Adam Harder – @CoachAdamHarder
Let’s start with a scenario for you all to help you understand this. Let’s say you haven’t washed your car all winter—like I have failed to do—the inside has trash and dirt mixed with spilt coffee and the outside isn’t any better. It has salt from the road built up, the rims are now just as black as the tires from the dirt and you can barely see out of either windshield. The car needs some love right? It may seem (if you’re like me and usually keep a clean car) as if cleaning the car is going to take forever. You start focusing on the big picture, instead of taking on the small things one at a time that are going to make the car look better. For example: taking the trash out, shaking out the mats/rugs, and cleaning the windshield and tires. All those little things make the car look better, but they don’t have to be tackled all at the same time.
Now, as a former athlete and a current coach, I can definitively say, no one likes to practice the little details of getting a move down. It’s all about the big picture. Steph Curry didn’t become the best shooter in the league by just starting to shoot. He perfected every little part of his shot to where it became muscle memory and he no longer had to think about doing it.
Something I say every day now to my team is, “The little things make up the big things you are trying to do.” This holds true for anything you do in life. Whether you are striving to hit 405 on bench, or you are trying to figure out how to budget your family’s money. Start with getting the small things down and it is going to make a huge impact. Maybe you need to learn to stay tight on your bench, or maybe you need to just start tracking your expenses. Those are very little things in the overall goals I just mentioned, but once you start doing those right, you will see improvements. Then other small things will come up and need to be fixed, but you can’t just fix the big picture without fixing the small details first.
What I have found to be most effective, is to identify the weak spot I have and actively think while I’m doing it on how to fix the problem, and every day you can get a little bit better. Eventually, without you knowing, whatever you have been thinking about will either become a habit or it will be so engrained in you that it just becomes muscle memory, you won’t have to think about it any longer. This isn’t the end, however, because then you should be finding another weak spot and fixing that. You will continue to improve in all aspects of life and training when you strengthen all the little weaknesses that add up to improving on your big goals.
And that my friends, is why the little things matter so much!
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