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My son and I were talking about grades recently (since the semester recently ended) and I mentioned that I thought he could get A’s. “That would require long-term focus”, he said. I agreed with him at the time, but then got to thinking about it a little more. While he’s right that it requires focus, it doesn’t really require long-term focus or focusing on the overall goal. Instead, it’s a matter of just doing a bunch of little things, one after the other. For someone who has great difficulty focusing (on anything!) for very long, this is pretty reassuring.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

I used to play the clarinet in junior high, and was ranked very low in the band. If you’re not familiar with how that goes, people in band play some music for the director at the start of the year, and the director ranks them in order of how well they play. If they want to move up and get a better part, they have to challenge the person above them. There’s a little competition basically, and the person who plays best gets (or keeps) the better seat.

Now I wasn’t a very good clarinet player. In fact I was thirteenth chair, out of fourteen. If I remember right, the fourteenth chair even challenged me and won. Parts for the low-ranking clarinet players are very…boring. So I decided that I wanted to be first chair.

But I sucked. Sucked as in, I wouldn’t have made the band at all if they weren’t required to accept everyone. And I hated practicing. I squeaked all the time. Painful, embarrassing squeaks that hurt my ears. It’s pretty bad when you can’t stand to hear yourself play because you spend the whole time wincing and feeling stupid.

So the first thing I had to do was convince myself to practice. I told the director I wanted to prepare a challenge, and got the music. I REALLY hated practicing, so at first I just played a couple of bars before stopping. That’s like less than a minute of practice. Eventually though, I could play those two bars without screwing up. So I went a little further, until after quite a while I could play the whole piece nicely.

Then I challenged the person above me. And I won! I was so excited to move up a chair. Rinse and repeat (with occasional setbacks) until finally I was second chair. I went to challenge the first chair, and was told “uh, but you can’t, there’s only one week of school left, and they have to have a week to prepare”. And I was shocked. Only one week of school left! How did that happen?

Without even realizing it, I’d been so…focused…on one tiny, itty-bitty little thing at a time that I didn’t even notice the passage of time.

So while I didn’t technically achieve my goal of being first chair, I know that given another week I would have. As a consolation, I entered in a regional competition and got a perfect score on an extremely hard piece. This from the person who 9 months earlier couldn’t even play “Are You Sleeping?” in a form anyone would recognize between painful squeaks.

Now I don’t play the clarinet anymore, but that’s a lesson that I’ll never forget. Big, impossible-seeming goals CAN be achieved, WITHOUT long-term, conscious focus on the big picture, IF you just do one tiny little thing at a time. Even if the longest you can stand to do the tiny thing for is a minute at first.

All you need is a plan, enough time, and the commitment to do the tiny little things one after the other. Replacing “focus” with “determination” does it for me.

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