By Narayanan (Rayn) ·
On my Whatever Matters podcast, a guest dropped a statement mid-conversation that I wrote down straight in my diary because I knew I’d want to revisit it later:
be very ambitious in the head, but very realistic in the daily practice.
Simple suggestion, hard when you start to executive or live it.
1. Everyone’s ambitious. That part’s easy.
Wanting a big outcome might not cost anyone who’s reading this anything. If you write a book, the company or a startup that you build, if you want to run a marathon, or I don’t know, whatever your goals are. Everyone wants something big, something ambitious, something beyond their reach at the moment, right? It doesn’t set you apart from the next person with the same goal because they also have similar ambitions, and that part is the hardest for people to remember.
2. The daily practice is where people trip up.
I watched this happen to friends and some close founder folks. Sometimes I’ve done this to myself. I set a huge goal. I sit down and plan, if I have that time, for a day, for a week, maybe for a month, and I build a plan that only works for someone who’s achieved it, right?
2,000 words of writing every day would mean I’m writing 10,000 words a week, and that is action orientation. It’s really not a plan, so I think a lot of us confuse what planning means. Planning is to set habits. Planning is to be disciplined. Planning is to have action items instead of the execution itself.
3. There’s supposed to be a gap.
For a long time I thought the distance between where I wanted to be and what I was doing today was something to close immediately. It isn’t. James Clear put this better than I can in Atomic Habits: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Your daily practice is the system. Build it for who you actually are today, not who you’re trying to become.
4. Make the practice something you can actually keep. As I gave the example of writing a few thousand words every day, because our goals are ambitious and the end motive is to achieve big things, we end up forgetting that the broken-down action items or the broken-down tasks that we do have to be very small. Instead of saying 10,000 a week or 2,000 a day, you start with 15 minutes of writing. The number itself is smaller. Your brain can comprehend that this is achievable, hence action is easier.
This can correlate very quickly with how long a short-form video is today. It could be 30 seconds, could be 90 seconds. It is a very small amount of time from your 24 hours a day, but you end up doing that so much, so often, because the minute task of swiping up is probably just a millisecond. That is where practice comes in handy. Our brain gets trained when the broken-down tasks are way smaller, way minute, and they could just come together over a period of 3 months. If you are smart enough, you will be able to figure that out easily.
5. Keep the dream loud and the daily habit boring.
That’s not a contradiction, it’s the whole approach. Big vision up top, small repeatable steps underneath, and enough patience to let the second one eventually catch up with the first.
I’m rebuilding a few of my own habits around this right now. Loud ambition, boring practice. That’s probably the whole way to live this life.