Click here to download the very first Motivation & The Family Podcast. (5.2mb, ~15 minutes.) The podcast is a conversation between Brian Wheeler and Sam Azer on the subject of incremental improvement. The text below contains material not included in the podcast:

By the time a man is forty years old, he has approximately a quarter million hours of experience repeating the habits he has taught himself to practice. If there are some bad habits that developed during that time, every hour spent practicing the replacement of the bad habits with good ones is actually like a drop of good habit water that tries to move an entrenched ocean of bad habit water. So, the sooner we start practicing good habits, the easier our lives will be.

A good way for young people to start is to set worthy goals at an early age and try to achieve them. When we do this we find ourselves blocked in many ways, but if we keep at it we overcome all the obstacles and we succeed.

Being a real winner in life is not about the successes or the failures at any moment in time. It’s about the habits that we develop and the general results of practicing them. A real winner has good habits that generally lead to successfully achieving goals – habits of thought and behavior. 

When we look around in an effort to understand success in the lives of the people around us, we find that there are two basic steps that we need to take in order to achieve any goal:

• Un-learn some of the wrong ideas that we’ve become attached to. Wrong ideas become stumbling blocks in our lives; they prevent us from finding the truth that we seek and they block us from achieving our goals.
• Once we’ve removed the wrong ideas, we are able to find out what we need to know in order to succeed.

There are two ways to do this: 

• Make mistakes and learn from the resulting failures or
• Find out what to do from somebody who has the necessary experience (or by reading books written by people with the necessary experience.)

Of course, once we know what to do, we need to get into the habit of doing it. This requires self discipline and practice. 

If you think about it, successfully achieving our goals is actually a personal business process, a cycle that we must learn to follow in order to move forward in our lives.

Let’s go over it again. Let’s say we want to accomplish an important goal in life: 

• We might find that we’re stuck for some reason. There are many reasons that we get stuck while trying to achieve our goal, but most of them can be resolved reasonably quickly. One problem that stands out from the others (because it can hold us back) is the wrong ideas that we become attached to. Wrong ideas in life, especially the ones we are emotionally attached to, are very damaging. They block us from succeeding in our goals and they are very hard to get rid of.
• As we’re searching for the truth, people will often tell us what we need to know, but because of our attachment to wrong ideas, we can’t accept what they’re saying. In extreme cases, wrong ideas prevent us from even being able to begin to understand what they said!
• Inevitably, we make mistakes. These mistakes cause problems and, sooner or later, those problems will start to bother us. When we sit back to review what we’ve been doing, we discover we are doing something that doesn’t work. If the problem is related to a wrong idea that we’re attached to, we may or may not realize it but we do realize that our behavior must change. Sometimes this can be a time consuming and difficult process, but we do make changes and adjustments in our behavior from time to time. If we’re smart, we eventually lose our attachment to any wrong ideas and, at some point, we will convince ourselves to remove a wrong idea entirely.
• Once we are free of any wrong ideas that are holding us back, we open the door to understanding the truth and we start to figure out what we need to know.
• Through our experience in life, we may already have collected enough information about the subject and we are finally able to put it all together and understand what we need to know. If we’re lucky, we’ll just read about it in a book or somebody with more experience will explain it to us. In any case, at some point in our lives, we accept correct ideas and they become part of our experience and understanding.
• Finally, we are able to find the remaining pieces of the puzzle. Once we know what we need to know, we are able to make progress.
• With persistent effort, we eventually achieve our goal.

This can be a long process; many people may never actually get to a point where they’ve come to understand that this is what they do. The important thing is this: If we think about it a bit, we can formalize the process and get into the habit of going through it quickly – and this will lead to greater success in all aspects of our lives.

Fortunately, we don’t have to think about it too much. Many people have gone through this throughout history and the process works in a reasonably obvious sort of way: 

• Once we have a goal, we evaluate where we are and what we think we need to do to move towards achieving the goal. Of course, we can’t accomplish everything in one day. Most quick and easy goals are not very important. The valuable achievements in life take time and effort, so we work towards them one step at a time. Following our evaluation, we have a step or two that we plan to take and we have some idea of what we think we might do after that.
• Next, we take the first steps towards achieving the goal.
• Now the cycle repeats. We evaluate again: Where are we? What do we need to do to move forward? We plan another step or two, take those steps, evaluate again and so on until we’ve achieved our goal. 

You probably recognize this process – it’s the foundation of almost everything we do in our lives. For example, young children practice this exact process when they get involved in community sports activities. In this case, the goal is to take a small group of young, inexperienced players and turn them into a successful team:

• They go out to practice and are watched by their coach. The coach will find that each child has some skills and abilities and some weaknesses.
• The coach will try to build the child’s self confidence by pointing out the strengths.
• The coach will also try to remove the child’s weaknesses by organizing practice sessions that concentrate on the need to improve some specific skills. In all sports there are habits and behaviors that can be changed to improve the player’s results.
• Then, when the children finally get to play a match with another team, they find out how well they are doing.
• After the match, the coach will usually meet with the team to review the performances during the game. The coach will again try to build the confidence of the children by pointing out their strengths. At the same time, the coach will try to point out areas of weakness that the children need to concentrate on during the next few practice sessions.
• On the day of the next practice, the whole cycle starts again. By practicing this cycle, a mediocre team can become a great team in just one season!

This is the incremental improvement cycle. Everybody practices this cycle every day – but many people don’t realize that they’re doing it. You know you need to do this, so why not get into the habit of doing it well?! Here are some important points to remember about this cycle: 

• Your subconscious mind will always be working towards the dominant thought in your mind – so learn to think the right thoughts (Romans 12:2.) Check your thoughts regularly and get rid of any negativity, anger or bad attitudes. Wrong thinking will prevent you from being successful.
• Listening to others and paying attention to their needs leads to good communications with others.
• Good communication is a critical element in all our activities and relationships. Good communication leads to productive teamwork.
• Teamwork allows us to accomplish far more by working together.

Two more points to keep in mind:

• You need to be able to identify your strengths and successes in order to build your self confidence and give yourself the courage to deal with bigger and bigger problems. Take the time to recognize the progress that you make in life.
• You can’t measure your real success when things are easy. Jesus tells us that we will see how well our house is made when the storms come (Matthew 7:24-27, Luke 6:47–49.) Difficult situations and serious troubles build character and allow you to measure your ability to succeed. Do you crash and burn at the first sign of strong winds or do you fly like an eagle in the face of them? We all need to learn to plan for and manage difficult times gracefully. Those few people who are really good at it look as though they never have any troubles.

It’s a good idea to write down your goals. Make sure you take the steps necessary to move yourself forward towards your goals every day. Review your progress as often as possible, identify and recognize your strengths, identify and work to correct your weaknesses. 

After a few cycles of personal incremental improvement, you will find that you will become successful more often than not. That’s all there is to it, being a real winner in life is as easy as that!