Defining Daily Goals Starts with Finding the Minimum Viable Change (MVC)
I’m a firm believer that defining a daily goal is the key to achieving all difficult goals. The biggest mistake anyone can make in pursuit of a difficult goal is trying to become an overnight success. Overnight successes do happen, but they are the exception not the rule. Therefore, it’s best to pursue goals with patience and consistency.
This is the purpose of setting a daily goal. It forces you into the right mindset. Daily goals facilitate daily wins. Daily wins drive motivation. When motivated, you keep pushing towards achieving more goals. As a result, this process becomes self-sustaining.
Fortunately and unfortunately the hardest part of the daily goal setting process is defining your daily goal. It’s fortunate because you only need to define your daily goal once. It’s unfortunate because finding the right goals to achieve everyday is hard. However, I do have an idea to help.
Find Daily Goals with the Minimum Viable Change (MVC) Concept
Stealing a concept from the business and software engineering world can help you find your daily goal. This concept is called the Minimum Viable Change or MVC.
Basically, a MVC is the smallest possible change that can be made while still making a difference. This change must have at least three characteristics:
- Easy to implement
- Impactful in some type of visible or measurable way
- Builds momentum
For example, last year I set a goal to write a book to help parents and young athletes. To get there I defined my daily goal to write in this blog everyday. I knew not many people would read my blog at first, but that didn’t matter on day one.
- I knew my daily goal would force me to stay consistent and eventually I would find a voice.
- Once I found a voice, my writing would improve.
- As my writing improved, people would start reading my blog more.
- Getting more readers would then turn into people to share and subscribe to my Facebook page.
- By maintaining trust with integrity, relevance, insightfulness, and generosity, my audience then would grow.
- With the growth of that audience, I would then have the momentum needed to support publishing a book.
This daily goal met all three of the characteristics for a MVC. Starting a blog with WordPress is super easy. Publishing a blog every day is measurable in an impactful way since you can track traffic and subscribers. Lastly, momentum builds as writing articles each day drives more subscribers, which drives more shares, which drives more subscribers.
This is an example anyone can follow and apply to other areas of life. The path to a daily goal starts with just sitting down and taking time to find the MVC relevant to pursuing the long term / difficult goal.
If you are interested in getting help with this process in a series of one on one virtual coaching sessions, please contact me here.