Seemingly small steps, changing one project at a time, create momentum. Social scientists have argued that a strategy of “small wins”—making quick, opportunistic, tangible gambits only modestly related to a desired outcome—is in many instances the most effective way of tackling big problems. Part of the reason small wins can produce much bigger results than a grand strategy is psychological: Defining a problem as “big and serious” can make us feel frustrated and helpless and therefore can elicit a less creative (or more habitual) response. We become paralyzed. We make the wrong move just to change. When we see change as requiring “big, bold strokes,” we amplify our fear of it; we overcome this fear by putting one foot in front of the other, in a series of safer steps.

Small wins are also great ways to learn and to enlist supporters. Negotiating both a good fee and mostly remote work on her first consulting contract, for example, helped Susan discard barriers and discover resources that were invisible to her before. One small win in itself may not seem like much; a series of them increases the likelihood of serious change by setting in motion a dynamic that favors a next step and makes the next solvable problem more visible.

As you’re wondering through the fog, you use the compass as you take a series of iterative steps toward having all three elements come together into One Big Thing.

And that is a key phrase: “iterative steps.”

The people in this study surprised me with the extent to which their lives were so often unplanned. Their lives were organic, unfolding, iterative, adaptive. They were like explorers adventuring into a vast unmapped territory, making discoveries and adapting a to whatever they hit along the way. Culling through tens of thousands of documents on the people in this study, I was continually struck by how their lives went down paths and ended up in places that they never expected. The path out of the fog lies in a series of small steps, a highly iterative, often unplanned approach that I think of as simplex stepping through life. And it is to this idea of simplex stepping that we now turn.

8. Simplex Stepping

The term “simplex stepping” is inspired by a concept from a professor on my college campus named George Dantzig. It made a big impression on me when I first learned about it in a mathematical sciences course. It wasn’t the math mechanics that caught my attention, but the sheer elegant beauty of Dantzig’s seminal insight and what struck me as its philosophical implications.

Consider the following challenge: You want to find an optimal outcome to a huge complex problem that has many variables; furthermore, each variable has many possible values. One approach might be to calculate every possible permutation of the mix of values and then select its best result. But suppose there are too many possibilities for even the most powerful computer to process them all. How could you find an optimal result? Dantzig showed that it is possible to move in an iterative series of small steps that will lead you to an optimal outcome without ever needing to calculate the total set of possibilities. His approach proved reliable, and it revolutionized optimization. He called it the “simplex algorithm

Across the study, we can extract a more general pattern: When lost in the fog, simply take what looks like the next best step. Not a big step, but a small step. Then reassess, step again, reassess, step again, reassess, step again. Keep moving in steps. And one day, the fog will begin to lift and the cumulative effect of all those steps will become clear.

The lives in our study show the great utility of moving in small steps when otherwise befuddled and uncertain. You don’t need to have the answers for what to do with the rest of your life. You just need to begin simplex stepping. You might get a long way down the road before you even know where you are going.

This study shows that there are fog phases of life and there are clarity phases of life. In the fog phases, we see simplex stepping as a highly functional method of navigation. In the clarity phases, we continue to see simplex stepping at work, but we also see more big decisions and life commitments. In both phases, we have action and movement, not just sitting in a room and contemplating.