How You Can Leverage Your Brains Reward System to Get Stuff Done

Fear and ego have a deceptive trick to keep themselves safe.

When it comes to a goal, something vital to us, they tell us it is impossible — so why even bother?

Fear/ego focus only on the outcome, not the process, and this is where we get stuck. The outcome seems too big, too daunting — it’s too big a risk.

But — the brain has a nifty little trick that, once we are aware of, we can utilize to make the “insurmountable” attainable.

We can work around the ego.

When I first decided to conquer my fear of public speaking (I was in prison when I made this goal), the biggest stage I could think of was the TED stage.

And it scared the absolute crap out of me.

Brene Brown, Sir Ken Robinson, people with 10’s of millions of views — and something important to say.

Who the hell was I to think I could share a stage with them? What could I possibly talk about?

It was too big, too scary, too much.

How do you build the Great Wall of China? One stone at a time.

I broke it down to the 1st smallest step I could take.

When I got out of prison, I Googled “public speaking.”

That was step 1.

2 — Researching the search results.

3 — Committing to attending a meeting.

4 — Volunteering to speak at the meeting.

Step after step, all the way to the TEDx stage.

I don’t know how many steps I took, nor does it matter. What matters is taking each step.

What matters is who we become on the way to our goal. The process is the reward.

When we break things down into the next smallest step, commit to taking that step, execute the step, and celebrate the step — our brain rewards us:

Dopamine. A pleasure hormone

Our brain wants us to succeed; otherwise, why would it give us pleasure?

Next time you have a massive goal you want to achieve, break it down into the next smallest step — and keep doing this…