The only way to truly reach your goal is by doing one thing – taking the next right step.
It has been said thousands of times by people from all walks of life. Books are devoted to it. Keynote speakers make thousands of dollars a year talking about it. YouTube could probably survive on the profits from it alone. Yet we don’t follow it. We hear it and get excited but we most often fail to put it into practice.
What is it? The sage advice to pursue excellence one step at a time.
Perhaps it’s the relationship we have with social media that most resembles the courting habits of birds of paradise. When it’s time to share ourselves with the world we transform for a brief moment into the most awe-inspiring form we can and then capture it to be our “forever and always” (if you haven’t seen this YouTube it or get your Planet Earth on and let the sweet voice of David Attenborough give you a tour). We know that 90% of the time we aren’t that most amazing person, but it sure is fun to make other people think it. When what we see of people is the 10% of their amazing, 100% of the time we get a sense that something must be wrong with us because “that person gets everything they want, whenever they want it.”
The problem is…they don’t at all. I can’t remember who said it but I think it’s true that when we see an “overnight success” and compare ourselves to it, we’re missing the iceberg of hard work they put in. We ignore the hours in the gym, missed nights with friends to write, compromises to get up earlier than everyone else. We fail to see how most of the people we look up to, consistently took the next right step and then at some point took one that showed the world their destination. We never ask what their walk looked like to get there. This vantage point hurts both parties. You struggle with comparison not knowing how to make the giant leap to your dreams, and they don’t get credit for the grind that they’ve been through.
Now, of course there are some true stories of overnight success but I’d bet they are far and few between. Let’s take a look at Abraham Lincoln for an example. Most people know him for the moments that would have gone viral if the internet was around for him to use – his 2nd Inaugural address that reaffirmed a nation at war with itself or the Emancipation Proclamation where he changed the winds of history by declaring, “All persons held as slaves…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free”, or maybe you memorized his famous words at Gettysburg, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” These are the moments of the 10% but they fail to account for all the times that he simply took the next right step.
One moment that is often forgot but shows the process of thought behind those famous statements came when he was a 28-year-old delegate to the Illinois General Assembly. He and another delegate, Dan Stone, responded to a vote taken 6-months prior that put restrictions on abolitionists from spreading their message. Lincoln and Stone claimed, “the institution of slavery is founded of both injustice and bad policy…”1 That was a bold move away from the popular 1837 opinion that slavery should at least be allowed where it already existed. That next right step would lead to his more famous statements that kids across the U.S. now put to memory.
There are tons of more present examples of this phenomenon as well. From Steve Jobs, Robert Iger, Mila Kunis, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, to Halle Berry and J.K. Rowling people who’s names we know but stories we don’t often care to actually look into. We see their movies, books, or companies and think, “wow, they just came out of nowhere”. They didn’t. They came from failures and setbacks. They came from lessons learned the hard way and easy way. They came from taking risks. They came from acting with faith over fear. They came from taking the next right step.
The fourth principle of the Brothers LIFE Council is to pursue excellence. The reason we say “pursue” is because it’s a journey not a destination. The pursuit of something excellent is an ongoing climb of next right steps. Want to be in excellent physical shape? It’s gong to start with a daily next step into the gym, onto a bike, or out the door for a walk. Want to pursue spiritual excellence? It’s going to be the next right step to make time every day for spiritual disciplines of reading, prayer, and conversation. If mental excellence is your pursuit, you better start with the next right step into a bookstore, onto TedTalks, or to get a journal.
I don’t know what your pursuit of excellence looks like right now. All I care about is that you have one. That you have goal you are pursuing, a reason to push through the quarantine. Maybe it’s simply to spend time with family and be present amidst the chaos. Take the next right step to put your phone away in the evening and be with them.
You have greatness within you. You can pursue excellence and fight isolation for yourself and the people in your life. That greatness won’t be reached with a leap to the top of the mountain and there is no helicopter to take you there. It will all be in the decisions you make each moment to take the next right step.
Weekend Challenge
This weekend, I think a two-part examination of the next right step is the best way to go!
- Learn about someone you look up to. Choose someone you look up to, either that you know personally or that you follow on social media and take the time to learn their path of next right steps. I promise you’ll find one heck of a story behind their success that might look like it was instantaneous. I put some book/audiobook recommendations below if you want to go that route and learn about someone.
- Figure out your own next right step. Pick one of your plans to pursue excellence. See the vision but then let it go and focus on today. Write out a plan for the next week on paper. At the bottom of the paper, write your big goal. Then next to each day, write what the next right step will be for that day. Maybe it’s to write a book and each day is to write 1,000 words. Or it’s to run a marathon and each day is to follow your program without fail.
Recommendations to see the journeys of next right steps:
- Lincolns Virtues: An Ethical Biography by William Lee Miller
- The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company by Robert Iger
- The Measure of Our Lives by Toni Morrison
- Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead by General Jim Mattis
- 25 Hours A Day: Going One More to Get What You Want (story of Nick Bare, owner of Bare Performance Nutrition and bodybuilder turned Ironman)
- It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership by Colin Powell
- My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
1 From Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography by William Lee Miller, 2002, p.122