Too Small To Fail

I was listening to a message yesterday morning by Pastor Levi Lusko. He's been teaching a series about "who you could be in 5 years." The idea is to focus beyond just 1 year...think longer term. As I was listening (and multi-tasking) he started talking about push-ups and my ears perked up. "If I set a goal to do 100 push ups everyday and I don't do any push ups now, I am bound to fail. If I set a goal to do ONE push up each day, I feel great when I did ONE and kept going and did 20!"

Set a goal so small you can't possibly fail!

YES YES and more YES!

This is exactly what we've been talking about with these baby step goals into 2018. What typically happens is we set these grandiose goals for ourselves and then we end up frustrated when we inevitably fail. We're going on a new diet (like super-strict, must shop at Whole Foods diet for weird foods we've never heard of). We're going to start working out (for the first time in years).

And we crash and burn before the end of the month. These big goals are not even close to being sustainable, yet somehow we think this is the year we're finally going to do it. And when we don't (because it's not even possible) we end up feeling like a failure, frustrated and discouraged until the next wave of motivation to do something rather extreme comes up and we try to overhaul again.

The idea with setting goals too small to fail is that we feel the success and that encourages us to keep building. One of my goals was to eat breakfast before I workout in the mornings. Just that one thing. It wasn't "eat 6 meals a day". It was just breakfast. When I noticed how good I felt and "accomplished" with just breakfast I wanted to eat better throughout the rest of the day and it naturally made doing so easier. With no stress. No expectation. No risk of failure.

Sometimes we need to take risks when failure is an option. But when it comes to creating healthy habits, perhaps we could cut ourselves a little slack and set ourselves up for massive success. Set a goal that you cannot possibly fail to meet.