The accumulation of little wins matter more than any one off big wins that you have in life. Too many people look for the big wins that changes their life dramatically. However, these kinds of wins are seldom available to everybody. And the ones who want them? Dime a dozen.
Don’t focus so much on the big wins that you forget to lose sight of the details that make up your life. Small wins add up to big results when measured over the long term. Never forget the power of compound interest. Does it shock you that a 1% improvement every day leads to a 38x improvement after the end of the year?
That’s even a better result than if you spent the majority of the year trying to find that one big win that doubles your value. Instead of doubling, you have the chance to 38x your life. Why would you ever pass that up? That’s the beauty of little wins. They are easier to do in quantity over the long term.
When I invest money, I don’t look for opportunities to double my money in a single day. That’s a surefire way for me to end up in bankruptcy court. I look for 7 – 10% annual return opportunities because I understand that investing works in a cumulative way. Over the long term, a 7 – 10% yearly return is phenomenal.
By investing too many resources trying to look for a big win, you end up short. It would be much better to get small but guaranteed wins over a year than the alternative. Little wins add up to make big noise by the end of it. You can apply this principle to every aspect of your life, not just with money.
What are Little Wins?
Little wins are small but achievable wins that can be accessed by the masses. It can be a win in just about anything. Whether its your personal savings goal, professional growth, business, career development, soft skills, and more. The point is about measuring the actual progress within each to get you to progress and improve.
As an example, if you are wanting to improve your public speaking skills, how many times did you publicly speak today? Not even once? Maybe you’re currently working on the preparation phase and not necessarily the act of actually publicly speaking. That’s OK. However, the point is that you are continuously putting in effort daily.
It can be a tiny thing such as understanding who your audience is and tailoring your communication accordingly. Or about how you should be dressed for the occasion. Your tone. And so on. Whatever it may be, are you working on getting better at it? Think about what your biggest goal in life is.
Whatever it is, take daily steps to improve your position in whatever you are lacking or wanting more of. Mine is financial independence. The little wins that I employ daily is to save as much money as I can and resist as much temptation as I can to shun consumerism. It’s worked so far and it’s continuing to work.
One day, I am hoping to make my finances be on autopilot so that I don’t even have to care about money anymore. No matter what I spend or earn, it doesn’t matter to me because it’s already accounted for. That’s one of the biggest goals in my life and I’m hopeful to get there through the power of small wins.
They will add up to HUGE results in a more meaningful way than you think.
Why are Little Wins so Powerful?
One powerful little win that you can employ is to SMASH that social share button and post to your favorite social media! Your friends just may be discounting small wins which could lead to their downfall over the long term. It’s not a bad thing to shift your friends’ mindset so that they can win alongside you as well.
Too many people look for the big win that will get them over the hump. That’s not the right mindset to employ. Let’s all work together to lead happier better lives by the end of the year. We can 38x the people we care about’s lives!
So with that said, let’s go over the reasons what makes them so powerful.
1) Little Wins Mean You Are Making Progress
The easiest way for someone to give up is to give up because they don’t see any results come in. When you focus on little wins to get you over the hump, you become delighted at the level of progress that you are making. It doesn’t matter if the progress is small or big, it matters that progress exists.
There’s nothing more frustrating for you to experience time passing by only to end up at the same place years later. For some reason, your unconscious mind actually senses that you lost resources along the way. The biggest resource that you lost in this scenario is time.
Time is something that you just can’t get back. Ever. No matter how hard you try. Therefore, when you lose a precious and nonrenewable resource such as time, it becomes much more frustrating for you. That’s what chasing the big wins gets you. An obsession with trying to look for the one win that’ll change your life.
Which inevitably leads to giving up if you can’t find it. Therefore, focus on the small wins that can make a difference in your mentality.
2) Little Wins Lead to Major Milestones
Think about the last time that you surpassed a major milestone. When you were climbing a mountain. Did you leapfrog your way from the halfway mark to the next level? No you didn’t. You got there gradually, slowly, and steadily. Change is usually not that dramatic or drastic.
Remember that 2% inflation is a huge change from one year to the next. That means in order to reach the next major milestone, you get there through little wins with time added into the equation. You’re building something great and people rarely start at the top. That means they have to grind it out by starting at the bottom and climbing up.
You will experience major milestones by taking consistent baby steps to get there. I can’t tell you how long it takes me to get to the next $100,000 in net worth. It doesn’t happen in a month. It happens over a months and months of consistent saving and investing. No windfalls for me so far.
However, I would never experience those major milestones without thinking about it from a dollar at a time perspective.
3) Little Wins Prevents Burnout
Little wins give you motivation to continue doing and pursuing your goals. It gives you encouragement and gives you a psychological boost throughout a long and arduous journey. When you’re in the middle of achieving your goals, it becomes quite easy to lose sight of your motivation.
With small and consistent progress, you get to see the fruits of your labor and see how far you’ve already come. Then you remember that you didn’t come this far to only come this far. You continue on with the race and make sure you see it through the end one way or another.
If big wins happen once every 3 years or so, you are exposed to burnout much more meaningfully. You are going to be frustrated at the lack of direction in your life after a year or two. Then it leads to you quitting because you don’t have the will or the motivation to keep going. That’s no good.
4) Little Wins Means You Are 38x Better in a Year
Little wins enjoy the power of compound interest. Whatever metric that you can quantify with your goals, quantify it. Then put in daily effort to increase the number every day. On some things, you can’t quantify with numbers because you are not in control of the results. For example, career development.
It could be based on how many mistakes that you make in a day. However, for the most part, your upward mobility is dependent on how your bosses perceive you, how your coworkers support you, and so on. Therefore, when you pick a goal that you want to be great at, pick one that is quantifiable.
