The Incremental Life

build an extraordinary life one step at a time

There’s No Comparison Shopping Allowed on the Road to Awesome

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there's no comparison shopping allowed on the road to awesome

There’s an old quote from Theodore Roosevelt that’s one of the truest statements ever uttered by a human.

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”

I’m all for taking a look at successful people and gleaning all I can from them—that’s called studying best practices. The problem comes when we begin to compare our success to others and discover that we don’t measure up. We make false comparisons that only lead to jealousy, envy, and depression.

Jon Acuff addresses this issue in his great book Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work That Matters. He teaches how the Road to Awesome is a journey, and each of us are at different mile markers along the way. You may only just now be in the Learning stage of life while someone else is further down the road in either the Editing or Mastering stages.

Don't compare your beginning with someone else's middle

What good does it do to compare ourselves to someone much further down the road? Of course we don’t measure up! How could we? Unless we’ve gained unusual success in some way, we’ve got years of hard work ahead of us before we catch up to someone who’s had a head start.

When we compare ourselves against someone further down the road to success we begin to feel like the world is against us. We start to whine and act like life is unfair and tell ourselves, “the little man just can’t get ahead.”

That’s a load of tripe.

What we can’t see are the thousands of failures and setbacks that other person endured along the way. We don’t see all the extra hours of hard work they put in, or the monetary investments they made in themselves and others.

Is your road a hard one? Sure. Are you as far down the road as you’d like to be? No. But let’s stop and put things in perspective.

I was listening to Dave Ramsey’s podcast on my walk yesterday morning and he was commenting on a news story about the world economy. He said something in passing that made me realize just how very blessed I am. I’m paraphrasing, but he said that if you have an annual household income of $34,000 or more, that places you in the top 1% of average global income.

Think about it, if you can read this, that means you’ve probably got a decent job, a place to live, and access to the internet through a computer or mobile device. You’re incredibly rich in comparison to the majority of the world’s population, not only in your financial situation, but in your health, security, technology, and education (especially literacy).

How’s that comparison working out for you now?

The world isn’t against you. The deck isn’t stacked in favor of the rich, it’s stacked in favor of those who work hard, have a desire to excel, and won’t give up. Sure, your circumstances come to bear on your situation, but look around and see just how well off you really are, and how many opportunities surround you just waiting to be grasped.

Jeff M. Miller (@jmarkmiller)
I’m Jeff M. Miller, and I help ordinary people who are stuck in a rut change their behaviors so they can be extraordinary. I’m an entrepreneur who retired from my full-time job in my early 40s to work from home. I’m a financial counselor, life coach, graphic designer, and passionate believer in helping others improve their lives a little more each day.
http://theincrementallife.com

The Secret Formula for Incremental Change

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The Secret Formula

My wife and I are coordinating Financial Peace University again this semester, and this week’s lesson was the one for which Dave Ramsey is most known. It’s all about getting out of debt using the Debt Snowball method. Dave gets so fired up in the lesson that it gets me excited every time I watch it.

One of the parts of the lesson that has always most resonated with me is his formula for achieving success with his plan. He doesn’t call it a formula, but it has always seemed like a nice, succinct formulaic statement. I can attest that the formula works because it’s exactly how our family got out of debt.

I’ve modified it a bit for clarity’s sake, but it goes like this:

(P + T) x S = R

Your Level of Passion over Time multiplied by your Depth of Sacrifice equals Results.

As you can see, this isn’t a magic formula. Implicit here are dedication, hard work, and sacrifice. This formula doesn’t offer an easy road.

Each component of this formula is crucial for achieving the change you desire in your life. You must be passionate about your goal—you’ve got to want it! You must understand that change takes time—incremental change is a marathon, not a sprint. And you must be willing to sacrifice, knowing that the deeper you’re willing to sacrifice, the faster you’ll reach your goal.

This is the secret to incremental change. Get fired up about who you want to become and dedicate yourself to implementing change over the long haul. Be willing to sacrifice deeply and you’ll begin to see amazing changes happen in your life.

secret-formula

Jeff M. Miller (@jmarkmiller)
I’m Jeff M. Miller, and I help ordinary people who are stuck in a rut change their behaviors so they can be extraordinary. I’m an entrepreneur who retired from my full-time job in my early 40s to work from home. I’m a financial counselor, life coach, graphic designer, and passionate believer in helping others improve their lives a little more each day.
http://theincrementallife.com

Priorities Should (and Will) Shift Over Time

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5 Questions to Ask

As you work to be more intentional about how you live your life, and as you take the time to ask yourself “who do I want to become”, you will often find that the answer to the question changes over time. Your priorities will shift as you grow and mature. Just as your interests change, so will your ultimate goals.

Dreams have a way of changing, don’t they? When you were a kid, did you have one of those “Who do you want to be when you grow up” assignments? You might remember the cute answers—such as astronaut, ballerina, and president—but would you have answered that question the same way as a high school senior? Of course not. You changed. You grew. You matured. And so your dreams changed as well.

How many people buy their dream home in their 30’s or 40’s only to later downsize and sell that home when they become empty nesters? How many friends and colleagues do you know who are working in a field completely unrelated to their college degree, or who have gone back to school for training for a new venture?

