Jerry Seinfeld, one of the most successful comedians of all time, is famous for his long-running sitcom Seinfeld. The success reflects in his peak earnings of $267 million in 1998. Yes, a comedian, last century, hundreds of millions in one year! His secret?

Years later, in 2008, a young comedian Brad Isaac asked Seinfeld for some advice on how to be a great comic. First, Seinfeld told him, “The way to be a better comic was to create better jokes, and the way to create better jokes was to write every day.” But then he shared his gem. In his Lifehacker interview, Isaac tells…

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red ”X” over that day. "After a few days, you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

If you notice, Seinfeld did not say a word about the results as a comedian or the research that goes into writing. His calendar system was so simple that there was no reason to skip it, and best of all, the days of low motivation had no place in his equation. He made it all about the streak of crosses on the calendar.

Small wins are how habits work. Seinfeld made his goal so small that his brain associated his daily crosses on the calendar with a sense of achievement that released the reward hormones, and got him hooked to doing it again. If he had set a hard goal like writing 10 pages per day, especially in the beginning, his brain would have associated writing with pain and given him a tempting reason to not do it the next time.

Your daily goal should be a small win. Really small! Know your limits, set your daily goal, and give it all you got. Do you need to do it every day? No, but daily repetition increases the chances of making it a habit. But in the end, it is all about doing what you commit to, be it just 20 minutes of exercise or 1 hour of studying. You can do it on alternate days as well, but do not break your commitment. And here is a word of caution: No matter how good you feel, DO NOT do more than your daily target, at least in the beginning, else you are likely to skip it the next time.

Seinfeld probably wrote thousands of jokes for his 180-episode series. These numbers might make even a veteran give up, but since Seinfeld made it all about the small win of writing a few lines every day, there was no stopping. The same is the case with how we look at our goals.

No denying that you need to measure your progress against the long-term goal occasionally, but if you do it all the time you are bound to feel anxious because all your effort will seem negligible in front of the bigger goal. It’s like a toddler worrying about running a marathon while still learning to walk. The marathon goal is fine but comparing daily progress against it will make all the progress seem worthless. Demotivated, the baby might even give up on learning to walk itself.

Don’t be such a marathon baby!