Small wins, exponential results.

· 7 min reading time | Ivan

Image showing exponential growth

About a month ago I have finished reading Atomic Habits, which is a book that focuses on building small and effective habits throughout your life that can lead to significant results. One particular quote from the book I still remember clearly is:

If you can get 1% better each day for one year, you’ll end up 37 times better by the time you’re done.

This quote kept itself inside of my mind for multiple weeks as my deterministic logically thinking brain was going through the math, trying to figure out what it would actually take to get one percent better at any given thing each and every single day.

On our server we often discuss different habits and many of us are trying to build effective habits or get rid of bad ones. It doesn’t matter if it’s about reducing the time you spend on your phone, or trying to better understand the emotions of people you are communicating with online. Each small task that is repeated often can and will eventually turn into a habit.

In this article we will talk about the importance of small wins, how they relate to forming effective habits and some pitfalls to avoid when building habits, as we explore an example out of my own life.

Why small wins matter

We as humans often have very ambitious goals in our lives. Many of us look forward to achieving a great victory, a particular point in their life, almost as if the goal was more important than the journey it takes to get there…

And so many people attempt to skip the journey, not physically of course, but mentally as they keep focusing on the end result, the actual steps they have to take to get there become more and more unclear. It often gets so bad that we often forget how difficult it is to actually achieve the goal we set out to reach and approach the goal with complete disregard for the needed effort which only results in failure and demotivates us.

Because we want to stay motivated however and avoid feeling demotivated, how about we take the opposite approach. Rather than thinking about the end result, we think of tiny little steps to take in order to achieve our goal.

Often times when we set ourselves a large goal, it is not clear what we have to do or work on in order to achieve it. If we want to lose weight for example, all of a sudden we are thinking about all kinds of different diets, different reasons on why we’re not losing weight etc. Yet all of us know that to lose weight, all it really takes is to eat less calories than your body burns. And so, if you start leaving yourself a little hungry every single day, you are going to lose weight, every single day your task is now clear… avoid eating every time you feel hungry.

Keep going for a while, stick to it and collect those small steps of progress every single day and all of a sudden you’ll notice that you have not only been working towards the small goal of not eating every time you feel hungry, but have also made progress in reaching your more ambitious goal of losing weight…

This is why small wins are important. Taking a step back and cutting our goal into smaller and more manageable pieces makes us worry less about the difficulty of reaching our goals and gets us into action immediately.

The role of positive reinforcement in our habit building

Every time we decide to act upon one of our smaller tasks and complete it it makes us feel genuinely happy. This happiness will make us crave more and more happiness through the dopaminergic circuits in our brain. Effectively causing us to look forward to finishing more and more of those microtasks.

Internal motivation is a very limited resource. While one day you might wake up very motivated to turn your life around and start going to the gym every single day from now on, the motivation is eventually going to run out and you’ll rely on your ability to keep up the production of dopamine whenever you think about it.

Because our lives today are filled with social media, smartphones and other technological advances which are guaranteed to provide us with dopamine whenever we request it, we are constantly fighting the urge to just scroll and obtain our dose that way.

Positive reinforcement, either by rewarding yourself after completion of a task, or by active repetition of small achievements boosts the amount of dopamine associated with that activity, making it easier for you to resist alternative urges like social media and instead strengthening your ability to act upon your internal motivation.

Habit formation research suggests that this cycle of cue, action, and reward leads to our minds eventually approaching a state in which the cue becomes more and more automatic, the action less demanding and the necessary reward smaller and smaller.

With us needing less of a reward in order to start working on a task, we will crave more dopamine in other areas of our life which encourages the building of more and more habits, a positive cycle that keeps going on and has the potential to truly turn your life around.

Reflect and Celebrate

When starting to build a habit it is very important to regularly take a step back in order to allow yourself to reflect upon, appreciate and eventually celebrate the progress you have made so far.

Regular reflection ensures that you keep track of the things that excite you and avoid things that do not. It helps you avoid habits that might be negatively contributing to your life and swap them out for ones that change your life for the better.

Building a habit of understanding people.

People around me have always mentioned that I think very rationally. I noticed that throughout my life there have been more and more cases where I accidentally hurt the emotions of the people I was interacting with without me even aiming to.

When I ended up in my first romantic relationship, I set a goal for myself to try my best to make sure I never accidentally hurt the feelings of my partner and so we regularly made sure to have her check the content of my messages for things that could potentially be misunderstood or are a little bit too harsh or direct.

Over time I have been getting better at openly communicating my own emotions and understanding those of the people around me. By putting in slightly more effort every single day, I can now safely say that I no longer feel like I am hurting people with my words on accident, and I do not catch myself actively editing my messages and making sure they are appropriate anymore.

Avoiding common pitfalls

I personally have been trying to build various new habits over the last couple months many of which have not really been rooting themselves in my daily life due to some mistakes I have learnt to detect and avoid going forward.

One of the most common mistakes when building habits is allowing perfectionism to get in the way of celebrating one’s individual small achievements. I am a software engineer and have been programming for a long time. Because of that I used to set very high code-quality standards for myself, everything had to be maintainable, easy to read…

This lead to me not finishing a single of my side-projects in multiple years often dropping them and replacing them with a shiny new idea for a project as soon as continuing to work on the original idea wasn’t fun enough anymore.

Only once I dropped those standards for myself and allowed myself some more imperfection I started seeing results, with my first side-project after multiple years, this particular website being built in less than a week… perfection leads to us aiming for quality, but it is also dangerous as it stops us from acquiring quantity, which is what is needed in order to build effective habits.

It is also very often the case that some things simply don’t play out the way you expected them to and you feel like you are being set back. In these scenarios it is very important that you remember that the process of building habits is a long-term effort with small to no short-term reward signals. It might feel like you want to give up once in a while, but as long as you keep going the long-term benefits will overcome any short term setback.

How about you start building a habit of your own? Take 5 minutes of your time every single day, and declutter a small area of your house until the Timer runs out. Keep going and you’ll soon reach a point where you will never have a messy bedroom or a messy kitchen anymore.

Remember, getting one percent better at what you are doing every single day is going to make you 37x more effective at that task… what are you waiting for?

Thanks for reading!