Shifting your priorities may be more of a practical matter than anything else. Maybe you’ve learned during your goal setting process that your values haven’t changed, but that the way you lived your life didn’t show it. You now see that your priorities—those practices in your life you give the most weight—must change in order to take you forward toward your goals. Unless you wrote down goals that were achievable through the steps you were already taking in day-to-day life, it’s certain you’ll discover the need to shift priorities.

One of the things you’ll learn to be true about leadership is that, if you’re truly an effective leader, you become an instigator of change and innovation. Otherwise, why would you need to be a leader? (If your focus is to keep the status quo, then you’re just a manager, not a leader.) If you’re a leader, you’re always striving to be better and encouraging those around you to go further today than they did yesterday. Change is inherent if you want to avoid stagnation.

Here are 5 Questions to Ask to Discover if You Should Shift Priorities

  1. Do my shifting priorities match my core values?
  2. Will my shifting priorities help me achieve my goals?
  3. Have my ultimate goals and dreams truly changed, or am I giving up?
  4. How will shifting my priorities affect those around me, especially those whose care I’m responsible for?
  5. Am I shifting my priorities due to greed, envy, laziness, or due to mature growth on my part?

How do you deal with shifting priorities in your life? How have your priorities changed as you’ve grown and matured as a person? Please share in the comments.

Shift-Priorities

Jeff M. Miller (@jmarkmiller)
I’m Jeff M. Miller, and I help ordinary people who are stuck in a rut change their behaviors so they can be extraordinary. I’m an entrepreneur who retired from my full-time job in my early 40s to work from home. I’m a financial counselor, life coach, graphic designer, and passionate believer in helping others improve their lives a little more each day.
http://theincrementallife.com

5 Steps to Align Your Daily To-Do List with Your Goals

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Align Daily To-Do List

How do you know if you’re truly making progress each day toward your goals? Last week, you learned how to turn your goals into an actionable plan, which means you made a plan that is simple, specific, incremental, and effective. Crafted successfully, such a plan has built-in metrics—ways you can measure your forward progress on a regular basis.

But maybe that’s not enough for you. You want more than being able to look backward at the end of the day and see if you’ve done well. You want to be even more intentional about how your day is set up and how you can ensure that what you’re doing fuels your forward momentum.

You need to measure your daily to-do list against your goals and make sure they’re in alignment.

Now before you go scorched earth on your task list, realize that there will always be things to do that don’t directly influence your goals. I’m sure there are responsibilities that come with your job and household that won’t offer forward motion on your personal goals—especially if you work for someone else. What you can be sure of, however, is that you can control the individual parts of your to-do list in such a way that everything you do has at least an indirect effect on reaching your goal.

Here are 5 Steps to Align Your Daily To-Do List with Your Goals

  1. Cut Items First
    Start by looking at your to-do list for the day and determine if there are items that are detrimental to reaching your goals. Unless they’re things you can’t get out of doing—such as work assignments—cross them off the list right away. Keep in mind you’re looking for items that are truly a hindrance to reaching your goals, not simply things you don’t want to do.
  2. Prioritize Your List
    Prioritize the remaining items on your to-do list. I suggest breaking up your to-do list into the following categories:

    • Needs Action Immediately
    • Needs Action Today
    • Needs Action Tomorrow/Later
    • Delegate
  3. Tackle Responsibilities and Necessary Items
    These are things that you have to get done whether or not they move you toward your goal, so you have to make them priority. Be encouraged that all of these items are probably at least indirectly associated with your goals in some way. Consider even onerous tasks assigned by a supervisor as beneficial because they at least provide a paycheck.
  4. Make a Top Three List
    Once you’ve cleaned up necessary tasks and responsibilities, find the top three items that will move you toward your goal today. Circle them and number them #1, #2, and #3. Use the time you’ve got left in the day to work on them in that order.
  5. Do Some Clean-up Work
    By this point in your day there are probably items you’ve avoided or put off because they were low priority—like cleaning the bathroom at home. Spend some time working on some of these tasks. Hopefully they’re quick ones. After you’ve done all you can for the day, see what needs to be moved to tomorrow’s list and begin anew.

Note: If you’re employed and on company time, don’t work through your personal to-dos at work unless you’re on break or lunch time. Don’t steal from your employer, they’re paying you for your time.

In truth, what we’re setting out to do here is to begin the process of evaluating your life in general to see if the actions and choices you take each day align with who you want to become. In everything you do, keep your core values at the forefront of your mind and begin cutting out those things that don’t measure up.

How do you prioritize your to-do list? How do you make daily decision to make sure you’re always gaining forward momentum toward your goals? Please share in the comments.

Align-To-Do-List

Jeff M. Miller (@jmarkmiller)
I’m Jeff M. Miller, and I help ordinary people who are stuck in a rut change their behaviors so they can be extraordinary. I’m an entrepreneur who retired from my full-time job in my early 40s to work from home. I’m a financial counselor, life coach, graphic designer, and passionate believer in helping others improve their lives a little more each day.
http://theincrementallife.com