40+FAB Blog

The small wins

I listened to a 9 minute presentation by New York Times best selling author, Steven Kotler, on the prescription for transformation. Having worked as a journalist, he summarised what the lifestyle of those who have proven to be excellent in thier field looked like.

He spent about a minute in the presentation to share the secret with us. They get up in the morning, take a shower, have something to eat, check through thier plans, make calls, have conversations, carry out thier daily tasks, and then repeat the same process everyday until they pull off something spectacular that has been in thier plans.

So, you may ask, is there any wisdom to what he shared? The whole talk was only 9mins, and the secret of excellence was only 1 minute, how effective can it be?

That is the whole point. Before we become a ‘big’ success, we must master the small routines. You must have heard this, “what you do daily is what you become permanently”. So, success is not an event, but it is in essence a habit.

Practice winning at the small things like making one call, building one relationship, reading one page, learning one thing, solving one problem etc. Keep doing it as often as you can, preferably daily, and before you know it, your small wins will compound to make you hugely excellent and massively successful.