A young comedian once asked Jerry Seinfeld what the secret to success was. He was probably expecting some inside knowledge on how to make people laugh, or how to book gigs, what agents to use, how to negotiate a big TV deal.
Seinfeld instead told him to get a wall calendar. Every day he wrote a joke or worked on his craft, put a big red cross on the date. Pretty soon, you won’t want to break the string of successful days. And these successful minute wins add up to the big success you want.
We all want the big victory and we want it now. This drive spurs us on to try and put in serious effort.
“Big” wins are really a series of small wins accumulated. And starting with the tiniest of wins increases our motivation to keep going.
So what’s this got to do with “Don’t Miss Twice” in the subject? Well, we’re anticipating we’re going to stumble at some point. It’s way better to plan in advance for the stumble and have a strategy in place than it is to expect it to be all wins.
So when we have a bad day food wise, we get back on track the next meal. We don’t sacrifice the weekend or starve ourselves to try compensate for it.
When we have a bad training session we reduce the load/intensity/duration/skill requirement the next day so we can have a good training session.
I really wish it could be just one big action that meant BOOM! Victory. It’s the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of small wins, small loses, and small course corrections that get us to our destination.