Small Wins

It is easy to normalize the small things that happen every day.

Like deciding to go for a walk instead of watching a TV show, or waking up and exercising instead of checking Facebook or your email. These are small decisions that don’t make a big difference. There is no novelty and no shouts of praise from the people around you.

When you look back at your week, and think “what was remarkable about this week?” We start to look for novelty. We look for something different that happened, something that surprised us, and usually something that happened to us, that we didn’t expect.

The small almost unnoticeable positive events don’t register. We don’t think about them five days later. We don’t bask in the glory of these small decisions. But without these small wins, there will never be the big wins that we crave.

The big wins that you want, promotions, new clients, or whatever it is for you, only come from the long-term investment in small positive actions. When you choose to appreciate those small positive steps, you gain willpower. The next time you are faced with the decision between writing a blog post and watching Netflix you remember how good it felt to choose the blog post.

That is why I write down my small wins every day.

Walking 30 minutes, writing a blog post, meditating, stretching, cooking dinner at home.

I catalog it all. Every day.

These events are not gigantic. They are nothing that my friends would find especially impressive. But these choices are the tiny steps that lead me towards my dreams. So I choose to celebrate them every day.

In the long term, where you end up will be defined by the small decisions you make every single day. They compound. So start celebrating the good choices and the small wins.