The Power of Incremental Progress

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are in between seasons and we're doing a bunch of one-off episodes. We're about a half dozen into this now. This episode, I want to look at and actually revisit the power of incremental. We talk a lot about getting better, about particularly setting some sort of a momentum and doing a little bit every day. Every time you get a little closer, you move a little forward, just moving the ball forward, as it were. It seems like sometimes I think we can look at it and say it's not enough. We try to set up something and in particular, you'll run into a situation where you say, okay, I'm going to do, let's say, five minutes a day because that sounds like nothing. It sounds like it takes nothing. It's easy to find five minutes in a day, right? Then we say, well, okay, five is probably not enough to actually make progress, so let's move it to 15. Well, 15 doesn't matter. It isn't really going to work, so let's go to 30. We sort of underestimate what steady progress will do for us and then we either write it off and say, we just don't have time to do that. I can't add another hour into my day or maybe even a half hour into my day. Or we end up pushing too much and we take something that should be essentially a smaller incremental thing because we can keep it going and we make it something bigger and then we fall short. I think of physical exercise as a great example of this. If you look at apps that are out there and there are plenty that are the...you've got the six pack abs in 60 days or all that other kinds of stuff that are out there, but you also have a lot of these that are, for example, 100 push-ups a day in 100 days or something like that. I don't know what the specifics are of these, but in general, what these things are is you You start off and you do, for the push-ups, you do five push-ups. That's it. You do that for the day. Or you do five or 10 push-ups twice in a day, something like that. Then each day, you push a little harder. Now, what you're doing in this case is you're actually building each day to something bigger. it, if you did five minutes of exercise a day that was, let's say, push-ups, we spend five minutes a day doing push-ups and related exercise, push-ups and setups, and you do that every day, the first few days, especially if you're totally out of shape, the first few days may be very difficult. Over time, that is going to build up. You're going to actually see improvement. We do this in anything. For example, and this is why I even brought this topic up, we do our 15 minutes a day classes. We did one years ago. We started off with the Launch Your Internet Business, and now we're doing one that is essentially Python Django. 15 minutes a day, which is, okay, I lie. Usually it ends up being a little closer to 15 to 20 minutes if you actually go through the video, but it's very short, small amounts of work. Ideally, it's something that if you do it even three or four days a week, you don't have to do it every day, seven days a week. You're going to make progress over time. Now, the daily portion of it is what's even better because it ends up settling in. It becomes comfortable. It's not like you have to, for example, if you go once a week, you have to remember where you were and you have to reset. You end up taking a couple steps backwards first when you do a weekly thing. When you do daily, it actually ends up being fresh enough or recent enough that you're closer to where you let off the day before. Another good example from a learning point of view is some of these language learning applications. I've talked about Duolingo many times, and I spent, oh gosh, years, several years doing Duolingo every day. It wasn't much. It typically was 10 to 15 minutes working on Italian. Although I can't, if you put me in the middle of Italy, I don't think I would be able to just talk my way out of the situation right now. As far as reading and writing it, I can get along pretty well. I have found that speaking it would be, although I don't have the right accent, stuff like that, I could probably be close enough to stumble through. I got just a few minutes here, a few minutes there, day after day after day. I've done that with numerous other things. A lot of the languages I've talked about over the years that I have learned, the programming languages started with 15 minutes. Usually I did 15 minutes five days a week, Monday through Friday. Get up in the morning. Part of the morning routine is you spend 15 minutes working on that language, writing a little app, doing a little tutorial or demo or something like that. Or now there's lots and lots of online training opportunities that are out there. That's how I've gone through the certifications. A lot of certifications. It was just read a little every day and it will build. It doesn't require, and that's the real point of this episode I want to get across, is it does not require a huge amount of work. And by huge, I mean even 30 minutes. It doesn't even require 30 minutes. If you want to make changes and make progress on a goal, you can do it with almost anything in 10 minutes a day. You can split off a little bit of time, even 15 minutes a day, then you will be able to make progress. Now it may take a couple weeks before it settles in, but I guarantee you once you