The Power of Small Wins — How Small Wins Can Lead to Massive Growth in Your Life
In our journey towards big goals in life, it is important to understand the significance of incremental progress and small wins when it comes to achieving big results.
However, in this society in general, we are tuned to celebrate big wins. Often big wins are highlighted and celebrated on social media and our inner circle of friends and family that makes us think that we are not doing enough to achieve our goals since we are “not there” yet.
What often gets neglected is a thousand small steps taken daily to bring us closer to the bigger goal. For instance, people are often seen to celebrate buying a new car, moving to a bigger house, or landing that dream job.
However, no one posts about the little savings set aside to purchase that new car or house for years. Or the countless hours spent on training and upgrading their skills to qualify for that dream position.
This can make us neglect the importance of small wins. Small wins is any action that brings us closer to our goal. It can be anything such as reading the first two pages of your book or making one sales call at a time.
When you take a small action, it puts you in direction of achieving that bigger goal. By breaking huge goals into incremental small steps, the goal becomes approachable and doable. However, if we focus on jumping right to the last step and attaining that desired result, we can become engulfed in the sea of self-doubt and give up on achieving that goal entirely.
Take losing weight for example. It looks desirable to just shed 10 kg and become slim and smart in a few days of going to the gym but to be able to do that you first need to focus on the daily calories and exercise performed daily. You begin shedding your weight 1 kg at a time and not the entire 10 kg all at once.
When setting big goals, it is important to focus on the first baby steps in front of us. By focusing on what is doable and celebrating small wins along the way, we can be on the way to massive growth.
In her Ted Talk, “To Achieve Success, Start Detecting Your Small Wins”, Mehrnaz Bassiri talks about small wins among other ideas such as weighing our achievements on human-sized scales.
She highlights the importance of small wins by mentioning the theory from organizational theorist and psychologist Karl Weick, “Small wins have transformational power. Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion to favor another small win and another small win until the combination of these small wins leads to larger and greater accomplishments.”
What does that mean? That means that real progress is a combination of daily small steps. It means that doing a daily workout can lead to losing that 10kg. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
Mehrnaz Bassiri also talks about weighing our achievements on human-sized scales. We often measure our success by looking at other people’s end results whereas we might be on the first few steps of our journey. And even in the first few steps, we often compare ourselves with our end target and feel the amount of work done by us to be insignificant.
Therefore it is vital for our growth journey to measure our progress on human-sized scales and change our perspective from focusing on the big wins to taking notice of small steps and celebrating it along the way to keep us motivated and targeted on our goal.
In this article, we have learned about the power of progress and small wins with respect to making big changes in our lives. Hope this article helps you in your own journey towards transformational results.
Remember nothing gets done overnight. It may take days, months, or even years to achieve a goal. However with small steps and celebrating your progress along the way you are closer to your goals than the day before.
