Aim Small, Miss Small
20 Aug 2025 · 1 min
0:58
A sharpshooter's principle: aim at something tiny and you miss tiny. Applied to work, narrow goals over short timeframes mean your mistakes stay small. You miss by hours instead of weeks.
A sharpshooter's principle: aim at something tiny and you miss tiny. Applied to work, narrow goals over short timeframes mean your mistakes stay small. You miss by hours instead of weeks.
Aim small, miss small. There's an idea in, in sharpshooting training, I think, in the US Army, that they teach you to aim for something very small on your target. Because that way, when you miss, you miss proportional to the thing you're actually aiming at. And it's a neat little psychological trick, right? If you aim at like a giant barrel, then you'll miss by feet. If you aim at like a button on a shirt or something, you will miss by inches. And that is a remarkable way of thinking about how precision works and also how misses work. And I think it really applies to issues of time management. If your time management is you're going to focus on working on this thing for a few hours, then you can be wrong, but you're wrong by a matter of hours. If you give yourself a week to do something, you're wrong, you'll be wrong by a matter of weeks. And this is where being intense really helps. If you focus on a given period and you focus on like that one problem you're trying to solve, that big thing you're trying to shift, and you do it in a short period of time, sure, you might miss, but you'll miss small.