get into the third and the fourth week, you will see that you have made progress. And this is one of those things as we're getting into, as I record this, towards the end of a year again and to the point where we can start looking at what do we want to do next year just because annual changes are that thing. But also, since we're not into the end of December yet as I go through this, I think that's one of the things that is a benefit of that holiday kind of time that we see in December is that we have time off. And yes, we have, we've got holiday parties and office parties and wrap up before the end of the year and some things like that. But it's also some time that we have, particularly if we've got holidays and vacation days, where we can think about putting habits or at least actions in place in December to help us when we get to that New Year's resolution time of January, that we've actually got some progress made towards turning these things into habits. And they're not just something that we said, oh, we're going to do January 1st and by January 4th, we're done. We've moved on to something else. Because once we get those habits in, it actually almost requires effort to back off of it. If you've been doing 15 minutes a day of something, let's just say that you do a little 15 minute exercise every day, seven days a week, do that for 21 days. And when you get to the 22nd day, you know, you may be tired, but you're going to realize and you may say, I've done this for 21 days, I'm done. But you're probably not going to feel right because you're missing that thing that you've been used to. If you do a 21 day fast, okay, that's different. You're going to want to, if you haven't eaten for 21 days, you're going to want to have a good meal because you've been doing without for a while. But also even think about that. Even if you go with zero food for whatever period of time it is, let's say two weeks, you go for zero food, you're not going to feel good immediately just filling your gut. You're going to be hungry, then you're going to be ready to eat, but you're probably not going to gorge yourself because if you do, you're going to feel really, really not good. You're going to feel under the weather. And that's the same thing with any of these habits is that we want to get the momentum going and then it will have this force behind it that makes it more likely for us to move forward than it does for us to take a step back. And so regardless of how small our progress is, it's worth it to measure out that progress, to make the attempts on that progress, to do that and make things, you know, get moving forward. Whatever it is, whatever your goal, whatever your dream is, make that something that you incrementally five, 10, 15 minutes a day work towards. It doesn't have to be at five, 10, 15 minutes is not going to be exhausting for almost anything. You can do that as part of your lunch break or get up a little earlier, you know, part of your morning routine, part of your evening routine. That's something you can fit in. Yes, a half hour, an hour, those kinds of things can add up pretty quickly and then it ends up disrupting your normal flow. But I would challenge you that 10 to 15 minutes will not, particularly if you plan it out. If you say, okay, I'm going to start doing this, look at your schedule, find a time, carve that time out and then make progress on whatever that goal happens to be. It is not too small. Forward progress of any kind is forward progress. And so as long as you're doing that, it will add up. If you want to go, let's say if you wanted to walk across a football field, you can do it an inch at a time. But as long as you're doing it an inch at a time, you're eventually going to get there. And that's part of, I think, part of what we need to keep in mind as we set these things up is that if you, let's say what you're, whatever you're doing at that pace is going to take you two years. Well, the thing not to, it's not, oh gosh, that's going to be two years from now. So I'm not going to bother. The thing to think about is, well, what happens if two years from now I do have that thing? If I'm able to do that in two years, that's going to be pretty cool. Or if I will have accomplished that, that's going to be pretty cool. That's what you see with marathon runners. They don't go out and run 26 miles the first chance they get. They work their way up to it. They probably, depending on where their starting point is, maybe they start with walking a couple of miles and they start to jog. And then they jog longer and harder and further. And they don't necessarily do it more every day, but they have to work their way up to it. And that's true with everything we have. I think our goal, our focus too often is, I would really like to have that now versus saying, hey, why don't I start putting a little bit of work in and I'll be very happy to have that two years from now, five years from now. Retirement is exactly that kind of a long-term goal. We start working and saving money, hopefully, when we're in our 20s, 30s, 40s, depending on what it is, depending on how good or not you are with saving money, and depending on what your company provides, stuff like that. But you start, you work and you take some of that money that you've earned and you put it into savings so that it will build up over time so that