E73 Transcript
The last two episodes went to some fairly uncomfortable places. Misalignment struggle. Manufactured binary choices. Both asked you to look sincerely at things that are easy to avoid looking at altogether!
This week is different in tone. Not easier exactly - but more immediately useful. This is one you can actually do something with today. Not eventually. Today.
Because here's the thing about everything we've covered in this series so far. You can know your values, question your definition of success, own your choices, read your struggles clearly, work through your beliefs, and still not move. Still not build anything. Still end up in exactly the same place a year from now.
The reason is almost always the same thing. The gap between knowing all that and doing something about it. And that's what this episode is about.
Lao Tzu said it a few thousand years ago and it's been on coffee mugs ever since. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
Most people agree with that. Most people nod at it. And most people are still standing at the trailhead.
Because knowing that progress starts with a single step doesn't tell you which step. It doesn't help with the paralysis that sets in when you look at the whole thing at once and the gap between where you are and where you want to be feels too large to even know where to start. That paralysis is real and it's worth taking seriously rather than cheerleading past it. It's not laziness. It's not lack of commitment or caring. It's what happens when your brain is trying to solve the entire problem at once - and the entire problem is too big to hold all at once.
So what this episode is actually about is not how to take small steps. Most people know how to do that. It's about why capable creative makers who know this principle still freeze up. Still don't start. They still find themselves six months later with the same list of things they've been meaning to get to. And what actually changes when they finally do start moving.
Here's something I want to start with that I don't think gets said enough about big goals and the overwhelm that comes with them.
You're not supposed to be able to see the whole path from the starting point. That's not a design flaw in how you're thinking about the goal. It's just how it works.
You can’t see the whole path to any destination from the start. There are buildings and trees in the way. There are turns that obscure the next intersection. There’s construction that sends you on a detour. It’s just how things work.
When I was a director in the garment industry, part of my job was holding what I'd call the 30,000 foot view - seeing where the collection was going, what was coming up, where the potential problems were down the road. The designers on my team didn't have to hold that. Their job was the work in front of them. The next decision. The next design problem. The next construction question. My job was to know the destination well enough that I could tell them when they were heading somewhere that wasn't going to work - but their job was just the next thing.
And what I noticed, working with designers over many years, is that the ones who tried to see the whole path before they started - who needed to understand every decision that would need to be made before they committed to the first one - were the ones who got stuck. The ones who moved were the ones who trusted that the path would reveal itself through the work. Let me say that again.
The ones who moved were the ones who trusted that the path would reveal itself through the work. Because it does. Part of what determines the path is what you learn as you go. Skills you develop that open up directions you couldn't see before. Approaches that don't work and redirect you somewhere better. You can’t plan your way to a destination that requires you to know things that…you don't know yet. You can only move toward it and let the path show itself.
Which brings me to a thing called GPS. Because I think this is the most authentic version of how this actually works in practice. You’ve heard of this before.
A GPS system doesn't show you every turn of a five-hour drive before you pull out of the driveway. It might show you the general route- or maybe several to choose from. Then, it shows you the next few yards and the next turn. And it can only do that if you're moving. If you sit there waiting for the complete route to be visible in detail before you put the car in gear, you'll be waiting a very long time.
And here's the part people forget - if you make a wrong turn, it recalculates. It doesn't shut down. It doesn't tell you the whole trip is ruined. It finds the next best option from wherever you actually are and keeps going. But you have to be moving for any of that to work. A parked car gives the GPS nothing to work with.
There is also some interesting research on this from a psychologist named Peter Gollwitzer. He found that the difference between intending to do something, and actually doing it, often comes down to one specific thing -and that is - how concrete the next action is. Not how motivated you are. Not how much you want the goal. Not whether you feel inspired to do it. Whether you've gotten specific enough about when, where, and how you're going to take the next action-whatever that might be. "I'm going to work on my weaving practice this week" is an intention. "I'm going to spend twenty minutes at the loom on Tuesday morning before I check email" is something you can actually do. The specificity is what closes the gap between knowing and doing. Not more planning. More precision about the very next thing.
Now let me talk about something that I think a lot of makers feel but don't say out loud. Because I hear it often enough that I know it's real.
Small steps don't feel like enough. 10 minutes just doesn’t feel like it’s getting me anywhere. One seam doesn’t feel worth sitting down for.
Now, you know they add up over time. You've heard that. You probably believe it in the abstract. But in the moment, fifteen minutes of practice or one small completed task feels almost embarrassing compared to the size of the goal. Like you should be doing more. Like this tiny thing you just did doesn't really count toward anything significant. And so, there's this persistent low-level resistance to the small step - not because you don't know it's the right approach, but because it doesn't feel like progress.
And I want to say it here and now- in public – recorded – for all the world to hear - that feeling is not reliable information. And, it's doing real damage to a lot of creative practices.
We talked in episode 70 about how belief functions as a filter - how what you believe determines what you look for and what you find. The belief that small steps don't really count is filtering out all the evidence that they do. Every significant body of work you have ever admired was built this way. Piece by piece, session by session, small decisions made consistently over a long period of time. The belief that it has to feel significant to count is working directly against the mechanism that would actually move you forward.
And we talked in episode 69 about the reframe test - replacing "I can't" with "I choose not to." Run it here for a second. "I don't have time to work on this today" becomes "I choose not to make twenty minutes for this today." What does that produce? If it produces that uncomfortable recognition - that ouch - then the issue probably isn't time. It's the belief that twenty minutes isn't worth the effort. And that belief is costing more than it looks like from the inside.
