Sometimes when we go through life and face a big obstacle – one far bigger and scarier than any obstacle that we have previously faced – we just stand there frozen, stunned, at the sheer enormity of the problem. And we just find ourselves stuck, unable to move on.

Sometimes, seemingly insurmountable obstacles appear out of nowhere.

What do we do when the problem is so big that it just seems impossible to overcome?

Early on in Warren Buffet’s life, he found this book that was aptly titled “1000 Ways To Make $1000″. Through the entrepreneurial eyes of young Warren, he saw a an enormous treasure trove inside that one book. It was his key to achieving his goal of becoming a millionaire by age 35 – to break up that seemingly enormous task into small baby steps, and to work towards that million a $1000 at a time.

The rest was history, and needless to say, Warren Buffet already achieved his millionaire dream well before he was 35.

Personally, I’ve also found that splitting a seemingly unsolvable problem into tons of tiny little baby steps helps enormously.

Last year I remember staying up all night with a team member of mine to complete a written assignment for my Organizational Behaviour class. It was an important report, and it would seriously impact our final grade, but what happened was that our group couldn’t decide on some issues and we made the bad call of procrastinating to complete the project.

So there I was, with one team member, staying up the whole night to complete that report that was due the very next day, at 8:30am sharp. It was tiring work, but we managed to work through the whole night, toiling and toiling, both working on our separate parts of the project. At 7am, we were done. We were so overjoyed and we were ready to send the project to our friend who stayed off-campus to print and bring to school, as I didn’t have a printer in my room then.

Then as I put the two parts of our project together, we came to the shocking realization that our report was somehow 500 words longer than the prescribed word limit. We had counted our respective parts earlier and were sure that when put together, the combined report would be just slightly over 3000 words, just slightly over the prescribed limit.

We were shocked aghast as the word count of 3500 words on the combined report glared evilly at us.

We had 500 words to cut from an already lean report that we spent all night trimming and revising, and only half an hour to do it, before our friend had to leave from her house to make it to school on time.

The clock was ticking. Tick tock, tick tock.

My partner panicked. “How are we going to finish this!” she exclaimed and grabbed her head in pure frustration.

I had to think fast, or it was going to be a late submission for sure.

“Calm down. 500 words is just 25 words a page in this 20 page document. Let’s not panic and just focus on cutting down 25 words a page, alright?” I said.

Tick tock, tick tock.

We went through the already lean document with the meticulous eye of an old newspaper editor, removing every last redundant word on each page.

“Just 25 words a page, just 25 words a page,“ we kept telling ourselves as we cut, and trimmed and paraphrased to no end.

At 7:28am, we were down to 2012 words. In about 28 minutes of focused trimming and working at the problem one page at a time, we managed to trim 500 words off the already lean report. We managed to submit it on time and we lived happily ever after.

And that was just all thanks to splitting that seemingly impossible task into bite size pieces which we were able to take on.

I want to achieve my millionaire dream too, and I’m going to just keep working towards it, a $1000 at a time.