psychology
Undisciplined? With the Seinfeld strategy, you can still achieve your goals well
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Pursuing a goal is often not easy, especially when it requires patience and perseverance. However, the Seinfeld strategy can support us in this.
We certainly don’t all necessarily need a very clear life plan that tells us what we want to have achieved when and where exactly we want to end up at a certain point in time. Maintaining a certain flexibility and improvising step by step is fine for many people. But a few specific resolutions and goals are usually not bad for us, because without them we may feel lost and disoriented. Whether it’s our closet we want to clean out, our relationship with our brother we want to improve, the language we want to learn, or a professional development we’re striving for: by finding goals that work for us When we are meaningful, we give purpose to our lives in some way, and that can be very positive for us (you can read more about this in our article Purpose in Life: What happens when you find your purpose in life). Or our goals have an immediate positive effect on our health: For example, smoke less, do more or less exercise, eat healthier or more intuitively and the like – after all, almost all of us have some kind of habits that harm us.
It’s only depressing when we don’t achieve our goals – especially when we try and try again and fail every time. And especially when they’re really, really, really important to us.
Seinfeld Strategy: Don’t break the chain
If this has happened to us before, maybe we could try the Seinfeld strategy next time. It is named after American actor and comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who he claims was instrumental in the strategy’s success. (For the youngsters or those less interested in comedy, his sitcom Seinfeld was a smash hit in the US in the 1990s). Although the artist did not invent the strategy, it still bears his name, which owes its prominence to it. So how does the Seinfeld strategy work?
Jerry Seinfeld’s goal was to script a sitcom, so he committed to writing for (at least) an hour every day. Every day that he stuck to this resolution, he drew a cross with a red felt-tip pen on a wall calendar that he hung in a prominent place in his apartment. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Lifehacker magazine quoted the actor as saying. “Just keep at it and the chain will get longer every day. You’ll see that chain, especially after you’ve lasted a few weeks. Your only job then is not to let the chain break.”
So that means:
- Get a wall calendar
- Hang up the wall calendar
- start moving toward the goal
- draw a cross on every successful day
- Continue chain until the goal is reached
Of course, we must first think about what continuous action we can take to achieve our goal. When cleaning out the closet, for example, it could consist of sorting out one item every day. To improve relationship with our brother, we could communicate with him every day. Learning a language – practice ten minutes every day. And so forth. Long-term goals or positive changes in our way of life are usually best achieved in small steps, through continuity and familiarization, with patience and perseverance. The Seinfeld strategy is suitable for such goals, which also goes by the motto Don’t break the chain (don’t let the chain break) is linked.
How does the Seinfeld strategy work?
The strategy sounds suspiciously simple, but that doesn’t make it bad. On the contrary, it can work very well for many people and in relation to various goals, because it gives us something very powerful and inspiring on our long, arduous journey: an awareness of every small step forward. And a feeling of happiness associated with it. We feel pride and joy in every cross we make, as well as in every look at our chain. This strengthens our motivation – as well as the thought of having to start all over again if there is a hole in the chain (although an occasional hole is no reason to give up the chain completely, sometimes something just gets in the way).
As corny as it sounds, in the end most of our goals are about the path we travel before we get there. Ultimately, we celebrate and celebrate this journey with the Seinfeld strategy, so there’s little harm in trying it out at least once.
Sources used: impulse.de, lifehacker.com