One brick at a time, Legos, 15 minutes a day, and the path to accomplishment

While I don’t have a formal mastermind group, yesterday I was speaking with one of my friends who I discuss my goals with on a regular basis and with another friend he had connected with through his personal development efforts. As we were talking about goals, I had mentioned that one of the things I realized when I figured out how to isolate success mechanisms was that many people will take a personal development exercise and do it once, or take 100 personal development exercises and do them once, and that will be the end of it.  This is a pretty worthless personal development strategy since the mind is conditioned through repetition. No matter what you are trying to accomplish in your life, commitment and consistency are essential to moving forward.

One Brick at a Time/Legos

One of the greatest excuses that people make is that they don’t have time to work on their goals which is complete nonsense.  A house is built one brick at a time. Before it’s built there is likely a blueprint or a plan, and what starts out as a dirt lot eventually becomes a house after several months. It’s not like somebody draws up a plan and the next day the house is built. A consistent level of effort is put in for an extended period of time.  As a kid, I always loved Legos. As an adult, I just realized legos can be an extremely useful tool in the area of personal development. You might be wondering “WTF is Srini thinking, he’s gone off the deep end.”  I encourage you to go off the deep end, it’s liberating .  Anyways, Legos are a really great tool for showing you first hand the concept of one brick at a  time. Step by step instructions take you from a bunch of pieces of plastic to elaborate vehicles, houses, castles, or anything else those guys in Denmark can think of.

15 Minutes a day

Let’s explore the concept of time in a bit more detail.  In one year there are 365 days, 52 weeks, and 8760 hours.  That is a shit##oad of time if you ask me.  If you take 15 minutes out of each day and dedicate that 15 minutes to working on a goal, then at the end of the year you will have dedicated 5475 minutes to your goal, which equates to roughly 90 hours that you have dedicated to accomplishing a goal.  Turn that into one hour a day and you get 365 hours of time dedicated to accomplishing a goal.  I want to use an example that a friend of mine brought up and that I really should apply to my own life. Many bloggers are interested in writing a book. I have wanted to write a book about my 6 months in Brazil since I got back and if I had followed this formula, by now I would have had a manuscript in hand. But let me break it down for you.

• One paragraph a day
• 7 paragraphs a week
• 365 Paragraphs
• Assume that a page has 3 paragraphs and at the end of the year you’ve written more than 100 pages by committing 15 minutes.
• If you are a blogger than you already spend more time than this writing, so what’s another 15 minutes

A simple 3 step formula for accomplishing your goals

1.    Identify what you want to accomplish
2.    Decide on an action that will take you 15 minutes each day
3.    Do that action every single day for a year

*The action could change over the course of the year as you make progress towards your goal

Most goals appear really daunting when you only look at the end. But when you break it down piece by piece, day by day, minute by minute, the effort you have to make is minimal.  Don’t you owe yourself at least 15 minutes each day to increase the quality of your life?