Imagine brewing a delicious cup of coffee. You just received new beans and now you have to adjust your grinder to make the perfect brew.
When you dial in the coffee grinder, you move in small iterations. You slowly move the knob for either finer or coarser beans.
You don‘t over-adjust. In fact, over-adjusting will make things much more complicated.
You move from where you currently are and slowly adapt the grind setting over multiple brews. Sometimes, it will be quick. You make a single tiny adjustment, and the coffee will turn out great. Sometimes it will take multiple adjustments. But at the end, if you stick to the tiny adjustments, your coffee will turn out great, every single time.
This is what this article is about: the process of tiny adjustments.
As with the beans, the process of tiny adjustments will lead us to our destination. It might take a few adjustments but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. You know it will work, because you are following a process that will absolutely get you where you want to go.
In our day-to-day life, when something doesn’t work or we seek change, we often aim for the opposite:
- Sleeping in becomes trying to wake up at 5 am
- Distracted work becomes aiming for a 3 hour marathon of focussed work
- Constantly checking our emails becomes trying to check our emails once a day
But: the opposite of what doesn‘t work is rarely something that works for us, at least in the long run.
Usually, we simply create something else that doesn‘t work. But there is a much more natural process to change:
Slowly turning the dial – making tiny adjustments.
In fact, tiny adjustment become truly drastic changes. This has three reasons:
First, tiny adjustments are meaningful because we can maintain them over longer time periods. Maintaining a small change, no matter how small, is more meaningful than not maintaining a drastic change.
Second, initial tiny adjustments can be re-adjusted gradually. A 30-minute focused work session can become a 45-minute, a 60-minute, a 75-minute or even a 90-minute session over time. The process of gradually re-adjusting feels much more natural and doesn’t require heroic discipline.
Third, you learn to trust yourself. This is an important one. Being able to consistently execute on your tiny adjustments builds confidence and trust. You develop a level of certainty that is unparalleled. You don’t hope or believe it, you know it.