The Micro-Wins Effect: How Celebrating Progress Leads to Success

Hi Everyone, Mazen here. Welcome to The Maximal Life!

Every day you accomplish great things that come in small packages. 

Every day you contribute to the greater future of your business, of your family, and of your community. Even if you don’t realize how or why, at some point today, you will do something that is going to serve as a vital building block toward a major win in your near future. 

You may not be aware which action you took that will yield these tremendous results. Perhaps you smoothed over some concern with a client that will result in a windfall of future referrals. You may have made a few phone calls that will get the ball rolling on an important project. Or maybe you adhered to your health goals today that created momentum to stick with it again tomorrow. Even our mistakes hold within them, the Seeds of Success!

You see, the culmination of your daily efforts, decisions, and lessons learned, are what create the foundation for you and your family to achieve lasting health, comfort, and Maximal Achievement.

Here is a question worth pondering on: When was the last time you took a minute out of your busy schedule to acknowledge, let alone CELEBRATE, your many, many daily, micro-accomplishments?

?Celebration is a practice.

In fact, I like to think of celebration as a daily discipline. I know, it sounds funny when say that I practice a “daily discipline” of celebrating my micro-accomplishments. After all, isn’t a discipline supposed to be…difficult?

The truth is – many of my highly driven clients struggled at first, with celebrating …small wins. They usually tell me this is because they feel silly celebrating an effort that doesn’t seem like a major achievement.

They often say: Why celebrate checking off all the boxes on my task list for the day? Why celebrate one trip to the gym? or celebrate one step in the right direction toward closing a big deal? I just did what I had to do.

But here is the thing, The spirit of celebration shouldn’t be reserved just for major accomplishments. 

We CAN celebrate because of WHO we are becoming. 

We CAN celebrate because we are successfully moving toward OUR goals. 

We CAN celebrate because we woke up this morning to greet a NEW day. 

All major, life-changing achievements are the result of daily, small actions in the right direction. And celebrating our small wins reinforces the behaviors that lead to a willingness to repeat those same positive actions tomorrow. Maximal Achiever, Robert Collier once wrote: “Success is the sum of small victories, repeated daily.”

Celebrating our accomplishments, no matter how small, holds great value for our minds and our bodies. 

In a Harvard Business Study, 238 employees were asked to keep progress journals, where the employees could track their daily accomplishments. When the researchers analyzed the 12,000 journal entries, they found that the practice of recording small wins boosted confidence and job appreciation across the board for every single employee who participated. This is because any accomplishment, no matter how small, activates the reward circuitry of our brains. When this neural pathway is activated, key chemicals are released that give us a sense of both purpose and pride. Pretty cool, right?

The act of celebrating alters our biochemistry and strengthens our mindset.

In particular, a neurotransmitter called dopamine is released. Dopamine is an energizer and mood enhancer. This “feel-good” chemical enables us not only to have that sweet sense of purpose and reward but also leads us to repeat the actions that led to that chemical release in the first place. Dopamine is the same substance that results in addictive behaviors such as gambling, nicotine, and alcohol. Anytime we take an action that results in the release of dopamine, we feel an internal motivation to “chase that feeling”.

Tracking our progress and acknowledging our efforts, both great and small triggers the release of dopamine by the reward center of our brain, and as a result, we essentially develop an addiction to progress. How cool is that?

Developing positive addiction to progress. Advanced neuroimaging has revealed that when a person is depressed, or anxious, the reward center of the brain is largely inactive. Neural pathways are just like any pathway: If they are not treading often, they become more difficult to access. 

The pathway to the reward center of our brain has become the central focus in many recent studies. It is now being considered a major key to helping people break free from self-defeating attitudes and behaviors. Several studies have revealed conclusively, that keeping the pathway to the reward center of the brain open and activated can:

• alleviate symptoms of depression
• restore confidence
• eliminate fatigue
• even reduce inflammation
• and lower blood pressure

The brain is a bank, and when we deposit positive feedback, we get positive energy in return. And, as we all know, energy is the antidote. ??

Some of the ways that keep an open and active reward center are surprisingly simple. Smiling was among the most simple and effective ways to reward the nervous system. Even when test subjects weren’t feeling particularly happy, just holding their facial muscles in a smiling position resulted in activity in the reward center of the brain. Isn’t that Incredible?

Of all the research I’ve done to examine what best activates the reward center of the brain, and to find where the motivation and the stamina to avoid burnout is born. I’ve found that celebrating our small daily wins to have the most high-yield return.

Small wins are the sparks that ignite the brightest fire! 

The psychologist, Karl Weick’s definition of small wins is: “a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance.” 

By this definition, any action taken in the name of progress is an accomplishment that is worth celebrating. Tracking small wins provides us with an up-to-date map to guide us toward success. This map can also indicate when we need to re-route our efforts before we get too far in the wrong direction.