There's a researcher named BJ Fogg who has done a lot of work on how small habits actually build over time - and one of his most useful findings is that small actions done consistently don't just produce incremental progress toward a goal. They change your relationship with the work itself. Each time you follow through on a small commitment, you build a tiny bit of evidence that you're someone who does this. That you show up for this. That this is part of how you operate. And that identity shift - slow and quiet as it is - makes the next small action slightly easier. Not because you're more motivated. Because it's consistent with who you're proving yourself to be.
We touched on this idea back in episode 67 with Karl Weick's small wins theory. The completion of small concrete actions builds what he called self-efficacy - the belief that you can actually do this. Each small step doesn't just move you toward the goal. It also makes you more capable of taking the next one.
The small step doesn't have to feel like enough. It just has to be done. Not only does it move you closer to the goal, it also identifies you as someone who does the thing! You Do it.
I want to tell you about a period in my own life when this principle was the only thing that worked. Not as a strategy I chose because it seemed smart. It was actually the only available option.
December 2019. I was finalizing my mother's estate while working a job that was draining me completely. I was physically ill from the stress of it. Exhausted in a way that went beyond tired. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that needed doing across every area of my life simultaneously.
January 2020. I quit the job. I had a rough plan - build something out of two separate jobs, one back to teaching as an adjunct and one as a product developer for a friends company. It wasn't a complete plan. It was a direction and a starting point and a lot of unknowns. But it felt like the right move and I was ready to figure it out.
And then COVID hit. And everything I had loosely planned for collapsed. I mean all of it. No teaching in person – no need for more teachers. No non-essential companies – no need for new employees.
The question suddenly wasn't "how do I build this thing I've been thinking about." It was "how do I completely reinvent what I'm doing, learn skills I don't have or even know that I need yet, build an online business fast when I work in a very visual, tactile way, in the middle of a global situation nobody had a playbook for." That's not a question you can answer all at once. The enormity of it was genuinely paralyzing at first. I'd start trying to think through everything that needed to happen and just - stop. There was no path visible from where I was standing.
So I stopped trying to see the whole path.
The question I started asking was not "what's my plan" but "what's a next step?" Not the next step - a next step. Any step that moves in the right direction. Because here's what I've come to understand about those moments when you can't figure out which step is the right one - it often doesn't matter as much as you think it does. Any step forward gives you more information than standing still. Any action taken in roughly the right direction teaches you something that helps you figure out the next one. The GPS can't recalculate if you're not moving.
I had a general direction. Build an online presence around what I actually know how to do. I couldn't see the whole path from there - not even close. But I could see a next step. So I took it. And then I could see the one after that. And then the one after that.
It was not linear. I want to be clear about that. Some steps led somewhere useful. Some didn't and had to be abandoned and redirected. Some things I built carefully turned out not to work the way I'd hoped and had to be rebuilt differently. That's not failure. That's the GPS recalculating. The direction didn't change. The specific path adjusted as new information came in.
And here's what I know now, looking back, that I couldn't see from inside it: the path I ended up on is not one I could have planned from the driveway in January 6 years ago. Parts of it required skills I didn't have yet that I developed along the way. Parts of it opened up because of decisions I made early that I didn't know would matter later. The path revealed itself through movement. It couldn't have done that any other way.
So, here's why this principle is seventh in the series rather than first.
Small consistent steps only work if you're pointed in a direction that actually matters to you. A maker who takes small daily steps toward a goal they don't genuinely value - or toward someone else's definition of success - is just moving efficiently in the wrong direction. And we've spent six episodes working out how to make sure the direction is actually yours.
Knowing what you value gives you a direction. Questioning your definition of success means you're moving toward something that actually fits who you are. Owning your choices means you're deciding to move rather than waiting for conditions to be right. Working through your beliefs means you trust that movement is possible. Reading your struggles means you're pointed somewhere that fits rather than somewhere that drains. Thinking in both-and means you're not waiting for every obstacle to be resolved before you start.
All of that work - all six of those principles - produces clarity about direction. This principle is about what you do with that clarity. One step at a time. Consistently. Without needing to see the whole path first.
The steps are the mechanism. The direction has to come from the earlier work.
And the question worth asking - the useful one, the one you can actually answer on a weekday morning - isn't "how do I achieve this goal." That question is too big and too far away to be useful right now. Ask instead: what's one specific thing I can do today that moves in this direction? Just one. Specific enough to actually do. Not aspirational enough to feel good about and then not do.
That's the question. And answering it, and then doing the thing, and then asking it again tomorrow - that's how a body of work gets built. Not through a perfect plan. Not through a dramatic commitment made once. Through the ordinary, unsexy, completely unglamorous work of showing up and taking a next step. Every day. In the right direction.
You don't have to see the whole path. You just have to move.
Alright – so we know small steps feel insufficient. That feeling is not reliable data about whether they matter. We know they do!
You don't need the full plan before you start. You need one specific action you can take today. Not the right one. A right one. Any step that moves in the right direction teaches you something that the next step needs.
The path is not linear and it's not supposed to be. Wrong turns get recalculated. Detours reveal things the direct route wouldn't have. But none of that works if you're not moving.
So ask yourself - not eventually, right now, today - what's one thing you could do in the next twenty-four hours that moves toward what actually matters to you? That's it. Just that one thing.
Because a year from now the makers who moved forward won't be the ones who had the best plan. They'll be the ones who kept taking a next step even when the whole path wasn't visible yet. You already know enough to start. That's the point.
If you want a structured way to work through all seven principles we've covered so far - and the three still to come - the Ten Principles for a Stronger Creative Practice download has the exercises for each one. It's free and the link is in the show notes. Work them in order. That's where this gets genuinely useful.
Episode 74 is next week where we’ll cover principle 8- the value of imperfect action. I'll see you then.
