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Keep your ambition incremental
Goals in small steps
Harlan Coben calls it incremental ambition. His first goal was a book published by a real publisher. Next he wanted to walk past a bookstore and see it on the shelf, then a second book to show the first was not a fluke, then a living just big enough to get by. After that came one hour in the last slot of the New York Times list, number 15, and then the top 10, the top five, and number one.
Writing before the internet
Working before the internet helped. He had no idea how low-level he was in those days of paperback originals. Amazon today would have ranked him around number 1,347,000, but there was no Amazon and no internet to tell him, so he thought he was pretty hot with a book from a major publishing house.
That gave him a reason to keep going, and he believed he had the talent to make it as a writer.
Why do small goals keep people motivated?
Psychologist Clark Hull described the goal-gradient effect in 1932 after observing rats run faster as they neared food. In a 2006 study of coffee-shop loyalty cards, marketing researchers Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng found that customers bought coffee more often the closer they got to a free one. In the same study, a card that came with two stamps already filled in was completed faster than a blank card requiring the same number of purchases.
How do people judge their own success?
Psychologist Leon Festinger proposed social comparison theory in 1954. It holds that when no objective measure exists, people judge their abilities by comparing themselves with others, especially similar others. Amazon opened as an online bookstore in 1995, and sales ranks became a regular feature of its book pages.
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