Find a way
Scott Miker
The other night I was watching some college football and kept hearing a theme. The broadcasters kept stating that the team needed to “find a way.” They needed to find a way to win, find a way to make a play, find a way to get a turnover.
We hear this a lot in sports. During the course of the game, we watch, hoping a player will make a good play. We don’t know how exactly, but they need to do something.
When it comes to our own personal improvement, we could use this idea of needing to “find a way”. When we don’t feel like doing what we know we should, we need to just find a way to do it.
When we know we should work out but feel exhausted we have to find a way to jump on that exercise bike. When we hit an obstacle at work we have to find a way around it. When our children whine and complain, we have to find a way to correct them without losing our temper.
Saying we need to find a way is easy, but the actual action is difficult. Sure we can sit on our couch at home and say our favorite player needs to just find a way to get the win.
What does that actually mean? We know what we want to see, we know the result we are hoping for, but we have no idea how to actually get that result so we simply say that someone else needs to figure it out.
If we turn this around and use it for our personal improvement goals we will quickly see that it doesn’t give us any insight into how to do it, just that we need to do it.
Instead we need to start focusing on the how portion. We have to start developing ways to do what is needed.
There are many tactics that can help when using the systems and habits approach to improvement. We can set the minimum. We can look to start small. We can reduce the effort so it is easier to keep going. This lets us rely on being consistent and then increasing the effort. (One great resource for this is James Clear’s book Atomic Habits).
Rather than trying to do everything right out of the gate, we work on doing a very small something and then continuing with that something over and over until it starts to become habit. Once it is habit, then we can grow it. But until that point, any additional amount will just hinder our ability to keep going.
If you are setting goals and working towards your idea of success, then learn how to find a way. Don’t just assume you can figure it all out at the time, develop strategies that will help you when the odds seem to be against you. This can help you continue on long enough to form solid habits that you can then leverage to achieve your highest ambitions.