Ambitious goals?! how to eat an elephant...? Eat an elephant piece by piece or how to make your New Year's Eve wish come true

It is very difficult to eat an elephant in one sitting. It's not even possible. It is very big. This is a very serious task. If you put it in front of you right now, you will think it is a joke.

In the same way, many goals seem unattainable to us: “I will never be able to learn English!”, “I will never learn to play the guitar like that,” “I will never be able to get this position,” etc.

Having started to engage in any business, we encounter enormous difficulties, and often very quickly lose interest in it. This is because an elephant cannot be eaten in one sitting. There is no need to try to do this. You shouldn’t expect that after a week of doing something new you will immediately have results that you can be proud of.
An elephant should be eaten like this:

you need to cut it into hundreds or thousands of small pieces and eat one per day. Don't try to eat it all at once! There is no need to move towards your goal using the all-hands-on-deck method - once a week, pour yourself into your activity, giving it your all so much that you wait with disgust and discomfort for the next time you have to do this activity. After all, you now associate this activity with hard work, mobilization of your strength, etc., and you quite naturally try to mentally resist it. And then... you have to use what many call willpower. This is the best case scenario. And in the worst case, the lesson will be abandoned in the near future. After all, every time everything will have to more strength apply to force yourself to “work.” No need to “work”!!! You have to eat the elephant piece by piece.

No need for rush jobs or inspiration! You just need to train yourself to eat one piece from a big elephant once a day. You need to devote 10-30 minutes of your time to this big task once a day. It should become like brushing your teeth. Nobody calls this “work”? And making the bed/putting on shoes, etc. — all these things are done by us without much effort.

You need to break one big task (the elephant) into many small elementary actions (pieces) that can be completed in one sitting. For example, read (and work through) two pages of a textbook a day in English(no matter which one). It's a hundred times easier! In fact, all other things being equal, it is much easier to force yourself to do 20 minutes of work than 2 hours. This is morally very easy - “now I’ll read the planned two pages and I’ll be free again!”

Many great things have been done this way. In a few years you will be amazed at the results. A couple of months after you start, you get used to the fact that you have to do something every day, and over time you stop paying attention to it. It becomes a part of life - just like brushing your teeth in the morning. Only then, after a year or two or three (depending on your goal), you will be surprised by the result. People master entire new branches of knowledge in this way, even make discoveries (for example, in astronomy, most discoveries are made by amateurs), in general, they do incredible things. One thing is certain - once you start achieving your goal in this way, you will definitely not remain at the same level!

Things to keep in mind:
1) Systematicity is required, in our case - DAILY. It should become a habit that you don’t pay attention to, that doesn’t require effort. Thus, 30 minutes a day is better than 4 hours a week, and 15 minutes a day is better than 30 minutes every two days. If you do it not daily, but, for example, once every two days, then the habit is formed worse.
2) You need to spend some time planning. For example, if a book has 200 pages, and you want to master the knowledge contained in it in six months (120 days), then you need to read two pages a day. This is such simple planning. Difficult Goals often require complex planning, because, in fact, it is not always possible to know exactly what has to be overcome on the way to the goal (for example, building an airplane with your own hands), then the role of planning increases even more. But the meaning is the same - without planning it is impossible to eat an elephant.
3) Well, and most importantly - of course, all this is necessary if you have goals, and 95% of people simply do not have them.

How to start leading healthy image life? How to finally learn a language? How to become a good parent? Do you feel how these questions themselves are already stressful and cause a wild desire to run away to hell?

And rightly so! Your subconscious mind resists impossible tasks. After all, having taken them up, you will once again give up halfway, you will experience dissatisfaction with yourself, and self-esteem in Once again will hide somewhere under the baseboard. Look for her later. Who needs this? Your wise subconscious definitely doesn’t need it. But the short-sighted mind continues to call for new achievements and exploits, calling you a coward, a lazy person and a loser.

