Super Power - Scale Tall Buildings - a little at a time
Unfortunately this won't give the power of Superman to scale tall buildings in a single bound, but it will allow you to do something very impressive and with much higher success chance then doing it all at once.
This also could be called - Eat the Elephant Power - after how do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.
Many projects and almost everything impressive is to hard to complete in one massive effort. If you try and tackle something large in one go - writing your PhD Thesis, running a major software implementation project, building furniture from scratch, or any major task that has a large output, what you are likely to do is fail miserably and burn out, and if you don't do that you are likely to produce something of much lower quality than you can.
The flip side of this, is when some people are confronted with an elephant scale task it overwhelms them and they find many reasons to procrastinate starting on it, at the end forcing themselves to try and tackle it in one cram session resulting in - failure, burn out and low quality.
So how do you tackle these big overwhelming problems, - one bite at a time.
If you can pick one small meaningful part of the task, and just get it done you will generate momentum and confidence. You will start making progress and the whole task becomes a lot more possible.
It may be that the project is so overwhelming that all you can do is pick out the small manageable tasks out and do them one at a time. If this is the case, keep doing that until you can get a sense of the full problem. The earlier you can do this the better as this will also tell you which bite to eat when.
If you can plan your way through the elephant with some planning (going to start with the soft muscle to get started and then work way through and end with a bit of crispy deep fried tail) you can not only make this a manageable task you can do it better and faster, as each tangible accomplishment gets to clearly towards the end. This is very important because sometimes you can get so involved in work that seems important but doesn't get you closer to done (revisiting strategic planning decisions again and again when you have a workable plan, group editing documents [frequently groups will re-edit the changes they put in place last time and can repeat this process for ages]) that you will never get things done. Getting good quantum steps done is much better than an infinitesimally small perfect step (Half way to the goal and then half way again - Zeno's paradox). Each bite of the elephant has to get you on your way, but if you keep eating you will make it through.
One key thing to remember, even with a great plan and an efficient way to go about it, elephants are big and eating them takes time, plan for the time and put in the effort and keep your average speed up. Otherwise you will face failure, burnout and low quality output.
Rome wasn't built in a day but if you keep showing up you can build it "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
This also could be called - Eat the Elephant Power - after how do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.
Many projects and almost everything impressive is to hard to complete in one massive effort. If you try and tackle something large in one go - writing your PhD Thesis, running a major software implementation project, building furniture from scratch, or any major task that has a large output, what you are likely to do is fail miserably and burn out, and if you don't do that you are likely to produce something of much lower quality than you can.
The flip side of this, is when some people are confronted with an elephant scale task it overwhelms them and they find many reasons to procrastinate starting on it, at the end forcing themselves to try and tackle it in one cram session resulting in - failure, burn out and low quality.
So how do you tackle these big overwhelming problems, - one bite at a time.
If you can pick one small meaningful part of the task, and just get it done you will generate momentum and confidence. You will start making progress and the whole task becomes a lot more possible.
It may be that the project is so overwhelming that all you can do is pick out the small manageable tasks out and do them one at a time. If this is the case, keep doing that until you can get a sense of the full problem. The earlier you can do this the better as this will also tell you which bite to eat when.
If you can plan your way through the elephant with some planning (going to start with the soft muscle to get started and then work way through and end with a bit of crispy deep fried tail) you can not only make this a manageable task you can do it better and faster, as each tangible accomplishment gets to clearly towards the end. This is very important because sometimes you can get so involved in work that seems important but doesn't get you closer to done (revisiting strategic planning decisions again and again when you have a workable plan, group editing documents [frequently groups will re-edit the changes they put in place last time and can repeat this process for ages]) that you will never get things done. Getting good quantum steps done is much better than an infinitesimally small perfect step (Half way to the goal and then half way again - Zeno's paradox). Each bite of the elephant has to get you on your way, but if you keep eating you will make it through.
One key thing to remember, even with a great plan and an efficient way to go about it, elephants are big and eating them takes time, plan for the time and put in the effort and keep your average speed up. Otherwise you will face failure, burnout and low quality output.
Rome wasn't built in a day but if you keep showing up you can build it "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
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