A short YouTube monologue by Ian Ugarte about the importance of breaking goals into incremental milestones. He uses a medieval anecdote (township famines and a king who set distance milestones) and the Pareto idea (20/80) to argue that people often fail near the end of goals unless reminded by intermediate markers; he also gives a personal running example (11 km loop broken into 50%, ~70%, and final kilometer).
Hey there, ian from small asyouneewbig.com and what I want to talk to you today is about breaking down your goals into incremental steps.
And this was. This is not my work. This is handed to me by someone else. It's written in my book, so in our book that we've written a few years ago, but it's about talking about breaking down what you do every day into milestones. And so by breaking down into milestones, what you get is a completion rate which is far greater. We had.
The story that in London in the medieval times, one of the townships went into famine, and so they left their township to go to the next township to get some food. And then that one went into famine and the next one went into famine, and they started to head their way towards London. And the king in London heard about this, so he started to stockpile all of the food that was required for this mass of people that were coming to London. And when they finally arrived, only 10% of the predicted people turned up. And the king said, where are they all? And they all said, about 90% of them are all back, only just a little bit. And so what they realized was that 90% of people fail within 10% of their goal. And the reason that that happens is because they don't break it down into chunks. So the king said, and this comes down to the Pareto rule, which is a 2080 rule. 20% of all the work that you do reaps 80% of your results. So concentrate on the 10% of things that you do that now produce 90%. So the king said, we can't have this again. And so he created what they call the journey, which is French for the journey, obviously. And what he did was he put milestones from London all the way out 100 miles. But he didn't just say, you're at 100 miles from London or 99, from London, or 98. He broke it down into big chunks and then smaller chunks as they got closer to their goal. Because if 10% of you, if 10% of people are succeeding and 90% are failing within 10% of the goal, then we need to be reminded the closer we get. So they went 100 mark milestone. So when you achieve a milestone, this is what they talk about. Then they put 1 at 60, then they will put 1 at 30, then they will put 1 at 15, then they put 1 at 10, then they put 1 at 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. And even on any basis where you're doing anything this simple, 11 kilometer loop that we've just done had to be broken down in milestones. And so for me, I knew where 50% is on the other side of the loop. Then I knew that I had to hit another spot to be about 70% finished and then down to our last kilometer. And when you're down to the last kilometer and you know that you're at this point in time, you know you can take off and you can succeed because you got juice left in the tank and you haven't burnt yourself in the first 90%. So with that said, I'll race you.
