Celebrate Your Small, Daily Wins
When it comes to doing your best creative work — and to sustaining meaningful progress over the long run — your emotional and motivated state is critical.
It’s just as important (if not more important, actually) as your finances, tools, work environment, and overall creative freedom.
The Science Behind a Healthy Inner Work Life
Teresa Amabile is a professor at Harvard Business School. In 2012 she gave an excellent talk at the 99U conference. In that talk she shares about how our inner work life is what lays the foundation for being our most productive and our most creative.
When our emotional and motivated state — our inner work life — is strong and positive then we are most likely to be at our best in terms of creativity and productivity.
What is it that drives our inner work life?
Well, a lot of things. But one of the most important is this:
Making progress on meaningful work.
When you see that you are making progress — even small victories — then it strengthens your emotional and motivated state. And, as a result, you’re happier and more motivated at work and more likely to be productive and creative.
Consider the Inverse…
If you feel like a cog in a machine, then you’ll see your time as being wasted away, spent doing meaningless busy work while not contributing to anything worthwhile. And as a result, you lose just about any desire to be productive and efficient at work. You no longer care about coming up with creative solutions or fresh ideas. You just do what’s required in order to get your paycheck and go home.
This is one reason why having an annual review for yourself (and your team / company) can be so beneficial. It reminds everyone of the goals accomplished and the projects completed. It shows that the oftentimes mundane and difficult work we do every day is actually adding up to something of value.
The Progress Principle
Coming back to Teresa Amabile, she calls this the Progress Principle. In short, the science behind it is this:
In order to be happy, motivated, productive, and creative we have to see that we are making progress on meaningful work.
And so, if progress is so important, why do we seem to celebrate only the big victories that happen maybe once or twice per year?
One of the greatest ways to recognince our progress is to celebrate all victories — big and small.
There are several ways to celebrate and chronicle the small victories: daily checkins to a group message board, short accounts during weekly team meetings, and even our own daily journal. (I use the app Day One for this, personally.)
We often forget about our small wins after a few days or weeks. And then they quickly get buried under our never ending to-do lists. If you don’t pause to recognize and celebrate them, then they stop being “small wins” and start just being “what we should be doing anyway”.
By cataloging and celebrating your small wins each day then you are reminded that, yes, you are making meaningful progress.
And, in truth, it’s the small wins (the daily habits that move you forward) which all add up to actually complete the big projects, goals, and outcomes we are working toward.
As Benjamin Franklin said, it’s little strokes that fell great oaks. And so, to celebrate a big victory is actually to celebrate the summation of a thousand small victories.
The Fundamentals of Focus
On August 2, I’m hosting a free, live workshop. You should check it out.
At This Free Workshop, You’ll Discover…
- How to ensure your habits and routines are moving you in the right direction.
- Why most people struggle to balance all the areas of their life.
- The framework I use to keep my work and life in balance.
- The biggest productivity misunderstanding out there.
These are all the foundational ideas lifted right from my flagship product, The Focus Course.
What: A one-hour workshop (hosted online)
When: Wednesday August 2, at 2pm Eastern
If you can’t make it live, no problem! We will be recording this workshop and making a replay available. So even if you can’t make it to the live event, you should still RSVP below and we’ll send you the replay video for you to watch on your own time.
RSVP to the Workshop here…