Small Or Nothing Thinking

You might be, or might know someone, who suffers from all or nothing thinking. They’re the type of person that makes a commitment and dives fully into the deep end. They commit to being healthier and set a goal to workout 5 days a week after missing months in the gym. They have an idea to start a new project and register it as a business and open a bank account, even before having basic conversations to really assess the market. 

Big, bold, fast action is a hallmark characteristic of high-performers. It’s critical to be able to step powerfully into an idea and turn it into action. But this mentality often comes at the cost of taking things on at a level that is unsustainable, leading to burnout or a fast regression when things become overwhelming or they aren’t getting results fast enough.

That’s why I want to propose an alternative called ‘Small Or Nothing Thinking’. It’s the best of both worlds - You’re still taking fast and immediate action when inspiration strikes, but now you’re doing it in a way that is manageable. ‘Small Or Nothing Thinking’ gets you focusing your efforts on things that help you make progress on your goals, but the demand is not so dramatic that it feels overwhelming.

I love the play on words because it outlines the polarity. Either you do it small, or you do nothing. That’s because an ‘All Or Nothing’ approach has two paths that most often lead to nothing. The first path is taking big action that flames out and doesn’t last, and the second path is that you never reach the threshold to take action and end up doing nothing about it. 

Here’s an example in my life of how this mindset has served me. I’m making some big requests and hustling in certain ways in my career right now, and fired up about it. There are some major partners I’m looking to lock down and collaborate with. I could have set a goal to reach out to one every day, which would be a 30 minute commitment… But that’s something that would likely flame out and lead to me no longer reaching out at all. Instead I have a cadence of reaching out to just one of those partners a week! Much more doable and designed for consistency.

Think about the goals and ambitions you have in your life, what efforts you’ve made to achieve them, and ways that oversubscribing in the past might not have been helpful. And instead, arrive at the smaller and slower pace that you can actually maintain for it, and commit to trying that.