If you actually want to complete your goals this year, you have become addicted to doing hard tasks. The easiest method to become addicted to doing hard tasks is called, "breadcrumbing."

What is breadcrumbing?

You might have heard about breadcrumbing in relationships. If not, it’s a manipulation tactic where one person leads the other person on by giving them just enough attention to keep them interested and hoping for more, but not enough attention to make them feel loved and secure. The victim becomes starved of love and affection and easily gets addicted to the little crumbs of attention the manipulator does show them.

Breadcrumbing in goals is pretty much the same. You do tiny little tasks every day to reach your goal, creating a trail of breadcrumbs to follow to success. You do just enough to keep you heading in the right direction, but not so much that you wear yourself out and quit. 

Why breadcrumb? 

Just like breadcrumbing in relationships gets the victim addicted to chasing the manipulator, breadcrumbing your goals will get you addicted to chasing your goals and actually completing them. After every task you complete, you get a little hit of dopamine. When you complete tasks every day, you train your brain to crave that dopamine like a junkie. In this way, you create a goal chasing habit. As the habit becomes stronger, chasing your goal requires less effort, which allows you to do bigger and bigger tasks as time goes on.

So now you might be saying no, I don't want to start small, I want to give my goals my all. I want to eat ALL of my bread NOW. Well good luck with that, because what would happen if you ate a whole loaf of bread in one bite? You would choke and die. And every day, just like that, people bite off more of their dreams than they can chew, and they choke, and their dreams die. 

So you have to breadcrumb to an extent no matter what your goal is. If your goal is to get a job, you can’t just magically have a job. At the very least, you have to find a job listing, apply to it, and do an interview. Those are 3 chunks of bread right there, not a whole loaf. 

Another reason to breadcrumb is that breadcrumbing creates a path that you can follow to your goal. Going after your goals without breadcrumbing is like going into the woods without a map; you’re bound to get lost and quit. The breadcrumbing process creates a list of steps, or “breadcrumbs” to follow to reach your goals.  

How to breadcrumb your goals?

There’s only two steps to breadcrumbing your goals: (1) breaking your goals into tiny crumbs and then (2) dropping your bread crumbs. 

So to start breaking your goals into tiny crumbs, write your goal on a sheet of paper. This is your loaf of bread. Then break that goal into smaller chunks. And break those chunks into smaller chunks. Now break those smaller chunks into even smaller chunks. Go on and on until you have tiny little crumbs. Keep these crumbs and chunks on a list that you keep on you at all times. You can call your list your little bag of crumbs.

Once you have your little bag of crumbs, all you have to do is drop one crumb per day by completing one task per day. Now here’s the key to breadcrumbing: you have to do it every day. If you don’t leave enough breadcrumbs, you’ll lose the trail. Maybe you can miss a day here and there, but if you miss a month, you’re lost in the woods and have to start a whole new trail again. 

If that sounds hard, don’t worry: breadcrumbing is actually the easiest way to reach your goals. It’s easy for this reason: the size of your breadcrumbs can be stupidly tiny. 

Let’s say your goal is to get a job. 3 large chunks of bread we could break that goal into would be to find a job listing, apply to it, and do an interview. But each of those chunks is still pretty huge. So, we break them down even more. For example, you can break the “apply to it” chunk into “make a resume” and “fill out the application questions”. You can break down “make a resume” into “listing your previous jobs” and “writing the experience you gained for each job”. You can break “listing your previous jobs” down into “listing 1 job at a time”. And maybe that’s as tiny as you broke your crumbs down when you first planned your breadcrumbs. 

But maybe you had a bad day, and you find yourself not wanting to drop any of your breadcrumbs for the day. Even listing 1 job feels too difficult. Break that crumb down until it is so tiny, you feel like you can do it, even if it feels so small it’s stupid. For example, some stupidly tiny breadcrumbs would be “turn on the computer”, “open your word processor”, “make a resume document”, name the document “My Resume”. You get the picture. It’s better to leave a stupidly tiny breadcrumb than no bread crumb at all.

Every day, do as many breadcrumbs as you feel you can do. Do some chunks if you feel like it. But if not, don’t worry, all you need is a tiny crumb, and your trail will still be there.

As you get used to leaving breadcrumbs, completing the tasks becomes easier and easier, and you’ll find that the size of the breadcrumbs you’re able to leave every day gets bigger and bigger. 

Although the breadcrumb process might seem slow, it’s actually one of the fastest ways to success because the likelihood of you giving up and having to start again is much lower than if you make yourself start with larger tasks like applying to 20 jobs. Making the tasks smaller and more specific decreases the amount of effort you have to put into making yourself do the tasks and makes it far more likely you’ll stick to them for a longer time period. 

So let’s get this bread, one crumb at a time. 

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