What isn’t measured isn’t improved. You can keep a spreadsheet or a daily tally of something that you want to be excellent at and watch your progress throughout the year. Don’t just let time pass dilly dally. Intentionally spend your most precious commodity, time, so you don’t wonder where it all went by the end.
Examples of Little Wins
Now that you are thoroughly convinced about the power of small wins, let’s go over some examples of when you can employ it.
1) Building Wealth
Did you save money today? If you saved $5 yesterday, did you save $5.05 today? Did you remember to put your money to your investment accounts? Whichever strategy you use to build wealth, cut expenses or increase income, ask yourself if you employed the power of little wins to your finances.
Everyone has the ability and power to achieve upward mobility and get to the top 1%. No one is actually willing to put in the consistent and daily effort it takes to get there. Most just want everything to be handed to them through big wins and big changes. That happens way less often than you think.
Most companies offer an inflationary salary increase. Inflationary salary increases mean that you are making an extra 2% per year. Promotions are different but they happen every 2 – 3 years or so, on average. Don’t expect or hope for big changes when building wealth but instead look for small steps to get there.
2) Job Skill
This is a little win that’s going to hit you one day when you wake up. One day, you’ll realize that you are actually great at what you do. One of my friends had ridiculous difficulty adjusting to the new workaholic culture with a new company. He was on the verge of quitting but ended up not quitting.
After a year or so, it’s as if a button came off in his head. His efficiency improved and his workload perceivably improved as well. He was actually getting better at it. The last time that I spoke to him, he was on his way to double his six figure income in just 2 years. All because he tried to get better little by little.
When you don’t throw in the towel and actually improve little by little every day, one day a light switch is going to go off in your head. You will question why you ever thought that it was hard in the first place and laugh it off. This is absolutely an avenue where you can put in effort to improve little by little to get there.
3) Losing Weight
There’s no healthy person on Earth who loses 10 pounds in a single day. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. Little wins would be celebrating losing a half pound or a pound a day. Then it can snowball into much higher numbers as time passes and you become better at controlling your eating or exercising habits.
Over the past year, I lost 20 pounds through intentionally controlling my meal portions and exercising accordingly. I didn’t lose ten pounds one day and gain 5 pounds the next day. I gradually and steadily lost weight so that my BMI reached closer to the normal levels.
That’s how you should use the power of little wins toward losing weight as well. Try to cut small things out of your diet instead of trying to starve yourself to get there. Your body will send biological signals to your brain to eat much more than you would need to, if you starve yourself.
Then it ruins the progress and the cycle will begin again until you end up at the same weight. Don’t let that happen to you.
4) Sleeping Well
Keep daily track of your sleeping habits. Maybe your starting point is that you sleep well one day out of the week. Then you gradually try to increase that to two days out of the week for a month. Afterwards, you try to maintain the two days out of the week.
Then you add in one more day after another month. So forth and so forth. Don’t try to sleep well by forcing it through sleeping pills and such. Sleeping pills can be absolutely dangerous. Anything that your body doesn’t naturally produce, has the potential to be harmful to you.
Therefore, try to look for ways to naturally increase your sleeping quality. Sleep is your greatest weapon you’ll have versus someone have. It’s when you recharge to take on the world. Therefore, take good care of it.
5) Feeling Happier About Yourself
This is a subjective quality that can absolutely be quantified. The way that you can evaluate whether you feel happier about yourself is to measure your mood throughout the day. In a given week, how many days were you happy? How many days unhappy? Why were you unhappy or happy?
Is it because of a repeatable event? Then can you take that repeatable event out of your life? However you can to measure your happiness, use the power of little wins to your advantage when it comes to it. As a default position, we are not born happy. We don’t even know what emotions we feel or experience when we are born.
Happiness is something that requires effort in order to change the default position from when we are born. Therefore, take intentional steps and choices so that you can reach the coveted spot many people are so desperate to get to.
Your Life is a Marathon, Not a Sprint
The great thing about life is that life is long. Which means you have plenty of chances to see what works and what doesn’t. You can make mistakes. There’s no need for perfection, because it is the enemy of progress anyway. Whenever you have time on your side is when great things are going to happen.
When time becomes your ally and you’re not racing against it, then you can leverage little wins to your advantage to snowball into massive results. When you’re in your 20’s and in your accumulation phase, that’s when your building blocks form. It’s not when you are in your teens, it’s when you’re in your 20’s that matters.
Don’t squander the time that you’ve been given. Time is a gift. Someone out there is handing your time to you without you asking for it. It would be a shame for you to waste it to have nothing to show for it after decades pass. How can you make sure you don’t do this?
Write down and evaluate often what your goals are and whether you are in the progress of achieving them. Time passes by quickly when you’re having fun. Because your life should be so much fun living it, time is going to pass by very quickly. Quicker than you realize. Therefore, plan ahead and see what you can do.
The biggest goal I want to achieve in the next 3.5 years is to be a millionaire. I am completely on track to reach it, barring any layoffs, medical problems, or relationship problems. I know that it’s completely within my power to achieve it in that timeframe and I can’t wait to get there.
That should be the same way for you as well. Have something to look forward to.
Great reminder and congratulations on the weight loss success! I’m pretty sure focusing on the little wins (and compounding of those wins) is how Warren Buffett made most of his money. Being able to celebrate the little things makes life that much more enjoyable and gives you the motivation to push forward and further improve.
Thank you!! It took an entire global pandemic for me to whip me into shape, haha. Better late than never, as they say.
The little wins are definitely what makes up the huge gains. I think the statistic is that 90%+ of Warren Buffett’s wealth was created after his 50’s and he couldn’t have done that without the little wins to make up to where he is today.
Even if it doesn’t apply to investing, it’s the little things that matter in the end.