By Ryan Dolan
“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”
Mark Twain
“When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made. Don’t look for the big quick improvements. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens-and when it happens-it lasts.”
John Wooden
A year ago I walked into my first jiu jitsu class. Though always health and fitness conscious, I found that, at age 49, things had gotten stale. I saw an element of the creeping complacency that hits in middle age, a tendency to retract from risks and things that scare you. As I approached 50, and within a couple years of the empty nest, I wanted to test and humble myself in a new pursuit. One year in, a year filled with its share of highs and a few humbling lows, I’ve learned many things about this amazing martial art and about myself.
One of my biggest takeaways is the mindset and approach needed to tackle what seems like an insurmountable goal. It’s hard to articulate just how counterintuitive and just plain foreign jiu jitsu is to the rank beginner. I spent the first handful of months feeling like I was drinking information from a firehouse, with no ability or sense of how to even begin to pull the strands together. I was at the long stage of “unconscious incompetence”-I didn’t even know that I didn’t know. This wasn’t some abstract, mental observation-this ignorance was being exploited by my training partners. It’s brutal and demoralizing. As one of my teachers recently said, “your first year in jiu jitsu means being the nail.” Exactly, a nail in a room full of hammers.
Now, a year in, I can say I am worlds away from that newbie walking into the gym for the first time. I’m still a total beginner, but the process has unearthed and built a degree of resilience, toughness and persistence I didn’t know I had. One key virtue that has been strongly reinforced is that of incremental improvement. My progress improved meaningfully when I stopped focusing on getting better at a dozen different things (very easy to do in jiu jitsu), and instead worked hard at the one or two most important gaps I needed to fill.
You learn to celebrate your small “wins.” My skills were haltingly improving, and I was having more luck rolling with other beginners. My teachers reiterated that the only way to get better was to focus on the one or two key skills I needed right now, then to drill those extensively, to the exclusion of everything else. For me that meant a focus on defense: guard retention and submission escapes. I would work on one or two elements of each over and over, and once I reached some level of proficiency, I would slowly add others.
When you spread your focus too wide, you end up getting better at nothing. Your progress stalls and you drift, despite showing up and putting out. You need to define- narrowly daily, weekly and monthly goals and how you will define progress. From there, you work to make steady, incremental progress. When done correctly, the progress you make tomorrow will build off that of today-no matter how small. Right now it’s the X guard, just X guard-over and over. Am I better at it today than yesterday?
John Danaher, arguably the best coach in jiu jitsu today, believes incremental improvement is crucial to all growth:
“I’m a huge believer in the idea of small, progressive movements toward goals…If I can improve my performance in any given area by a very small percentage, and then add on that day-by-day, you get this compound interest effect, where at the end of five years, something quite remarkable may have happened.”
Most of us tend to approach any plan for transformational growth and improvement in a similar way: we set several big, audacious goals on short deadlines which demand radical changes. In short order, the immensity of the goals, coupled with their completely unrealistic timeline, very quickly extinguishes our willpower, leaving us more frustrated and deflated than before-more convinced that we don’t have what it takes to surmount these challenges.
I’ve seen the effectiveness of using incremental improvement with my planning clients. The key is to get them focused on the one or two most important areas needed to drive financial growth. For some it’s driving a higher savings rate, for others it’s building an increasing capacity for investment volatility, for others it could be placing more focus on the needs of the future than today’s. Once you have these identified, then you build a plan to achieve near-term (the next month or quarter) progress. The key is to set initial targets gentle enough where progress seems easily attainable. Once these are hit, we slowly increase the pace. The key is steady progression and pressure that builds over time.
By jumping over low initial hurdles, small enough to not trigger the fear and anxiety of large change, clients are encouraged and motivated to take on more. By focusing on the next small step needed today, and not the immensity of what needs to happen over the next 5 or 10 years, progress and accountability have a much higher chance of success.
A recent example of this in action involved a client who, when he initially came to me a couple years ago, had been sitting in cash for much of this long bull market. A pessimist by nature (he would say realist), he had a very skeptical view of equities, which he viewed as highly overvalued, overstimulated and prone for a big fall which he’d like to sidestep with his considerable cash hoard. As we defined his ambitious financial goals (still 10-20 years out), it was clear equities were going to need to be an important piece of the picture.
We discussed how markets had been overvalued and overstimulated for years and that his decision to be completely out of the market had materially impacted his financial life. We talked about how equity volatility risk is markedly reduced with long time horizons, and that it was essential that he work to build a more bullish long term orientation. Finally, we discussed the need to cease black and white thinking (all in/all out) and instead take a more incremental approach.
We created a plan to put a very conservative amount of his portfolio in equities. We also built a proactive plan to incrementally increase his equity exposure over time. If in the interim, the market materially dropped, we agreed to a more aggressive reinvestment plan.
Everything was going smoothly until this year. Falling equity markets and dire headlines had sparked a relapse in my client’s “world is ending” fears. I calmly reiterated that the overwhelming majority of his portfolio was in cash and T-Bills and that we wanted this to happen as it gave us an opportunity to increasingly lean into equity exposure.
I had a call with him the other day. I was doing periodic rebalancing of client portfolios and said that I was adding equity exposure with the market down over 20%. It was a small addition of exposure, and while he wavered initially-he ultimately agreed. He is slowly overcoming a mental bias which has caused deleterious damage to his long-term wealthy.
Incremental progress works, whether helping prevent you from getting strangled on the jiu jitsu mats or overcoming challenges in your financial life. The right combination is defining one or two core goals, developing the right template and scorecard for incremental progress and the right coach working arm-in-arm with you throughout the process.
Progress over perfection.
Dolan Partners works with professionals and business owners primarily in the real estate and lending, technology and executive search industries.
We work with clients who are at least 40 year old, have at least $750,000 in investment assets and are solid savers.
If you’d like to learn more, schedule a 20 minute introductory call.