Turning The Whole Into Pieces, Step By Step

　　Success is precisely a whole into zero, step-by-step process, not a straightforward path overnight. For example, a common phenomenon: many people are prone to decadence and feel that the task is too difficult to complete, so anxiety psychology, has to choose to temporarily escape, and do it tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow, dragging again and again; and once the task is divided into smaller pieces of easier, turn the whole into zero, reduce the difficulty of the task, postpone their mentality to give up, you can complete more tasks every day.

　　Psychologists once experimented with this.

　　Organization of three groups of people, let them respectively to ten kilometers away from the three villages.

　　The first group did not know the name of the village, nor did they know how far the journey was, they were just told to follow the guide. Just two or three thousand meters out, some people began to scream; halfway, some people were almost angry, they complained about why they had to walk so far when they could go to the end, and some even sat on the side of the road and did not want to go; the further they went, the more depressed their mood.

　　The second group knew the name of the village and how far it was, but there were no milestones on the side of the road, so they had to estimate the travel time and distance from the experience. Halfway through the journey, most people wanted to know how far they had gone, and the more experienced ones said, "About halfway." So, everyone clustered again and continued. By the time they reached 3/4 of the way through, everyone started to get depressed and felt exhausted, while the distance still seemed long. When someone said, "We're almost there!", "We're almost there!" Everyone perked up again and picked up the pace of the march.

　　The third group not only knew the name of the village and the distance, but there was a milestone every kilometer along the road, and people looked at the milestones as they walked. During the march they used songs and laughter to eliminate fatigue, emotions have been very high, so they soon reached their destination.

　　Psychologists from this experiment concluded that if people's actions have a clear goal and can continue to act against the goal, then they clearly know the distance between themselves and the goal, so that people's motivation to act will be maintained and strengthened, will consciously overcome all difficulties, and strive to achieve the goal.

　　I have met many people who, although they have a clear map of their goals inside, are somewhat unable to start or even daunted by the fact that they have too long a road ahead of them. Therefore, in order not to lose confidence in our busyness, we need to break down our goals and keep motivating ourselves by accomplishing one small goal after another, dividing the long distance into several distance segments and crossing them one by one.

　　Sometime in 1968, Dr. Rob Schuler set out to build a crystal cathedral out of glass in California. He expressed his idea to the famous architect Philippe: "I want not an ordinary church, but a garden of Eden on earth."

　　Philip asked Schuler what the budget was, and Dr. Schuler told him firmly, "The truth is, right now I don't have a dime, so it doesn't make any difference to me whether it's $1 million or $4 million. What's important is that the church itself be attractive enough to attract donors."

　　The budget needed for the church to be finalized was $7 million. This figure was not only beyond Dr. Schuler's means, but even beyond his imagination, and others told Dr. Schuler, "This doesn't seem possible."

　　But Dr. Schuler came up with a way to turn the whole thing into zero. He wrote "$7 million" on a piece of paper and then wrote below this goal: 1.

　　1. find one donation of $7 million.

　　2. find 7 donations of $1 million.

　　3. find 14 donations of $500,000.

　　......

　　9. find 700 donations of $10,000.

　　10. sell the rights to sign 10,000 windows of the church for $700 each.

　　With this miraculous method of turning the whole thing into zero, Dr. Schuler raised enough money over a year. It is said that the Crystal Cathedral ended up costing $20 million, but after Dr. Schuler had zeroed in on this ambitious goal, enough money was miraculously raised to make the cathedral a California attraction.

　　This map of goals was intimidating as if it was a goal that could never be reached no matter how busy one was, but after being reduced to zero, it became one small, achievable goal after another. Even if we suffer setbacks in the pursuit of our goals, we can see the rewards of being busy for each small goal, which allows us to keep dealing with the pressure and challenges.

　　Tolstoy, the great Russian writer, famously said, "One has to have goals in life: goals for a lifetime, goals for a stage, goals for a year, goals for a month, goals for a week, goals for a day, goals for an hour, goals for a minute, and also to sacrifice small goals for big goals."

　　In 1984, in the Tokyo International Marathon Invitational, the unknown Japanese runner Honichi Yamada surprisingly won the world championship. When reporters asked him what made him achieve such amazing results, he said this: with wisdom over the opponent.

　　10 years later, he told the truth about this "wisdom" in his autobiography: "Before each race, I had to take the car to look at the race route carefully once and put the more prominent along the way, I would take the bus and go through the route and draw down the more prominent signs along the way. For example, the first sign is a bank; the second sign is a big tree; the third sign is a red house ...... so the drawing is until the end of the race. The first one is the first one, and the second one is the second one. At first, I didn't understand this, and I set my goal on that flag at the finish line more than 40 kilometers away, and I ended up exhausted by the time I reached a dozen kilometers because I was so intimidated by the distant stretch ahead."

　　The first flag ...... the second flag ...... the third flag ...... It was this step-by-step attitude that helped Honichi Yamada win the world championship. The famous American writer Seva Reid said: When I intended to write a book of 250,000 words, once I decided on the theme and framework of the book, I stopped thinking about how heavy the whole writing plan was, and all I could think about was how to write the next section, the next page or even the next paragraph. Over six months, I thought of no other way than to start paragraph by paragraph, and it just fell into place.

　　Don't be afraid to aim too far away, and using the method of turning the whole into zero and working on one small goal after another that is within reach is the first step in pursuing the ideal. Don't complain about being busy with so many chores every day, success can never be achieved overnight, only step by step, so that the daily busy work is effective, to get closer and closer to the goal.