I love self experimentation. I like trying to find ways to grow my skills, learn new things and optimize my life. I find learning new things not just rewarding, but enriching-that is learning seems to make my life significantly richer and brighter with each new skill and insight. That said, I am a recovering type A personality, and like most type A personalities I’ve lived a life heavily focused on goal setting and goal achievement.

I suppose goal setting has always been a big part of my life. I was, after all, a high stress and high anxiety child. I can remember doing extensive goal setting exercises in middle and high school, and of course, I remember the stress of pushing myself to get decent grades and to stay focused on the learning at hand. As I transitioned into an adult, and an entrepreneur, goal setting became a huge part of my life. I came of age in the days of Stephen Covey, when carrying a paper planner and doing daily goal setting was a part of the corporate mantra. Later, I joined Amway, where goal setting and so-called “dream building” were a part of the business culture. I’ll save my Amway stories for another day, but suffice it to say, I was fully indoctrinated in goal setting by the time I opened the beginning of a string of businesses.

Fast forward 30 years and you get to today. Now, I’m a serial entrepreneur, a part-time ex-pat and a recovering type A personality, with the emphasis on recovering. I still do goal setting regularly and I have a variety of daily practices which I follow closely. But, unlike the days of my entrepreneurial youth, I tend not to focus on the end goal as a destination, but as a general direction in which to focus my efforts. This probably seems like a subtle change to many of you, but to me it is life-changing. You see, I’ve learned to stop tying my self-worth to achievement of a very large goal at the end of a usually complex and difficult struggle. Instead, I now endeavor, and judge myself, against the yardstick of improvement. Generally speaking, I ask myself “Did I make 1% improvement toward my goals today?”.

I originally learned about the 1% better approach from James Altucher . He mentions it in many of his books and it is a frequent topic on his podcast. Basically, he asks himself a set of questions every day, such as “Did I make myself 1% better today?” And he does that across a set of categories which he has defined. I adapted this technique, unaware of its historic tradition, to my life several years ago and have seen great benefit from it over the long run.

It turns out, that the 1% approach to improvement has a pretty significant historic tradition. That tradition, called Kaizen, dates back quite further than James. I’ve included a link, for those of you interested in learning about the history of this approach. No matter how it came into my life, or the history behind it, I am just thrilled with the difference it has made.

So, why am I telling you all this? It’s because I want to share with you a very simple but powerful insight that I gained from this approach. That insight, is to value progress. For so many years, I only could see the value of reaching the end goal, and I realize now, that I was blind to the joys of the progress along the way. Be better than I was, and learn from my mistakes. Learn to appreciate each step of the journey. Learn to appreciate progress.

Let me give you a couple of examples of how powerful this concept has turned out to be in my life recently. One of the goals I’ve been pursuing this year is to raise my number of Kiva loans to 100. Today, my number of loans sits at 73. I still have a ways to go before the end of the year to hit my goal, but I have a plan to make that happen. Now, I could be down on myself because it is the middle of November and I’m still quite a few loans away from hitting my goal. However, in the last 30 days, thanks to help from some of my friends who donated gift cards to my Kiva account, I’ve made several loans and thus helped several families around the world. Every day that I make a loan, I improve the lives of distant entrepreneurs and their families, as well as those in their community in many cases. Thus, even without hitting my goal of 100 loans at this moment, I have managed to help people and improve people’s lives with the progress I’ve made. I’ve gotten notes and updates from a few of them, describing their progress and thanking me for my help. I celebrate those notes and my being fortunate enough to help others. I’m not stressed about hitting my goal, because I am grateful for the progress that I’ve made thus far and the help I’ve been able to give to those who need it.

Another example of appreciating progress came in the last few months in the area of exercise. At the beginning of the year, I set a goal for 2018 to restore my mobility and flexibility to prevent injuries. I had a concrete, measurable achievement that I used as a test of whether or not I had hit this goal. For personal reasons, I’ll leave that test out of this discussion. But, suffice it to say, that I have a metric that I’m trying to hit. To accomplish that metric, I also defined a set of activities and a frequency that I would perform those actions as a sub goal toward achieving my overall goal of passing the test. Now, here we are in the middle of November and I am very close to hitting my goal in passing the test. In fact, barring a physical illness or injury, I should be able to pass the test in early December. But, here’s the amazing thing, as I have been working on the larger goal in accomplishing the subgoal on a week to week basis, the improvement has been amazing. Each week, I get more and more mobility and that leads to significantly improved comfort, balance, patience and an overall sense of just feeling “better”. I’ve also gained additional physical capabilities along the way. This has translated into increased comfort and mastery while practicing various physical activities that I enjoy. Once again, even though I haven’t hit my overall goal yet, the journey has been rewarded at its own pace along the way. Nearly every day, I take a little time and appreciate that progress. I remind myself in gratitude of those changes in the progress that they represent. Just that simple reframing and recognition of each step and its return has made a huge difference in my happiness and contentment.

I know. I know. By now, a lot of my type A personality friends have either stopped reading, or saying to themselves that this seems like such a small and trite thing that it couldn’t possibly be useful. “I’d rather stay focused on the larger goal.”, they are probably saying to themselves. That’s okay. I don’t feel that I lost track of my larger goals. I don’t feel lost, wayward or listless. I also don’t feel as much anxiety and trepidation as I used to. In fact, I feel like I get more done now than I used to. I feel like I hit my goals more readily and with more satisfaction than ever before in my adult life. What works for me, might not work for you. I’m certainly not writing this to tell you that my way is the right way. Instead, if you are one of my type A personality friends, I just want you to be aware that there are other ways to think about the problem. That’s it, that’s the sole agenda I have.

Maybe someday, I’ll dig a little deeper into my time at Amway or I’ll tell a few more stories about all of the lessons I learned there. But for now, I hope this writing helped you and I look forward to hearing from many of you that have questions or that want to share their own stories about valuing progress. You know how to find me, I am @LBHUSTON on most of the socials. As always, thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing from you.