Focus on Micro-Wins to Make Big Progress

Last week, I interviewed a startup founder in her fourth year of business. When I asked her what she would tell someone she mentored on the journey now, one of her responses was this:

“In those first couple years, the pressure to produce something on a large scale immediately was huge. After the initial excitement, most of the conversations started to center around when I was going to give it up and get a ‘real’ job. But it’s not like you’re not doing anything. You’re working consistently, and you learn so much.”

While the product they make is very technical (a through-wall radar for first responders) and fairly capital intensive, I couldn’t help but think how similar that is for anyone starting out on any new venture.

I’m part of a wonderful online community, and every week we share small victories. Many of the people in the group have been successful entrepreneurs for decades, and many are trying to transition out of corporate after multiple successful stages of their career.

In the midst of everyone else’s weekly small victories (which often sound like huge wins), I sometimes struggle to pick one of my own to share – because at this stage, I have SO many daily small victories.

These daily small victories add up to really big shifts. And even though those shifts are more mental or operational as opposed to a giant billboard splash, those micro-wins – daily and hourly practices of showing up how I want to and reflecting on the times that I don’t – are weaving this sort of cross-stitched pattern of reinforcement that is stronger than any kind of stair-step pattern of progress or billboard splash of accomplishment.

As this founder said, she learned 100 ways not to make a through-wall radar. And I am learning all the ways not to do things as well – even for things that resulted in a client or a contract, if there’s something that didn’t quite sit right with me about the interaction, it’s a learning and I practice doing it better next time.

So for those of you that don’t have a place to regularly share small victories, I hope you at least think about yours on a regular basis.

In addition to learning how I want to do things differently, who I do or don’t want to work with, and how I want to present, many of my micro-wins-turned-small-victories look like this:

·????????Some types of client interactions or decisions that used to occupy my mind for days are now plugged into a decision framework and dealt with in seconds

·????????I stopped trying to connect five ideas at once and realized connecting two at a time was probably fine – and it’s made completing tasks easier

·????????I surround myself with amazing, genuine, supportive, reflective, challenging, and kind people – and no longer make room for those that aren’t

·????????I am no longer plagued with fear of retaliation after saying what I really think to someone I don’t have a long-standing and trusting relationship with

·????????I no longer get physically uncomfortable when seeing my face on a website (yes, if this bothers you, it’s stealing your energy, and it’s something you must conquer)

·????????I realized I actually know quite a lot AND still have a lot to learn, and the latter doesn’t mean I’m not still adding a lot of value

It’s all the little things that have to be cleared up and cleared out before you can “level up.”

If you’re not sharing small victories publicly, I hope you at least have a way of tracking them for yourself. Every little time you do something that makes yourself proud, it’s worth celebrating. And when you regularly pause to look at how far you’ve traveled, you’ll be surprised at how much growth you see.?