Making the Improbable Feel Possible
In the sales world, we spend a ton of time looking at dashboards. Any action or outcome you can think of, we can track. In and of itself, this isn't super valuable, especially when you realize that everyone else can (and is) capturing the exact same data as you.
Knowing which metrics to track and how to interpret the data separates the good from the great.
This logic doesn't just apply to sales or business as a whole. It also applies to your life.
Regardless of what you want to achieve, having a firm understanding of which data points matter and knowing what to do with them is so important for sustainable improvement.
The specifics will vary depending on what you're doing or trying to achieve, but you can apply the following general framework to help you figure out how to make what may seem improbable feel a lot more possible.
Controlling What You Can
An input is any action you completely control. In my line of work, the most basic input for a sales rep is a cold call. At any moment, you can pick up the phone and dial. In your personal life, an input might be waking up an hour early, drinking more water, or going to the gym.
An output is the result (directly or indirectly) of your input. In the example above, this could be booking a demo as a result of the cold call.
In reality, it usually isn't that clean. A lot of the time, there's a pretty decent lag between our inputs and their respective outputs. For example, if you go to the gym (input), you won't see the scale drop 5 lbs when you get home (output). This is important to remember, and we'll touch on it later.
It may seem obvious, but we must make this distinction early on. You need to cement the fact that all you can control are your inputs. They are what get you to where you want to be. That isn't to say we don't measure and analyze our outputs - after all, they're what we're after, but when we are tracking daily success, we focus on our inputs.
The final point is to be ruthlessly impatient with your inputs but patient with your outputs. Busy day? Don't feel motivated? Doesn't matter - you find time for your inputs. Life will always get in the way, you can't let that stop you. On the other hand, you've got to make sure that you give your outputs time to materialize.
The Progress Principle
The reason it's so important to get our inputs and outputs clearly defined is that training your brain to experience pleasure and satisfaction from doing rather than achieving is going to be the cornerstone of winning, and it'll create long-term sustainable change instead of temporary results.
I won't dive into the science behind this next part, but if that's something that interests you, I recommend checking out this episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast. Dr. Huberman gets granular about what's happening, and it is, without a doubt, my favourite episode of the pod that's had the most significant impact on my personal and professional life.
In short, Dopamine is the currency of life. It signals to your brain that whatever action you've just done is worth doing, and you should keep it up. Your ability to create an environment to manipulate its release and avoid cheap versions of its release will singlehandedly be the skillset that will indicate if you will achieve whatever it is you want.
Do this by eliminating the scoreboard that measures your results and instead focus on The Progress Principle. It's the idea that the pleasure of getting what you want is often fleeting. In any pursuit (especially a continuous one like getting promoted or trying to hit a monthly quota), the more often you do it, the more habituated you become to the euphoria it brings until it eventually fades entirely.
What replaces it is a feeling of relief, and although pleasurable, this feeling is short-lived because it’s associated with a single moment in time. When the scoreboard resets, you’re back where you started.
The takeaway is to eliminate the scoreboard so that nothing can be reset. Sustainable pleasure will come from working towards a goal rather than achieving it (which will happen as a consequence)
This is a lot easier said than done. It's something I struggle with daily, but there are a few valuable tips for doing so:
- Track your inputs and look for consistency or tiny improvements (or both)
- When you do decide to track your outputs, expand the time horizon of which you're analyzing them
- Remain forward-looking. If you miss a day at the gym or don't make enough dials today, try to understand why without beating yourself up and then shift your focus to working on not repeating the same mistakes tomorrow
Divide and Conquer
Lastly, dividing your inputs into tiny bite-sized chunks is key. Trying to make 150 dials a day is technically still focussing on the inputs, but that number is big. It can induce some paralysis, especially if it's 9 a.m. and the day itself feels like a massive undertaking.
Revert back to the namesake of this blog. Breakdown big into small.
Here are some examples of what that could look like:
- Making 150 dials a day = 9 dials per 25 min call block
- Reading a book every month = 15 pages every weeknight*
- Going to the gym 3 times per week = laying your clothes out the night before
The last example is my favourite, and I intentionally included it to show you that breaking down your inputs doesn't mean simply working backward mathematically. It means dividing your action into steps and only worrying about the next step ahead of you.
Summary:
- In any goal pursuit, there will be inputs that produce outputs
- Inputs are within your control, outputs are not. Spend your time focused on the inputs and be ruthless with making sure you are consistent with them
- Dopamine is what signals to your brain that you've done something "good"
- You'll achieve long-term attainment of what you want by shifting your perspective of what is good to the inputs that you can control rather than the outputs that you cannot
- Big is hard. Small is easy. Divide your grand plans into their lowest denominator and focus on that.
Notes:
*I'm assuming the average book is 300 pages here