Sufiya Sufi is a mind-blowing Indian runner who has three World records to her name. These include Fastest Female runner from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, Indian Golden Quadrilateral (6000 KM) Running Challenge, Himalayan Ultra Running Challenge (Manali to Leh), and the Siachen-Kargil Running Challenge. The most surprising part is that she doesn’t come from any athletic background.
How does she attain insurmountable goals?
Covering these great distances appears an inhuman task. It is natural to think that to traverse and to achieve such a milestone, you need to be born with crazy genes. Sufiya shares a very simple mindset in how she has gone about achieving her goals.
She breaks them down into very simple, measurable targets like light poles.
A run of 42 km, which is a full marathon distance, is incredibly long. For an average runner, it can take anywhere from 4 to 6 hours of running without injuries. The finish line is a long way out and the terrain varies through the distance. Contrast this with a 100m race where everything from the track, distance, competition is ultra visible.
Long runs are games of endurance. Much like our careers. 🙂
I like Sufiya’s approach of small steps. Instead of being fixated on the finish line, she focuses on what the best target in front of her. If that so happens to be a traffic light, so be it. What’s the parallel we draw with her approach?
We have setup ambitious goals for our careers.
This includes titles, revenue targets, product launches, or awards. Targets are good but the trouble is that we don’t have a clear path towards those. The meaningful ones are not a 100m race but instead like one of Sufiya’s long-distance runs.
Instead of shooting for that huge goal, I recommend that you break it down into these smaller targets.
Let’s say, you want to improve the efficiency of your product by 30%. This is achievable after a fair amount of trials and tribulations. Complex projects don’t present a clear picture (and hence, the complexity). Quite likely, when you start working on ambitious targets, you may not get initial success leading to demotivation. Here’s how we go about these situations:
Ask yourself, what is it that could get me 1% improvement?
That’s an incremental goal. Let’s attain that and then shoot for the next 1% level of improvement. Why will this work?
You are racking up some basic momentum, some initial wins.
If you add up these tiny wins, that can take you to this much larger target. This is how long-term investment works where you use SIPs to achieve your target. The same principle applies here.
To sum it up:
- Break your target into small steps
- Take action to rack up early wins
- Leverage the momentum to reach your much bigger goals.
To learn more about Sufiya, watch my podcast episode with her (it’s in Hindi).