How to come to an agreement with both? Just like eating an elephant - small pieces at a time. The global challenge to “lead a healthy lifestyle” is good for the mind. And for the subconscious, which loves you and makes sure that, God forbid, you don’t overwork, a set of small subtasks is suitable. This month I will drink a glass of water first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. Next time (when a glass of water becomes a habit), instead of complex exercises (this will come later), I will hold the plank for five minutes - they say that all the muscles work, but you don’t have to do anything. And after that I will stop using the elevator. You won’t be able to become a good parent right away - you’ll fall apart. But it’s quite possible to practice a ten-minute conversation with your child before he goes to bed for a month.
And so on, coming up with the next task, each time the bitten off piece has already been digested, i.e. when the desired behavior becomes a habit.
Yes, it will take a little longer. But it will lead to results much faster.

Continuing the theme about fluffy tails. After working with the list of your unfinished tasks, you will clearly find those that do not fit into the period of half an hour or an hour. They require significantly more time and involve multi-step actions. They are so voluminous that we sometimes don’t know which side to approach them from. Sort of elephants. And since they are not particularly urgent, interaction with them is postponed and postponed.
As a rule, these are the things that are actually important. Yes, they are not on time, but they can qualitatively change our lives. They can take her to new level. They require us to overcome and make efforts. And that’s why I always want to allocate more time for them in order to deal with them properly, with feeling, with arrangement. We kind of prepare ourselves internally for them. We are gaining strength.
Yes, we are preparing to eat the elephant instead of already starting to eat it. Or more precisely, we are preparing to live, instead of already living.
This is also very familiar to me. And now there are several such elephants standing in front of me. And for the second week now I’ve been “keeping them in the freezer” instead of starting to “butcher the carcass.” And this is the second week when the outside world with its affairs controls me, and not I control outside world based on your goals. Sad? A little bit yes. What motivates me when I do this? My desire for thoroughness. Sometimes too much. For you it may be something different, something of your own.
Why am I sharing this? Besides, elephants arise in each of us. More precisely, for everyone who wants more from life. Because we strive to swim against the current. And sometimes the current turns out to be stronger, and we allow it to carry us away. As in my example. The main thing is to catch yourself in time and start rowing in the right direction. Toward your goals. And if we want more, then our goals are usually ambitious. Ambitious for ourselves at this stage of life. It's like we're challenging ourselves. Challenge, can I overcome this elephant or not?
So, back to the big things (elephants). You can overcome them if you absorb them piece by piece. Break a large project into a number of large pieces. And then divide each large piece into several smaller ones. And each small one for several small tasks. You will get a diagram in the form of a tree. And every small task is a specific task or action that can be done using a quick shooting method. And there, in small pieces, you yourself won’t notice how big elephant begins to decrease in size.
The main thing is to start by finding a little time every day to think through a plan for “cutting up the carcass”, and then to complete tasks on the elephant. Give this task priority status and complete it as soon as possible before other tasks. Then you will feel that you are living based on your interests.

And I liked it. With enthusiasm, I rushed to apply the acquired knowledge in Everyday life. And you know, it worked! My career began to move forward, life began to sparkle with new colors.

The condition has been set. In front of you is a huge mammal. The average male weighs 5 tons and is 3.5 meters high. Your life and the well-being of all humanity depends on whether you can eat it. You cannot involve other people under the terms of the assignment. Your actions?

Right! An elephant can only be eaten in parts! Having prepared necessary tools to cut a carcass, you chop the huge thing into pieces, and after a certain time (here it depends on your personal metabolism) - the planet is saved, and you bask in the rays of well-deserved glory.

Now let's move on from metaphors to action.

What are your long-term goals today? Lose 20 kilograms? Learn Swahili? Or write, finally, an imperishable story from the life of the elves of the Middle World? Don’t be shy if your goal seems petty and mundane to someone outside. There are dwarf elephants, and there are African ones. In addition, no one forces you to inform others about your desires.

