other job—which it is. Those big red "Xs" represent progress, and, as Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer write in Harvard Business Review, making progress in meaningful work is the single most powerful emotional booster and motivator there is.
All too often, we focus only on reaching huge milestones, ignoring all the incremental steps we take to get there. Here's how to resize your goals to emphasize progress over big wins.
This is your brain on progress
Research from Amabile and Kramer shows that the main driver of creative and productive performance is the quality of what they call an "inner work life"—the emotions, motivations and perceptions a person feels over the course of a workday.
We tend to connect the idea of progress with achieving long-term goals or major breakthroughs. And while those wins feel great, they're relatively rare. The good news, write Amabile and Kramer, is that small wins have a tremendously positive effect on inner work life. According to their research, many of the progress events reported by participants were technically minor, yet evoked outsize positive reactions.
"Across all types of events our participants reported, a notable proportion (28%) of incidents that had a minor impact on the project had a major impact on people's feelings about it," they write. "Because inner work life has such a potent effect on creativity and productivity, and because small but consistent steps forward, shared by many people, can accumulate into excellent execution, progress events that often go unnoticed are critical to the overall performance of organizations."
Related: The Life-Changing Habit of Progressive Leaders
In other words, making progress fills us with much of the same satisfaction as achieving big milestones. But because it happens far more regularly, it can generate more consistent motivation.
Set specific, measurable goals
Making progress is all about reaching strategic milestones. But when you're doing something as overwhelming as running a business, it can be easy to get pulled in too many different directions, which keeps you from feeling like you're getting anything done.
To run my company, Jotform, I use the SMART goal framework, which consists of five elements:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound
When you're first implementing SMART, take some time to zoom out and think about your overall vision or long-term goal. Once you've got an idea of where you're headed, it's time to plot out the route to getting there. This is where SMART comes in. Operating within the SMART parameters will help you make progress more efficiently, which in turn will keep you motivated and inspired.
Related: 5 Steps for Achieving Your Goals Through Healthy Habits
Adjust your expectations
Say you've decided to start training for a marathon. You start running a few miles every day. After a couple of weeks, you evaluate your progress, and find you're still not ready to run a 10k, much less a full marathon. You become discouraged and quit running altogether.
The problem isn't that you haven't accomplished anything. It's that your expectations are unrealistic, as Vancouver-based educator Mehrnaz Bassiri tells TED Ideas.
That we expect so much of ourselves isn't surprising—we're constantly inundated with images of other peoples' major successes, be it through word-of-mouth, blogs or social media. When the only wins we hear about are the overnight sensations that rocket to the top of TechCrunch, it can make our incremental progress feel puny by comparison.
Being constantly exposed to flashy stories of big wins "have programmed our thoughts and desires to want and expect the same kind of results in our own lives," Bassiri says. "We've started to measure our progress on an oversized scale." That means that rather than celebrating our own modest successes, we view them as failures.
Learning to truly appreciate your progress means re-scaling your expectations. Instead of berating yourself for not cracking a sub-six minute mile, be proud that you've maintained a regular running schedule. Remember Seinfeld's big red Xs? Simply not breaking the chain is an accomplishment on its own.
Be positive
Similar to adjusting your expectations, adopting a positive outlook is a matter of reframing your perceptions in a useful way. Constantly zeroing in on your failures will drain your motivation. Focusing on your accomplishments and what you've done well, on the other hand, will bolster your self confidence. In one study, researchers found that when participants visualized positive outcomes, their levels of anxiety and worry notably lowered.
Maintaining positivity takes practice. To train your mind, try using affirmations. It sounds simple, but reminding yourself, out loud and into the mirror, that you are capable and worthy of success is an incredibly powerful practice. It also helps to surround yourself with people who support your goals, and reinforce the positive messages you're sending yourself.
Related: Harnessing the Power of Positive Thinking to Grow Your Business
In today's world of instant gratification and the glorification of big wins, the act of making progress is often overlooked. Rather than discounting your small wins, recognize them for what they are: the essential stepping stones that pave the way to your goals.
