Reaching any goal calls for the step-by-step method. Whoever is determined to achieve great things learns that the stairs of progress are climbed one at a time. A house is built one brick at a time. A championship is won one match at a time. A great store grows one new customer at a time. Every great success is made up of a long series of small ones.

The well-known writer Eric Sevareid once wrote, in Reader’s Digest (April 1957), that the best advice he ever received was the principle of “the next mile.”

When I changed my work and set out to write a quarter-million-word book, I could not summon the strength to think about the whole project at once. I nearly gave up the deepest pride of my craft. So I tried to think only of the next paragraph — not the next page, not the next chapter. For six months I did nothing but think of the next paragraph, and the book wrote itself.

“Years ago I wrote short daily pieces to be read on the radio. By now they number more than two thousand. Had someone asked me then to sign a contract for two thousand pieces, I would surely have refused — the sheer size of it would have overwhelmed me. But I was asked for only one. Then one more. And that is how the total grew to what it is today.”

The step-by-step method is the most sensible way to reach any goal. A formula I once heard for giving up smoking — one that helped my friends even more than it helped me — is what I call the ‘hour-by-hour’ method. To reach the ultimate goal of being free of the habit and never smoking again, a person simply decides not to smoke for the coming hour. When the hour passes, they extend the decision to the next hour. As the craving fades, the span stretches to two hours, then to a full day, until at last the goal is reached. Those who try to break the habit all at once usually fail, unable to bear the strain. An hour is easy; forever is hard.

— David J. Schwartz, “The Magic of Thinking Big”