Chunk It Down! (How to eat an elephant)

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one." -Mark Twain

I don't know about you, but I love the cliché saying of 'How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.' This is what Success Principle #8 is all about. Jack Canfield goes through suggestions on how to chunk down what we want into steps so we can get there little by little.

The first suggestion he makes is to start from the end and look backward. You are now where you want to be in life with all the things you want, doing everything you ever wanted and being who you want to be. What did it take to get there? You can visualize it or write it down. Before I started reading this book (The Success Principles) I attended an activity with the BYU Concert Choir. My wife used to be in the choir and they were having an activity for the choir members and their loved ones--I was a loved one thank goodness! At this activity the choir director talked about this orchestra professor and what he did a particular semester (or every year, I can't remember) with his students. He told them that he had given them all "As" and to take time at that moment to write down everything they had done to earn that "A".

That story was inspiring to me and I went home and after my wife had gone to sleep I stayed up writing ferociously in my journal--and when I say "ferociously" I mean it. I was writing as fast as I could as all these ideas poured in my head. I felt inspired. I wrote for about two hours. By the end my handwriting was dying, became more spaced out and bigger. I picked a particular date in the future. It was a day of December 2016. I wrote in the past tense as if I had accomplished everything I wanted to. I won three gold medals in the Olympics and I wrote about how I had done that etc. It was powerful!

Canfield recommends "mind-mapping" or in other words a series of circles where in the middle you have your goal and then connected with lines and circles you have things that you have to do to accomplish that goal. He shared a great piece of advice and that is to figure out one to five things you MUST accomplish on any given day and then pick the one that has to be done first. The suggestion is to then accomplish this task first. The last piece of advice he gives is to plan out your day the night before.

There's power in planning. No matter what your personal beliefs are when you plan you send out a signal. You are calling for help. For me personally when I plan I'm calling on God and He helps me. I see each Sunday what needs to happen during the week to accomplish my goals and then each day I review where I'm at and where I still need to get. I plan out more specific workouts, adjusting them to how I'm feeling. Certain things I can't do on my own and I plan those out too.

For example, last night I planned on doing repeat miles for this morning. This week has been CRAZY to say the absolute least. Started work full-time and still was getting in two workouts/day and finishing the week at 75 total miles (Check out my updated Training page.) I didn't know what was going to happen, if I was really going to feel up to the workout and worse, for me, I didn't know if I was going to be able to perform well. There's nothing I dislike more than a poor performance, even when I'm not feeling good. I went out there this morning and ran the first mile repeat in 5:02! I was stunned! I thought I had read my watch wrong and I looked again and sure enough, it was. If you recall from my post, Believe It's Possible, I did an all-out mile on the track and could only do a 5:03. Then I came back and did mile repeat number 2 in 5:07 and mile 3 in 5:04 with mile work recovery jogs in between. It was amazing and I know that God blessed me.

I know that as we take our goals and chunk them down into manageable portions that little by little we will come closer and closer to our goals until one day we reach them. I invite you to do that. Have a great weekend and, as always, run fearless!