When we celebrate with our colleagues and business partners, we reinforce a positive team mentality.

My recent research discovered how critical it is for teams and individuals in the workplace to achieve small wins daily. Setbacks can be very common, especially when developing something new and complex. People can become discouraged unless they can point to some meaningful advancement, even if it involves nothing more than extracting insights from the day’s mistakes.

Maximal Achiever Thomas Edison said, “I have never failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

So, what affects people’s relationship to their work the most? Progress. A sense of moving forward, regardless of how small. By far, the most interesting part of these Harvard Business Studies is what they revealed. That celebrating small wins at work were nearly as psychologically powerful as making major breakthroughs! Progress is HUGE. Seeing and celebrating your progress is important!

Nothing evolves in a perfectly straight line. Sometimes our efforts towards a singular goal can seem scattered, and it seems like all our small wins don’t align until we reach that joyous tipping point where everything comes together. During these critical times of uncertainty, of trial and error, It is during these times when it is MOST critical to celebrate your small wins, to keep you moving forward, and to avoid burn-out.

There is an unpredictable nature to small wins that requires us to just keep moving forward and all without being able to see exactly how we are going to reach our destination. The road to success is different for everyone and it almost never looks exactly like what we thought it would look like. It is not neat, it is not linear.

Avoiding burn-out and maintaining the tremendous amount of motivation and inspiration required to press forward, sometimes blindly, is no small undertaking.

World-renowned philosopher, Lao Tzu says, “The journey of a 1,000 miles, begins with one step.”

A fantastic example of this is Pixar’s emergence as a film company. Pixar began as a special effects company. In spite of being hired by George Lucas to do special effects for Lucas films, Pixar was losing money, selling a mere 120 units of it’s Pixar Image Computer. Now, in 1986, Steve Jobs watches an animated promotion made to showcase and promote the Pixar Computer. Even though the company isn’t thriving, Jobs sees potential in the team that created this animated promo, and he purchases Pixar. Tin Toy is Pixar’s first animated film. It isn’t expected to get a lot of recognition, but it is a small win and it encourages Jobs to expand the animation department. Tin Toy shocks everyone at Pixar by winning the Academy Award for BEST animated short in 1988, and Jobs decides to steer Pixar further toward digital animation. This wasn’t the original vision for Pixar. Far from it! But the small wins pointed the way. In 1991, Disney partnered with Pixar to create the international sensation known as Toy Story, and the rest… is history. In an interview about Pixar, Steve Jobs said: “Pixar is seen by most folks as an overnight success, but if you really look closely, most overnight successes…. took a long time.”

Progress is hard to see when we compare ourselves to idealized, linear standards.

In today’s culture, celebration is reserved for major events or milestone accomplishments. And as a result of cultural conditioning, frequent celebration can be seen as a luxury of time, reserved only for those who have already “made it” or for those who don’t have demanding schedules.

Do you know the number one reason for entrepreneurs and busy professionals burnout? It’s because they are only thinking about how far they have yet to go, and can’t see the value in celebrating how far they’ve already come.

When we complete a significant goal, we have been conditioned to move IMMEDIATELY to the next goal, rather than celebrating our wins. This all-or-nothing mentality has been instilled in us to keep us striving toward unattainable perfection, rather than acknowledging our daily progress. 

The reason our culture takes this position is simple: Being satisfied with ourselves at the end of a workday is fulfilling, and makes us less likely to spend MONEY on all those things they are trying to sell us all those things that are supposed to make us feel “fulfilled.”

With all the pressures and distractions in daily life, it is TOO easy to allow our smaller achievements to slip by unnoticed. Think back on the past few days. Did you achieve any successes that slipped past your radar? I guarantee you that you did. So, let’s take a minute to revisit these small wins, and let’s take another minute to congratulate yourself. Really congratulate yourself. You definitely have time to celebrate your wins. We all do.

Your celebrations reinforce the mindset that you are a winner, and they attract more success.

And by no means, do you have to throw a party to celebrate. Celebration is simply acknowledging a significant event with an enjoyable activity. You decide what is significant and you decide what is enjoyable. Your celebration can be as simple as patting yourself on the back.

As you celebrate your wins, both personal and professional, and acknowledge the wins of your team, your business becomes more desirable to others. The Brain is a Bank. Perception becomes reality. As you celebrate your wins, others will respond and want to participate in what you are successfully building long before it is ever built.

Here is one thing you can do today to integrate celebrating micro-wins:

Ritualize your Micro-Win Reflection schedule. Make time for a weekly scheduled appointment for you to intentionally review your week, and identify all your micro-wins. Feel the win, to generate more confidence and enthusiasm for your progress.

Thank You for taking the time for yourself today, to invest in the power of celebrating your micro-wins and celebrating your daily successes as we all progress toward the biggest win of all: Living The Maximal Life.

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