🙈 TREE 569: Are you over-optimistic?

This week’s guest author is Kody Duncan. He writes the very excellent weekly newsletter Habit Examples. I know it’s excellent because I wrote a guest post for it last week. 😉 The posts that aren’t by me are also excellent, which is why I’m sharing Kody with you. He’s ion charge of it all – words, images and music.

Kody started keynote speaking for 1000+ person conferences at just 16 years old, met his Idaho-born wife in Honduras while they both were serving missions for their church, then graduated in psychology from BYU. Now his #1 goal is to help 3000 people build better habits in 2023 through his newsletter. You could be one of them.

Grow slowly
Jeff

K.C Green

The Sydney Opera house in Australia, one of the world's most beautiful buildings, was estimated to cost $7 million to construct and take 6 years to build.

It ended up taking 16 years and a whopping $102 million.

That's 14.5x more expensive than expected, even after plans were cut back to save time and money!

Too often, we make the same mistake in pursuing goals and habits.

We set out with over-optimistic visions, before fully understanding the real cost in time and effort required to get there.

It doesn’t take more than a few days to realise you’ve bitten off more than you can chew…

But instead of charging along like the construction workers at the Sydney Opera House for YEARS… we typically just decide those goals are impossible and give up altogether.

What if there were an in between?

Imagine what you think your realistic goal is.

Now cut that in half.

Start there.

You may be thinking something like, ‘But that’s so simple. Five minutes of exercise a day won’t do diddly squat for me’.

Yup. Five minutes of exercise won’t do anything for you.

BUT, exercising five minutes every day for weeks and months in a row can 100% change your life.

Those tiny habits can easily snowball into exercising longer, or have a halo effect in your life leading you to want to eat healthier, get better sleep, and so on.

No habit is too small until you’ve done it consistently.