Get Off Your Butt With Microactions

Written by Dave Navarro on February 16, 2006

Millions of people fail to ever make progress on goals that are important to them because they’re waiting for circumstances to make it easier on them. They’re waiting until they get a raise before they start investing. They’re waiting until they can schedule regular time at the gym before starting an exercise program. They’re waiting for something, someday to happen to somehow make it more convenient to tackle their goals. And boy, do they wait.

You see, circumstances aren’t necessarily ever going to get easier, and by the time things line up for you, your opportunity may be lost. Just think about it … how many goals have you been saying “soon, when I have the time …” for years now? You can’t let this happen to you anymore.

So what do you do when you don’t have the circumstances you need to make your goals happen? When you know you need to invest, but you’ recurrently scraping by? When you know you need to start working out, but you seem to have zero time? What you need to do is harness the power of what I call microactions.

A microaction is a tiny action that supports your goal, even if it doesn’t move you towards it. If your goal is to get in shape, a microaction could be a decision to do five pushups a day in the morning before you leave the house.

Will five pushups a day get you in shape? Absolutely not. But what it will do is put a stake in the ground, at least mentally, to say “I may not have a lot of time to spend on this goal, but I haven’t forgotten about it. I’m doing something.”

And though five pushups a day may seem insignificant, don’t underestimate it’s value. What a microaction like that does is signal your brain that you’re committed to taking action, even when you don’t have the resources you think you need.

And that gets your brain tuned to the idea of making the best use out of the resources you already have –and gets you results faster than you’d expect. You’re going to find you have a lot more resources than you think.

Think about it. Let’s say you’ve never saved any money in your life, and the thought of saving ten dollars a month doesn’t seem very motivating to you. But let’s say that ten years ago, you decided to take the microaction of saving ten dollars a month. At this moment, you’d have over $5,000 to invest with.

If you had that kind of money right now, wouldn’t that drastically change your levels of motivation? You wouldn’t think twice about continuing to put that $10 away. Well, why not put yourself in that place right now?

Decide that you’re not going to settle for being stagnant on any of your goals. Decide that you’re going to take a microaction daily or weekly for every one of your goals. Maybe you’ll commit one hour a week to write that book. Maybe you’ll put away $10 a month (or even $1! It really matters!).

Maybe you’ll do five pushups each day. And if you do, don’t be surprised if somehow you find that that hour grows into a few hours, or that $10 a month grows into $30, or that those 5 pushups grows into 25.

Microactions have a way of taking on a life of their own, of becoming seeds that grow far beyond your expectations, a little bit at a time. And one day, you reach that critical mass and you’re in control of your circumstances, instead of circumstances controlling you. And that’s where you want to be.

All the best -

Dave Navarro