eventually, when you're 60, 70, whatever it is, you'll be able to retire. You'll have enough money saved up that you'll say you don't have to work anymore, or you'll have some sort of an income stream on top of whatever your savings are or whatever it is so that you can retire. Now if you, and this is a problem we run into a lot, if you're sitting there in your 20s and you say, gosh, I've only got $100 saved, I would rather go, I don't know, to a movies this weekend than leave that $100 in savings. Well that $100 in savings over time would multiply to thousands of dollars. And so you essentially have said, you know, I'm going to do the, I'm going to take the now reward and give up a much, much bigger reward in the future. We do that with all these things. At 15 minutes a time, or hey, we'll make it easier, 10 minutes a time, you're saying that spending that 10 minutes doing something else today is more important than being an hour further towards a goal at the end of a week. There is, you know, in the financial world, there is compound interest and things like that that we have to worry about. But in the skill and advancement realm, there's the same thing. The 10 minutes you spend today is 10 minutes further along tomorrow. So you don't have to spend that 10 minutes again. If I have to learn a coding language, then whatever I learned, if I learn a certain syntax today, if I learn loops today, I don't need to learn it tomorrow. I may revisit it, but I've already learned that. So tomorrow I can worry about, I don't know, pointer arithmetic or arrays or file IO or whatever it is. That's the nature of our work in the technical world is that it all builds on each other. So the more that you are building out that foundation with daily progress, the further So you're going to be, you know, the better jumping off point you have tomorrow and the day after. And these things snowball because over time you're going to have now a foundation that you can use. It's a leaping off point for other things. So for example, just a personal example, I started working on react. Oh gosh, probably a year ago now. And just play around with it, made a web app here, web app there, did some tutorials, things like that, just getting some basics. And then, and it was this kind of progress. I think it was, you know, I was basically doing 15, goal was 15 minutes. I ended up doing probably 30 minutes a day for a while, but also took a few days off. So averaged 15 minutes a day. After about six months, I was in a situation where I had enough knowledge. I was able to talk my way into a project and it wasn't a lot of talking. It was basically nobody had any, you know, react experience. And so I said, Hey, I think I can, I can work on that. I've got, you know, I've got some exposure. I can, I can take a stab at it, which I wouldn't have done if I hadn't spent that six months or however long it was originally working just, you know, a little incremental here, and it wasn't, gosh, the things, the things that were accomplished on a daily basis were minuscule. You know, it's, it's a web form that's got, you know, two extra fields on it or, you know, one field got a little bit of styling done or, you know, one extra value got saved to a database or something like that, you know, very, very incremental. In a week, maybe there was a piece of functionality that was added that very incremental, very small, but put me in a position to be able to do something where then I was, it became part of my, you know, my day job for a while. And so I was able to make, you know, faster progress. And I think that's what we need to remember is that once we get to, there's certain points that we plateau, but then there's also certain situations where we get to a point where we now have enough experience or knowledge of a topic that it allows us to do something with it, to create, you know, to have a side hustle, to create a project, to go take a job that we otherwise would not have taken. And that all comes from those incremental steps. And so the challenge of the week is what have you been putting off? What goal is out there that you keep saying, God, that'd be really nice to do that. And it doesn't have to be technical. It may be learning how to play guitar or juggle or write a unicycle or cooking a meal or something like that. What is it you've been putting off? And then what can you do in 10 minutes a day or less to be progress towards that goal? And then carve out some time and go do it. Start it off. And I challenge you, part of this challenge is go do that for three weeks, solid three weeks and see what happens at the end of it. See if you're not further along. And if you're not actually more comfortable doing that, you know, spending that time every day than you were when you started off. So I think you'll be very pleased with yourself and very happy with, sometimes even surprised And that being said, the short term goal is go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noor podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoor.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Developer Noor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Developer Noor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time. We talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at developernoor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.