Take Incremental Steps

When I was around sixteen years old, growing up in Detroit, my mother’s boyfriend for several years was a tugboat (also known as a towboat) captain. Since the job was unionized, my mother was always trying to interest me in this as a good long-term career prospect. I did not grow up in the sort of environment wherein I was meeting and being introduced to attorneys, doctors, and so forth as role models; instead, I was meeting machine operators, towboat captains, and the like.

My mother took me down to watch this man and his crew hooking up giant freighters to tow them out to the lakes and sometimes all the way out to sea. She used to talk about how I could get a journeyman’s card, working on these boats as a deck hand. Back then in Detroit, these sorts of jobs paid well, and people usually got them through people they knew. In fact, if you were from a middle-class family and got a job working on one of these boats in high school, you might seriously consider taking this job over going to college. You could make more money working on the boats as an 18-year-old than you might be making if you went to a decent college, graduated, and spent ten years working as a manager inside a big company.

These towboats typically towed freighters that were loaded with steel, coal, and so forth to River Rouge and to other factories along the Detroit River. Towing the loads back and forth was big business and it looked like a lot of fun. Towboats on the Great Lakes in Michigan will sometimes tow vessels that are as long as a football field down a river and out to the lake. In fact, these towboats are so large that on some of them the crew rides from one part of the boat to another on ATVs. The freighters are often enormously heavy, and the towboats muscle them along at a few miles per hour.

Years later, in thinking about the process that a towboat operator’s job entails, I realized that this method of work is a metaphor for really what makes job seekers, salespeople, and others successful in virtually any profession. In fact, a towboat can even be viewed as a metaphor for your entire career and life.

In order for a tugboat to haul a giant freighter, it needs to be attached by a huge steel cable to the freighter. These cables are so large and heavy that you probably could not lift them if you tried. The process I have observed wherein a tugboat was attached to the freighter is a simple one:

• First, the tugboat operator throws a thin rope to the crew of the freighter.
• Attached to the thin rope is a heavier rope that the freighter crew pulls onboard.
• Attached to the heavier rope is a still heavier rope that the freighter crew will pull onboard.
• Attached to this heavier rope is a thin cable that the freighter crew will pull onboard.
• Attached to the thin cable is another heavy cable that the freighter crew will pull onboard.
• Attached to the heavier cable is an even heavier cable that the freighter crew will pull onboard.
• Finally, the final cable (perhaps as thick as your arm) is attached to the freighter that is to be pulled down the river.

In order to accomplish something meaningful, to get a job, or to do anything, you need to drop softly into a comfort zone. You cannot simply lay down roots instantly and get the result you want without taking many small steps to get there. The towboat is only able to attach its cable because it is progressively using a rope, then a cable, then a larger cable, and so forth.

One of the most important things you can do to reach any goal you want, is to take very small, incremental steps and then build upon these. Setting up a routine, and making sure that you are approaching some target on an ongoing basis, ultimately ends up assisting you in reaching your goal.

For example, if you were interested in running a marathon you would not start out by running 15 miles one day, 23 the next day, and then running the marathon. Instead, you would first run half a mile the first day, and you would probably be exhausted from this. You might do this for an entire week and then start running a mile five days a week. Then you might gradually move up to three miles, then four, then five, and so on. You would move incrementally toward your goal, and as you became more and more proficient along the way, you would put yourself in a better position to get to where you wanted to end up. However, if you had tried to run 15 miles on the first day you might have gotten so discouraged that you would have never tried running again; that would have been the end of it.

Unfortunately, this is what most people do with their goals. So many goals and potential achievements are thrown away on the first try because people become incredibly frustrated when they do not reach their goal immediately. And then they simply give up. This is so common, it is difficult to believe. Your ability to move gradually toward a goal is something that can make a massive difference in your life and career.

In the recruiting realm, for example, one of the most difficult things for recruiters to do is to track down candidates by calling them on the phone. The approach that 99% of all recruiters use is calling people in response to a job for which they are recruiting. Most of the people that they are speaking with, they have never spoken to before. Most of the people they are calling on the phone end up being suspicious, defensive, and so forth when the recruiter calls. The recruiter gets rejected a lot and may get frustrated because he or she is not making placements, getting enough candidates, and so forth.

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