Hey, buddy, what's up? Happy to be in your ears again for another episode of the show. And Today's Show is a special show. It's a micro show. It's about something that I have realized many times in my life. But like so many of us and with so many things. We remember them. We celebrate them acknowledging for a second. We throw them away in the car and we forget we haven't completely integrated.
This thought or an important thought
into our life and that is why in part. This is a reminder to myself which is part of what I love about these micro shows if you're wondering if if I'm just doing this for your good or maybe there's a little bit of reminders for myself in there. It's definitely the latter. So this has come up for me a couple times in the past. I would call it.
Maybe three months and it's this it is celebrating small wins. Now we can all look back at our life or our career or a Arc within a relationship or with a sport or something and probably find some success and yet we are so quick to dismiss it and that often leads to a dialogue in.
Side our own head which I feel like is unhealthy and what I realized is I needed to find a way in my life to continue to bring not just you know, the the milestones in our careers forward that's very helpful, but how to celebrate say at the end of every day week month or whatever to small increment that we can do to reinforce that we're making progress. Which after all that is a huge aspect.
Act of what it means to be human what it means to feel fulfilled. So in my own effort to start to do a better job of celebrating small wins, I wanted to share a few thoughts on this with you.
The first one is maybe is why do we not do this already? Just so you know, you're not, you know, you're not crazy. It's a human. It's a function of our biology to orient around the negative. Right? Just think of a YouTube comments or you put something out on Insta or anywhere on social and if you get a hundred positive comments and one negative one, you're going to think about the negative one more than you think about the 100 great things that's in your biology and
So I want to start there by saying don't don't sweat it but I want to encourage you to do the work to go beyond that because just just though something is wired in our biology does not mean that it is not something that we can overcome and specifically this negativity bias. I wrote a lot about it and creative calling and it's one of the reasons again. I need this continual reminder, which is why I'm sharing it with you because I think we could all learn remember rather why we started remember
How important celebrating these little achievements really is so if you can acknowledge that your biology is wired toward negativity and you can take you you commit to taking some steps the first step that I want you to commit to is when you catch yourself.
Saying yeah, I love those 100 comments on that amazing posts. It was so cool you but there was that one. I want you to start to put into your awareness this phrase. Yeah, but or this, okay, but yeah, and I want you to be able to say that's okay. I want to recognize that something negative happened, but how can we over index on
Positive just first of all is an awareness of the phrase. Yeah, but and replace that phrase with a moment of awareness and the awareness is that your biology is dragging you down. So if you if that's the first step and you do nothing more from this podcast, I will consider this a win because putting something in your awareness as power. Now if you are willing to go with me go beyond just raising this topic in a way.
Awareness and then actually doing things to counter programmatic or counter program it then this will be to your benefit as well now.
It shouldn't be a surprise why this is value right valuable because recognizing wins does a handful of things it and there's an actual function. This is not just you know me wanting to feel good about myself and patting myself on the back because momentum comes from the thoughts that we say to our self momentum comes from recognizing say a handful of small wins if you're just out
Out there celebrating the the huge Milestones or like more often than not being stuck in that negative bias. It's very hard to get momentum momentum begets motivation motivation cultivates success and engagement success and engagement provides a sense of fulfillment and all the while this momentum has what I would consider to be sort of a compounding effect.
Which is a habit and these habits. These are the things that make overwhelm.
Fade away because if you can if you can establish a habit and it doesn't have to be in your awareness and it's a healthy habit a habit of saying to yourself that you're grateful for think of the smallest three wins that you've had in a day. For example, if you did that every day before you went to bed and or so many people myself included like to do this first thing in the morning, it is such a powerful primer.
Now again overwhelming or sorry not getting overwhelmed because these this this language that we're using with ourselves and these celebration of small wins as a habit like that gives you the ability to go deep to go the long road, which is where all the best stuff in life is like you might just be 10 hours or a hundred hours into your 10,000 hour journey to mastery.
But if you've made a habit of positive self-talk if you've celebrated the small wins and by extension cultivated a gratitude practice you are going to be so much better off all those reasons. I just I just shared like momentum inertia like those things are real and if you deconstruct the lives and most successful happy and fulfilled people, this is a promise a Cornerstone of it and if it's not
I'll give you an example just a second the then what you will find out. If you talk to these high performers that the change they made from when they used to not celebrate small things and only celebrate the New York Times best seller or the multimillion-dollar deal or selling their company or getting that first client or if you ask the highest performers in the world. They may tell you I used to not do that. And then when I started doing it, here's what happened in the example.
I'll use is my dear friend Tim Ferriss was just texting with moments ago when the reasons that this example came to mind. I don't remember where it was but it was recorded conversation is either I was on his show or he wasn't mine. I don't know if you just look at there's a lot of we've created a lot of content together. But Tim has this thing that I absolutely love and this is again someone I think he would be very transparent. There was really hard on himself and you know, you still not meditate because he considered the edge that came from being sort of hard-nosed.
That was his Competitive Edge in something like meditation would slow him down. Well, if you ask him about that transition, you know, that was a huge breakthrough. He shared that before another huge breakthrough was in essence a gratitude practice, but I like to think of this specifically around small wins Tim has what he calls and this is really relatively new for him the jar of awesome now intriguing name, right?
What is the jar of awesome? Well, it doesn't have to be a jar. It can be a notebook but I like the idea of a jar because it's so literal and you see it sitting on the counter versus you have a notebook and you have to flip to certain pages. For example, the jar of awesome is every day. Right? One two, or three small wins on a teeny piece of paper. Maybe it's a yellow sticky that you then fold in half and sticky side to the sticky side to the back of the other side. That's not sticky. So
Doesn't stick to all the other notes in there.
