Remember the tortoise (not the hare) and the power of tiny adjustments every day or week
I’ve been thinking a lot about the tortoise and the hare this year.
Ever since I really saw how the 12-Minute Method was the story of the tortoise, things started to change for me.
Because for some reason, the hare gets all the press in the media most of us read. The hustle of the entrepreneurs, the overnight successes, the teenage footballers and much more. Those are the stories we glorify - the pace and the shortcuts.
But stories that have been around for thousands of years usually have something really important to say. And Aesop was around something like 2700 years ago. So let’s slow down (right?) and think about the tortoise.
Partly, it comes back to that idea (that I heard from Tony Robbins, some people think comes from Bill Gates, but has probably been knocking around for longer than that) that humans generally overestimate what is possible for us to achieve in a short amount of time and underestimate what we can achieve in long amounts of time. We think the hare can win the day for us, but he somehow never does (to do lists never finished, etc). And we forget that if we become the tortoise, then if we keep going for the long haul, one tortoise-step at a time, we might end up with something magical.
Remember: 12 minutes a week for three years created 80,000 words, which is four books.
But I’ve been reminded of other ways that the tortoise helps us this week. Asked of ourselves enough times, even seemingly small questions can be transformational.
As one of my clients and I once worked out, if we create a 1% increase in our happiness every week, after a year our happiness will have increased by about two thirds. That’s not nothing.
I’ve seen this when a single question, asked every week for six months, changed everything from my worry to how my finances were managed. Who would have thought that ‘What one thing that drains me of energy will I stop doing this week?’ could have such powerful and wide-ranging effects.
I’ve seen it focus my time: asking, every day, ‘what is in best service of my goals today?’ (and recommitting when I missed it) pretty much put paid to me doing things that didn’t move me in the direction I wanted to. And helped me feel a lot better as I did it.
When Robert Holden invited me and the other people on his Success Intelligence Mastermind to write, for five minutes each day (before we checked Twitter!) the answer to the question, ‘What is success today?’, I didn’t know what would happen. And then several months in, something shifted for me, and instead of it being a prioritisation exercise, it became a practice in tapping into a deeper part of me, a deeper intuition of what real success really is. And both ways of answering it had powerful consequences, the question being asked as my identity shifted beyond measure when I became a father.
And recently, my friend Jo Hunter reminded me of the power of these tortoise-like practices again. Noticing she needed support from her community, she did what leaders do in those moments: she created the support she needed, trusting that it was also the support that other people would need.
When she invited me to join, I noticed that I knew this kind of thing would be powerful to me. It had some of the characteristics that made me think I would keep it up (mainly, social accountability), but I also know by now that I’m someone who has practised recommitting enough times that I have strengthened my commitment muscle to a high level (for me, at least).
This week I felt the benefit. Everyone in the UK seems to be ill right now; I certainly am. And this week, the intention I set in Jo’s group was to nourish myself. I really needed it; it helped me to make five or six tiny adjustments and one big adjustment this week to my plans and my work. It helped manage the parts of me that don’t let me rest, and the intention became another tortoise-like, tiny adjustment to help me live the life I want to live.
So remember the power of small adjustments every day or every week.
And remember the tortoise.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
Read the archive of the 12-minute blog here.
The 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, is out now!