In your sweet fantasies, have you been basking on the golden sand of the beach for a long time, showing envious women and admiring men your slimmer, rejuvenated body? Or maybe you are clutching to your chest a book that smells sweetly of fresh printing ink with your name on the cover? Or... Why did you need Swahili, I couldn’t figure it out. But that's your problem. It is necessary - it is necessary!

How long can you dream? Let's get to work!

Stage one is preparing the necessary tools.

Addresses of the fitness centers closest to the house, Russian-Swahili dictionary, A. Pupkin’s self-instruction manual “How to write a masterpiece.” Approximately this set seems to me, constrained by a lack of information about your desires. Your imagination is limitless. You have already thought for a long time about what can help you in your work. So - go for it! My only advice is: there is no need to delay the preparatory stage. Time in this case works against you.

Stage two - control.

By the way, how much time did you give yourself to solve the global problem? Year? Six months? Don't know yet? Right! It all depends on many factors: investment of funds, time that you can devote to solving the problem, physical capabilities.

Divide the elephant into small pieces. Such as not to choke. Lose half a kilo a week, write two pages a day, learn 500 new words a month. We draw a plate where we indicate the initial and desired data. Many empty cells in the table will be needed to enter intermediate results. Voila!

And don’t forget to congratulate yourself on small victories. Each of them is a step towards a big goal.

Stage three is action.

The most boring part. Here you just need to do the job. Do not give in to laziness and weakness, find the necessary inspiration and motivation. And work, work, work...

Stage four - victory.

Fanfare sounds. You look back, remember what a great job you did and proudly say: “I ate an elephant!”

The path to the goal is often not easy. But don’t let difficulties scare us. There is a lot of pleasure in overcoming them. Now let's get back to our elephants! Bon appetit!

Oh, how often does it appear in our lives Magic word"Necessary!" And there is no escape from it. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of doing only what we like, so we have to do things that are not entirely loved and pleasant. How can you help yourself successfully cope with them, overcome your laziness and reluctance to do something? There are three effective techniques for this.

1. “Eat an elephant” technique

Let's say there is a very large and difficult task. Now imagine that this is an elephant! Very large and heavy. And you are very, very hungry and want to eat it. But since the elephant is huge, it will not be possible to eat it right away, in one sitting. Therefore, you will have to cut it into pieces, each of which can be successfully eaten.

It’s the same with business. Don’t try to embrace the immensity and do everything at once! This is unrealistic. When we set ourselves unrealistic goals, we only undermine faith in ourselves and our strengths. The so-called “baby or small steps” method is much more effective. In other words, the problem must be divided into several smaller subtasks that can be solved separately. By the way, the elephant is big, there is enough of it for everyone, so you can treat someone else. It’s the same with things: if possible, involve acquaintances, colleagues, friends in their implementation, don’t be shy about asking for it, because mutual assistance is a great thing!

2. Swiss cheese technique

If you don’t know how to force yourself to take on an important but difficult task, try turning it into “Swiss cheese.” This analogy works very simply: like in cheese, you need to make “holes” in the task - these will be the so-called tasks rapid response. They will only take up to 5 minutes, but at the same time they will allow you to make a little progress in completing the work and make the next steps easier. For example, do phone call, sort the literature, edit one paragraph. The main thing is that these are tasks that can be started quickly and easily completed.

3. Technique “Leave disgust - eat the frog”!

Do you know what is meant by the phrase “eat a frog” in the West? This means doing the most difficult and unpleasant task. And this must be done at the very beginning of the working day. How it works? Having completed your least favorite job first, you will, with a feeling of relief and accomplishment, take on other tasks, which, compared to the “frog”, will seem like manna from heaven :) It’s like drinking a spoonful of healthy, but disgusting fish oil before the meal that will be the most a real delicacy :)

What techniques do you use to perform difficult or unpleasant tasks?