But whatever your method is right down. One two, or three small wins. I like to want right one every day, but maybe you do three every week. I don't care my here to prescribe that Tim's jar of awesome is a place where heat records small wins as a regular practice puts them in the jar. And then on occasion, he doesn't necessarily specify. What on What interval but on occasion go in there.
Tim does and pull from the jar a handful of these small wins and read them to yourself. And this is so effective at reframing what used to feel like overwhelm. What used to feel like no progress what used to feel like that negative bias that we are wired for and now becomes momentum inertia positivity authenticity reality connection fulfillment.
Now let's just be clear. This is not like writing down small wins is not an excuse is not an opportunity to avoid mistakes or to step around the bad decisions that you've made because we all make poor decisions. We all decide in haste or or maybe we take too long and we're paralyzed there's all these things they can get in the way but
Remembering small wins is is more powerful just like that drip of water. If a drip of water hits a stone say ten or a hundred times what happens nothing if a drip of water falls on a stone enough, it will like carve a hole straight through that stone Small celebrations on a regular basis become incredibly powerful.
If you remember if you've read creative calling there's there's a section in there and I even did it's one of like five or six graphs that we created to put in the book because this the goal is not to avoid mistakes right mistakes are valuable. It's in part how we learn but the goal is to make better decisions over time winning is is not a up were a straight vertical line or even a 45 degree angle up into the right.
Because if you look at that line really closely you made a couple good decisions and then a bad one a couple good ones and then a couple of bad ones and what you really want over time is up and to the right making better decisions that are aligned with your values that make you feel better about yourself and make you better in the world closer to the person you want to be or become.
Now it sometimes it might not seem like it but celebrating small wins is one of the best vehicles I know for propagating this positive slope.
Now over time you will need to remember where you were a month ago a year ago or five years ago. You'll need to remember for historical reasons or for a storytelling or there's some random reason that you're going to need to look backwards.
Don't make that something that happens only when you need to revisit pain or do your taxes or what if you can revisit the best things in history whenever you want, that's what this exercise is about because you know, it's going to come out of that. It's going to come out of that is an appreciation a sense of gratitude.
For the time like right now there are things in your life.
That you have that you did not have six months ago six years ago. Remember those times remember? This is such a powerful exercise that I have taken up recently. Remember when you wanted what you have now.
There are few things in life that can make you feel better.
There are also few things in life that can carry the weight of small things done over overtime. That's ultimately a behavior done over time is a habit.
I would encourage you to make celebrating small wins a habit.
A corollary to this is sure writing things down and putting them in a jar. Incredible. Notebooks great daily notebooks even better.
But what I want to also encourage is there are a lots of ways to document your process to document success to document small wins. I'm suggesting you write them down with Tim Ferriss is jar of awesome, but little video Snippets also share when I was writing creative calling. I made a video every morning about my state of mind because I got up on I wrote at you know, 5:00 o'clock in the morning for an hour every morning for Josh for a really long time for years.
and I made a bunch of videos and sure there were videos in there that were low points but to build to go back on breakthroughs and to look at you know, the snapshots I have of my notebooks and the
The Bold Sharpie ink that I have on folded piece of paper that I have stuffed in a box of the things that I did to create that book. I'm in the process of thinking of another book and going through that it created so much momentum in in the 20 minutes that I was doing reviewing that that you know that in part inspired this this recording today, so
to summarize I can't
I can't overstate the value of celebrating small wins. It's not in our nature. It's not in our DNA. So I'm guessing if you're like me you struggle. You only look for the big moments in life. Believe me friend just in the same way that we learn to crawl and then we learn to walk before we can run celebrating small wins cultivating momentum reinforcing that you're making progress reinforcing that remembering where you wanted when you
Haunted what you have now, the power of that is unmistakable and I'd encourage you to employ this practice celebrate the small wins, and we're going to be in this together because that's what I'm working on right now. So there you have it grateful for your time. And if this resonates with you, please let me know on social because I'm trying to do more and more of these micro shows as it's the thing that seems to be resonating as great interludes between
Between these conversations that we're having that we've had on the show for for 10 years getting a lot of good feedback. And if you want to see more there's some topics that I've talked about or touched on in my book or CreativeLive or my own personal journey of Entrepreneurship and creativity. You want to know more about that stuff. Let me know and I'll make it a micro show in the meantime. I bid you farewell adieu, and don't forget a reminder. Don't forget celebrate the smallest.
Okay. That was an awesome episode. But before you bounce just I got three quick thoughts first.
Thank you for being in this community gives me so much juice. I can't even tell you so much juice that when I hit publish and this show goes out into the ether that there's an amazing community of like-minded people just like you consuming and sharing the show. So thank you second. It would be huge who mean the world to me. If you left a review at Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you listen now, we're regularly featured in the top slot there on Apple's podcast page and others and Spotify Etc.
And that's because of your reviews. So if you've ever wanted to lend a hand or you got some value for me in the past and you want to pay it forward that would be amazing. And then lastly it would also mean the world to me. If you shared the content that you get here, whether it's a screenshot or a photo of where you're listening anything via Instagram stories or any other social feeds tagging the and the guess now, I repost this content and your comments all the time, so I would love to share yours.
Ultimately to not only these shoutouts. Are they good for you and me but they also help us book amazing guess because they see the reach that you cultivate. This is a way for you to help contribute to the show. So again, I want to say thanks. I'm just at Chase Jarvis you can use a creative live as well and the guests are easy to track down because they are well, they're usually quite well-known people. But again, thank you so much for listening. I'm looking forward to being in your ears again,
hopefully tomorrow.
