The Kaizen principle

I was vacuuming the floor today while listening to Love Your Work podcast by @kadavy where he interviewed Dr. Robert Mauer about the Kaizen way to do things. It's basically about continuous improvement in small incremental steps. Could be applied in everything - from auto-manufacturing to writing a book, from fitness to learning to play musical instrument, from building a business to investing.

The idea is simple - at first you do such a small task that it wouldn't trigger a fear reaction in your brain. For example, write 100 words, meditate for 2 minutes, floss one tooth, play just one page of a musical piece, go for a walk around the block, doodle for 2 minutes, improvise a 2 minute piece using just 1 note.

Do this for a week or two and it will become a habit, you will want to do more, in fact, you will forget to stop.

The common mistake is setting out of doing 2 minutes of a task but really going from 45 minutes right away. It's too much, it invokes fear reaction from the brain part called Amygdala and then the person quits before even seeing any results of their labor.

Last August I set out to practice pull-ups like that. At first I would hang on the rings for 10 seconds, then 20 seconds, then 30 seconds, then would be ready to do 1 pull-up, then 1 pull-up and hang some more.

Right now I'm doing pull-ups twice a day and hitting 11 of them. Could do more but what's the rush? I recently started doing the same with the dips on the rings. Last week I did 10 second dip hangs and this week I'm doing 20 second dip hangs on the rings.

I think it all relates to the beginner experience on Steem as well. Beginners don't have to jump in and start Steeming all day long. It would be overwhelming and the person would quit.

Maybe at first a newbie could just write 100 words, read one article, upvote it and leave one comment. After a week or so, one could do 150 words, read and upvote 2 posts and leave 2 comments. Then 200 words, read and upvote 3 posts and write 3 comments.

The essence of the idea of Kaizen is to create a habit with a task so small it wouldn't require any will-power to do it.

How small?

Here's the good measure:

If you tell somebody about your small task and they laugh at you, then it's small enough.

If 100 words is too much, start with 50 instead.