I was sitting in a nail spa in Tallahassee, getting ready for my Department of Defense Worldwide Conference in Atlanta, and while getting "million dollar red" on my tootsie nails, I was half-watching a swimming meet in Rome. 
One of the U.S. women won an event (smashing a world record); when an interviewer asked what she had done to improve so much, she said she had worked on the "little things" like her turns. Just concentrating on small pieces of the bigger whole had helped her improve so much she obliterated the current record.
I’ve written about Kaizen many times – and while I logically understand the truisms about small steps, my emotional self wants results NOW! I’m wondering how other people make small strides, without abandoning them after a week in favor of going for the gold in big (un-Kaizen-ish) ways.
If you’ve solved this problem, leave a comment. I would really like to find a way to rein in this "must do it all now" monster.
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I think, like a lot of philosophies or remedies, if you are looking for Kaizen, you will find it. But you and I are not a Toyotas. Life on Earth, including you and me, has evolved and continues to do battle with other life forms, including disease and other people. Your life pattern will not resemble that of a long-term engineering project. Instead we will all face chaos, ups, downs, the loss of those around us and finally our own demise.
The must do it now monster is part of your evolutionary heritage. It’s linked to depression. That is to say, not ‘bad depression’, such as a clinical type, which is caused by a medical abnormality but the part of the brain that tells you something is wrong and you must act. 100,000 years ago, that could save your life and no need for language to work it out. But now you have TV, you can clearly see that your mud hut is not only smaller than the one that belongs to your neighbour, you can see that your dwelling is significantly smaller than lots of people and they have been to all sorts of exciting places and seen the World and have beautiful children and now you are judging yourself against all the best things achieved and witnessed by an arrangement of people who you will mainly just see on TV.
Clearly that is unrealistic but it is the instinct you are dealing with. Does that help with perspective?
Nice article. The idea of small, but continual, improvements is one that many businesses seem to have forgotten especially web based entities. Most of them seem to be looking that ‘big hit’ that makes them money fast – unfortunately, this very rarely happens and isn’t sustainable. Better to do it the slow but steady way.