Sometimes change is just not fast enough for me. I have an impatient soul that goes along with the rigorous demands I make of myself. Like many I want to see immediate results to affirm the direction that I’m moving in. A part of me hungers for the get rich quick scheme rather than reaping the rewards of long-term investment. Yet I know that if I focus only on immediate payoff that many great achievements that I’d like to have will never have the ground work in place to happen.
To balance these two needs I have come intuitively to a two-fold process where almost all projects I pursue have a short-term payoff within the process and potential for long-term gains.
A couple examples from my own life:
Creating a Video Learning Platform
About 2 years ago I set out on a project to create instructional lessons for all the classes I teach at Academie Duello.
Short-term payoff: Creating the video lessons was immediately useful for the other instructors in my school and for myself. It helped me better assemble our curriculum and communicate it. Students in the school also immediately benefited by being able to catch up on classes they had missed. The payoff in personal usefulness and satisfaction of my staff and students was immediate.
Long-term payoff: By taking a small chunk out of every week for the past two years, we now have a library of over 500 lessons and are able to leverage those as part of a successful online learning platform: Duello.TV
Writing a Blog
At the beginning of November 2013 I decided to start writing this blog. I wanted to have a place in the world where I could share my ideas an open them up for criticism and discussion.
Short-term payoff: My main goal is to write everyday and practice putting my words out into a public forum. I wanted to stretch myself as a writer and as a person. I get this payoff with every single post I make and it requires essentially no outside input.
Long-term payoff: From regular writing I see the potential to curate my content into a book, engage a larger audience, leverage discussions into projects, and many more opportunities. However the daily affirmation of writing is not contingent on seeing this long-term payoff which to me makes it more likely that I’ll reap long-term rewards. Many of which I can’t even imagine yet.
I have to continually remind myself that there is tremendous power in small moves. Like Jeff Olson writes in the Slight Edge: the power of transformation comes from routinely taking the small actions that are easy to do — but also not do. By falling on the “do” side of investment and movement forward more often than on the “not do” side of decline, one moves constantly toward the life and dreams that they strive for.