When you read self help books, the ask you to think of all the dreams you have and to write them down , then set goals etc. Etc.

I have read so many of those books, each time thinking that by following the advice in the book I would be able to achieve all my dreams sooner rather than later.

Each time I used to write the massive goals and then have a look at them everyday, after a few weeks I would kind of get disillusioned or distracted and give up because somewhere I think my brain used to keep working on the fact that this was not a feasible thing and it would not believe it.

However when I kept Small short term targets, I generally used to end up meeting them. In these situations I generally believed that it was possible and I could achieve it. This is why one of most recommended books on this blog has been Tiny Habits by B. J. Fogg.

This fact that the brain believes in small incremental targets makes a lot of sense if any eventually large target can be broken down into smaller incremental opportunities to achieve and then let the law of compounding play its role.

In my last post I had mentioned how Tony Hsieh in his book Delivering Happiness talks about a 1% improvement everyday can make you 365% better at the end of the year. Even if this seems an undoable thing , if we were to improve even 10% every quarter in whatever field we want, by the end of the year you would be more than 46% better than the previous year.

While reading Steven Kotler’s book The Art of Impossible, he’s actually got this incremental number to 4%. He says that if the challenge or target is 4% more than your current ability, then there’s enough anxiousness to perform but the brain doesn’t feel that it’s an impossible task and therefore there’s a large chance of success .

If you are like me who get overwhelmed with very high value targets or goals, then try doing this 4% method every month or 10% every quarter or anything which you think your brain will believe. As I have stated many times earlier, its our brain which plays games on us, so we have to find ways to trick the brain and use the law of compounding to our benefit.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!