How the ‘baby food method’ can help you accomplish your biggest goals

January filled our inboxes with productivity advice. Set stretch goals! Think bigger! Dream audaciously! What was conspicuously absent from all that exhortation was any practical guidance on how to move from grand vision to daily action without becoming paralyzed by the enormity of what we’ve committed to. 

And now, it’s February.

Here’s a counterintuitive truth I’ve learned from decades of navigating complex creative challenges: The secret to tackling big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAG) isn’t summoning more willpower or grinding harder. It’s learning to approach complexity the way babies learn to eat solid food: one tiny, digestible bite at a time.

I call it the Baby Food Method.

Why your brain rebels against big goals

When you declare a massive objective—launch a company, write a book, transform your organization’s culture—your brain doesn’t throw a parade. It throws up barriers! Neuroscience tells us that ambiguity and uncertainty trigger the same stress responses as physical threat. Your amygdala can’t distinguish between “I need to escape this predator” and “I have no idea how to execute this strategic pivot.”

This is why so many January resolutions collapse by February. The goal itself becomes a source of anxiety rather than motivation. The solution isn’t to dream smaller. It’s to digest smarter.

The Baby Food Principle

Think about how infants transition from liquid to solid food. No parent hands a six-month-old a steak and says, “Figure it out.” Instead, they puree single ingredients into smooth, manageable portions. Carrots become orange mush. Peas become green paste. One new taste at a time, until gradually the palate, and the digestive system, can handle increasing complexity.

Your audacious goals deserve the same graduated approach.

The Baby Food Method works in three stages: puree, introduce, and integrate.

Stage one: puree the complexity

Before you can act on a big goal, you need to break it down into its most fundamental components, the equivalent of pureeing that carrot. This isn’t the same as creating a project plan or building a Gantt chart. It’s more elemental than that.

Ask yourself: What are the irreducible units of this ambition? If your goal is to write a book, the puree might be capture one idea worth exploring. Not “write Chapter One.” Not even “outline the book.” Just: find one compelling thought and get it out of your head.

When I left a 16-year academic career to become an entrepreneur, I didn’t start by building a business plan. I started by having one conversation with someone who’d made a similar leap. One conversation. That was my puree.

Stage two: introduce new elements gradually

Babies don’t eat pureed carrots forever. Once they’ve mastered one food, they’re introduced to another. Then you start combining—carrots with sweet potato, apple with banana. The complexity builds incrementally, and each successful integration expands capacity for the next.

Apply this to your BHAG. Once you’ve captured that one idea, introduce the next element: Share it with someone whose perspective you trust. Then another: Test it against a real-world problem. Each small introduction builds your tolerance for the ambiguity that initially triggered resistance.

This is where I see leaders stumble most often. They puree beautifully, break their goal into components, and then they try to swallow everything at once! They mistake “understanding the pieces” for “being ready to execute them simultaneously.” Your nervous system doesn’t work that way. Neither does sustainable progress.

Stage three: integrate toward solid food

Eventually, a child graduates to actual table food. They’ve developed the motor skills, the digestive capacity, and the palate sophistication to handle complexity. The same progression applies to creative execution.

Integration means combining your mastered elements into increasingly ambitious iterations. That one conversation becomes five conversations, which reveal patterns, which suggest a framework, which informs a proposal, which shapes a pilot project. At no point do you face the full weight of “build a business.” You face only the next natural increment of what you’ve already proven you can handle.

A practical application

Here’s how the Baby Food Method might work for a common goal: transforming your team’s approach to innovation.

Puree: Host one 15-minute “what if” session with your team. No agenda beyond exploring one assumption you’ve never questioned.

Introduce: Add a second element, perhaps a “So what?” follow-up the next week, where you examine whether any of those “what ifs” have practical relevance.

Integrate: Combine the pattern into a monthly rhythm. Then invite a cross-functional colleague to join. Then pilot one small experiment that emerged from the discussions.

Twelve months from now, you may find you’ve built an innovation culture. And not because you announced “We’re becoming innovative!” but because you fed your organization one digestible bite at a time.

The gift of graduated ambition

The Baby Food Method isn’t about lowering your sights. It’s about respecting the neuroscience of how humans actually change. We don’t transform through declarations. We transform through accumulated micro-actions that gradually rewire what we believe we’re capable of.

Those early bites build what I call your inventory of courage. Each small success deposits evidence that you can handle complexity. When you eventually face the full weight of your audacious goal, you’re not starting from scratch. You’re drawing on months of proven capability.

So remember, don’t just set the big goal. Puree it. What’s the smallest, most digestible first bite you could take this week? Start there.

The steak can wait. The puree is where transformation begins.