Often, it can be hard to get started on a big vision or a dream that seems out of reach. Maybe, like me, you’re thinking about building something big this year.
I don’t know about you, but I love to procrastinate. Sometimes I resist getting down to business because the task looks so large. Other times Impostor Syndrome rears its ugly head and stops me in my tracks.
And even when I do get going on a big project, it’s easy to get bogged down in the middle, as the nuanced complexity and enormity of the thing starts to unfold. Oh, and my impostor syndrome usually circles back around at this point.
A few weeks ago I shared some ideas on building a serendipity engine to help you connect and build a powerful network that can help you build a life you love. Several folks reached out to me to share how this idea resonated, so I thought I’d share some more ideas on how to create amazing things in your life.
How to achieve your dreams with the Domino Effect
The domino effect is one powerful way to overcome two of these challenges: getting started and getting bogged down.
The domino effect can help you find the courage to get started and keep going. The third challenge, impostor syndrome, can take a bit more work to resolve. One handy way to deal with that dragon is to get curious about it. Resistance is, after all, information.
When I was a kid, I loved playing with dominos.
But I didn’t know how to actually play dominoes like the older gentlemen did on the street corners in my neighborhood, on plywood boards atop trash cans.
Instead, I knew how to set up long rows of dominos carefully and then knock the first one down, watching with glee as the rest fell in order, making that delightful clicky-clacky sound.
Mostly when people talk about “the domino effect” they are talking about this sort of chain reaction - one thing knocking over another thing. In the case of dominos, they are usually the same size.
The domino is much more powerful than we realize. In this 1983 study, University of British Columbia physicist Lorne Whitehead demonstrated the true power of the domino effect: dominoes can actually knock down things about one-and-a-half times their size.
...Big whoop, right? Okay, that might seem a bit underwhelming. Bear with me:
The Multiplier Effect: A Domino The Size Of A Tic Tac Could Topple A Building
In this video made by University of Toronto professor Stephen Morris, he set up 13 dominos.
The first was 5 millimeters tall and only 1 millimeter thick (it's actually smaller than a Tic Tac), so small that it needed to be set up with tweezers. The 13th was more than three feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds.
The first takeaway from this version of the Domino effect is that often, we think that the first step towards a big goal needs to be significant and worthwhile. It had better make a dent in the problem. But physics tells us that we just need to find a really really really small thing that gets us started and gets the chain reaction going.
It’s hard to imagine, but starting with a domino just five millimeters tall, it would take just 29 progressively-larger dominoes to knock over a domino the size of the Empire State Building.
If you hate imagining things, this video is a scale-up to 6.4 meters, a purported World Record attempt posted in 2009.
How to Keep Going: Set up the last domino and Hire a coach
But we are not purely physical objects. Although the adage “if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person” does seem to jive with Newton’s Law that “an object in motion tends to stay in motion”...it’s easy to get bogged down in the journey towards a big dream.
When I think about the process of writing my book, Good Talk, there were five things that I did that helped me keep on track:
Find a tiny first step (the first domino)
Set up the *last* domino
Eliminate the option to stop
Engage with a community
Hire a coach
There is some research out of NYU in 2009 that implies that when we tell folks about our goals, we get a sense of “premature sense of completeness”. However, a more recent, 2015 study published by the American Psychological Association said that people are more likely to achieve their goals when they closely monitor their progress, and the chances of success are boosted if progress is publicly reported or physically recorded. Take NaNoWriMo for example, a non-profit that has helped 798,162 folks write 367,913 novels, one November at a time, since 1999, using community, clarity and accountability.
For me, I pre-sold hundreds of copies of my book in 2018, when the book was only a proposal - barely more than a sketch (that was the first domino). The proposal was a significant domino, but selling all of those books to friends and family, colleagues and clients put a fair bit of healthy pressure on me. I had, in effect, eliminated the option to stop (#3). I had told people that mattered to me - it doesn’t get more public than that.
Creating the proposal could have stayed a secret...but setting up the launch page for the book was, in essence, setting up the “last domino” (#2)
By sending the email out to *everyone* on my email list, I got #3 and #4 underway: eliminating the option to stop and engaging with my community.
I often do steps 1-4 by setting up an Eventbrite and selling tickets to a workshop or program I want to prototype. Once I sell the first few seats, it’s hard for me to back out.
But of all the things I did, the most effective was hiring a coach. Even with the domino effect in mind, impostor syndrome reared its head over and over again during the writing process. And the complexity of the project expanded and shifted, many times over.
Working with someone on a regular basis kept my eye on the ball. When I got lost or down, they helped pick me up and helped me find the path.
If you have a big dream you want to make an impact on in 2022 and beyond, find a coach to believe in your dream and keep you on track, knocking down larger and larger dominos.