How could you build incremental power for yourself?

Whether you’re excited about a big interview, big article, big promotion, big client, big sale, or big launch, here’s some perspective to keep in mind.

This one big thing isn’t going to be the game changer for your career.

That’s not how big things work. Not anymore. We no longer live in a world where one isolated achievement changes everything for anyone. There are too many channels. too much noise and not enough eyeballs for any one threshold moment to suddenly and rapidly change the state of the system.

Carson, many say the best late night host of all time, had a rare but long standing tradition of offering comedians a seat on his couch after their performance. This one moment instantly changed those people’s lives.

Seinfeld joked that it was like the pope blessing you.

Overnight, those artists would go from a lowly feature acts to taking real meetings with networks and agencies and managers. Getting invited onto that couch was the inflection point of their professional lives.

But today it’s quite different. Appearing on a show is still a momentous occasion for any artist, but it’s not guaranteed to create the tsunami effect for their brand like it used to. It’s certainly possible that the artist can leverage a single moment into next level results for their career, but the more common experience with these big things is that they serve as milestones to commemorate all the little things someone has already been doing every day.

That’s what becomes the game changer for your career. Being an incrementalist. Progressing shovelful by shovelful each time you do your work. Trusting that there are no big breaks, only the accumulation of small breaks.

Reminds me of projects from my career as a corporate trainer. At the top of my dream client list were several organizations that, according to many of my peers, were game changers. Brass rings. Gateway drugs to a career high. All you had to do was get in good with them, and you were set for life.

Can you imagine how my workaholic brain internalized that line of bullshit? Count me in.

And so, I spent years nurturing those relationships, doing great work for these companies that were apparently going sing my praises and pave the streets of my career with gold.

As you might guess, that didn’t happen. Those companies did become clients of mine, but they weren’t game changers. They were milestones that signaled to me how I had already changed the game myself.

Do you need one big thing, or a thousand little things?