Go Farther, Faster, By Limiting Your View To Three Steps Ahead

[Cross-post with Storytellers Unplugged]

“Begin with the end in mind…”

Sound advice, that. Sound strategy. The rationale being that if you don’t know where you’re going, how in the name of Zeus can you be sure you’ll actually get there? Where, exactly? The end of an as-yet-unfinished novel comes to mind, for starters, but that’s just one entry on a really, really long list.

Then again, I can think of at least two pitfalls in clinging a tad too tenaciously to this approach:

(1) The grinding day-to-day reality of the distance in between. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge of covering all those points between A and Z. Or consumed by every grungy little details you think you need to get locked down before embarking, even though details keep expanding fractally.

Eventually, overwhelm = paralysis. While obsessive planning becomes an insidious form of procrastination. I confess to being a repeat offender on both counts.

(2) If your vision is continually locked on that spot 1000 yards ahead, you run the risk of falling on your face because you’ve tripped over what’s right in front of you.

The antidote? Begin with the end in mind, most definitely.

Then refocus.

The Power Of Three

It came a couple of days ago, like validation, in an e-mail newsletter from financial writer Ramit Sethi:

“Read what’s necessary to complete the next three steps in front of you, then take action.”

This was in the context of entrepreneurship … but then, most writers would do well to see themselves as creative entrepreneurs who inhabit a variety of roles, many of which would’ve been nonexistent for the authors they came of age reading.

And I say validation because this newsletter arrived within 24 hours after I’d completed the biggest and most involved — and most daunting — phase of giving my website a total overhaul and from-the-ground-up reconstruction.

Now, web designer is most assuredly not among my specialities or natural inclinations, but I had to take it up anyway. This meant doing a lot of things I’d never done before, which in turn meant finding out how all these things I’d never done before actually get done.

And the three-step limit was pretty much how I’d proceeded through the entire project.

The World’s Population Of Triplets Can’t Be Wrong

It might take a neuroscientist to explain why, but there’s just something about three that keeps things optimized.

Phone numbers come in three segments.

Traffic lights have three statuses.

Primitive peoples often don’t even see the point of higher sums. The Yanomamo, of the Amazon rain forest, conceptualize just three numbers: one, two, and more than two.

The most common form of the multivolume storyline is the trilogy.

The pinnacle of athletic endurance is the triathlon.

In August of last year, I even did a piece called “The Three-Step Process To Surprising Your Readers.”

For whatever reason, three simply works to our advantage. Three is easy to grasp, yet still feels substantial. It’s more than a paltry one or two, less than an unwieldy four or five.

So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to push this from theory into practice, like the creative entrepreneur you are.

What are the next three steps of, say, being your own webmaster?

The next three steps in implementing new ways of connecting with your readers?

Or starting your own blog?

Or finding out what you need to keep that research-intensive novel in motion?

Or, instead of exhaustingly outlining your novel to the very end, what’s going to happen in just the first three chapters? Then the next three after that?

Three steps: Name them. Define them. Own them.

Ready. Set. Go.

[Photo by Marina Montoya]

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