Millestones

A lot of smart people will tell you that the way to accomplish a daunting task you have set your mind on, be it writing a book, finishing a redesign of your website, running a marathon or changing some aspect of your life, is to keep your eyes on the goal and take it one step at the time.

Humans are driven by emotions, and the feeling that nothing is being accomplished is one of the nastiest moral-breakers of all. Especially if you look ahead at something that requires months or years of effort. The trick of getting around this is to split the humongous task we have before us into smaller tasks and take it one step at the time.

This is nothing new, all project management tecniques work with some sort of a milestone system, very smart people like Tom Peters make a great case about how milestones can be used.

However, the best example I have ever seen of how milestones can be a life-saver, literally, is the movie Touching the Void, as Imdb puts it “The true story of two climbers and their perilous journey up the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985″. Besides the amazing story and will of the two look at the movie from the point of view of milestones. One of them measured his milestones in meters, as he inched down from the mountain.

Same happens in a marathon, you set your mind to get to the next bend, one more kilometer, a few more steps. If you think that you still have 30km to go, you have the real chance of your moral letting you down. In the same time, you need to know why you are running one more kilometer, and that is to be closer to the finish.

For me the story in Touching the Void is the best, real-life example of milestones used to get an unthinkably difficult task finished.