You’re Winning Every Single Day — It’d Be a Tragedy If You Failed to Notice
You get more of what you focus on, so why shouldn’t you focus on winning?!?
“You’re experiencing wins every single day, most of which go unnoticed or unacknowledged. Celebrating your wins gives you jet fuel to keep going and extends a token of appreciation for how far you’ve come, instead of focusing on what’s missing.”
-Tommy Baker, The 1% Rule
I’ve written before about how good things happen to almost everyone on Earth at least once a day, and how, if you can find it within yourself to be happy whenever something good happens to someone else, then you’ve basically found more than 7,000,000,000 reasons to be happy.
It’s a wonderful perspective to take on life in general, but it also applies to you, specifically, in the sense that we are often blind to how often we’re “winning” in life.
We focus on what went wrong, rather than what went well today.
That last set was tough, but we put forth our max effort and got through it. We took the time to have that tough conversation, and we made some real progress in repairing that relationship. We went above and beyond earlier when that customer wasn’t expecting it.
If we’re paying attention, we can find dozens of moments like this — large and small — peppered throughout our days, and it’s time to start giving ourselves more credit for these mini-accomplishments.
Much has been written about “negativity bias,” but it’s basically the idea that human beings tend to pay more attention to threats in our environment than we do to rewards.
This made sense in an evolutionary context, as threats to our survival were everywhere. In contrast, even the best things that could have possibly happened to us wouldn’t be as good as the worst things happening to us — death — would be bad.
Does that make sense?
In other words, good isn’t as good as bad is bad.
Succumbing to threats could have taken us out of the evolutionary game completely, so over thousands of years, humans began to pay much more attention to them than they would to anything that was going well.
We still do this, even though the number of threats to our very existence is a lot lower than it used to be.
That was kind of a “pop psychology explanation” right there, but the point is that we all need practice re-training ourselves to see the good.
What we focus on in life expands, and so if we look for the good, if we look for all the ways in which we’re already winning, then we’re going to create more of those positive results in our lives.
I want to explore three related ideas here that could really help you focus on winning, but the reality is that if you actually made a list of all the things that went right today, you’d literally astound yourself with how long it is.
Using myself as an example:
I woke up (holy f&#$, I’m grateful for that, just for starters)
I was within 20 feet of the two people I love more than anyone else in the entire universe
I got myself out of a negative thought spiral immediately upon waking by refocusing my thoughts
I made some awesome coffee, and I realized that I still had an entire container of the non-alcoholic Bailey’s coffee creamer left
I had about 2 hours of uninterrupted time to just sit and read before I had to start working for the day
I remembered to drink 2 large glasses of water immediately upon getting out of bed
More than 100+ new people followed me on Instagram while I was asleep
I realized I had more time to complete this one particular writing project than I thought I did, giving me an immediate sense of calm
I hadn’t even been awake for more than half an hour today, and that’s already like…8 things that went well.
That’s not even counting my body and mind being healthy, the street on which I live being peaceful and quiet, etc.
So much goes right in our lives! Notice this the next time you have a few spare moments!
And bring your attention back to this fact whenever you’re feeling demotivated or deflated.
Alright, there are a few more things I want to touch on, as I said, and here they are. It all starts with how we measure progress.
“The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.”
-The Gap and the Gain
How Do YOU Measure Progress?
This right here is one of the most important ideas in the entire book (above), and if you can internalize this idea at a deep level and never let it go, you’re going to experience a ton of profound, positive changes in your life.
The authors explain that measuring your forward progress is a positive, uplifting way of appraising your current situation, and puts you in a sort of psychological headspace they call the GAIN.
It’s where you measure yourself according to how much progress you’ve already made, and how far you’ve come, instead of comparing yourself to others, to some external ideal. It means you don’t look at the distance between where you are now and where you want to be, a place they call the GAP.
The future isn’t real yet, and it can’t be measured. Only real, actual progress can be measured, and by doing so you will increase your motivation, inspire confidence and faith in yourself, and build up momentum.
Again, having ideals — a vision of where you want to end up and who you want to be — is incredibly important, but focusing on that and forgetting to appreciate yourself for what you’ve already achieved and how hard you’re working at the moment is demotivating in the worst way.
Don’t let your past be forgotten. Always measure backward.
What Gets Measured Gets Managed
“When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.”
-Pearson’s Law
There’s a popular saying among business professionals (and non-fiction nerds) that goes: “What gets measured gets managed.” This is 100% true.
For example, if your finances are running wild, what helps tremendously in getting them back under control is to make a budget. Just the simple act of recording where your money is actually going is often enough to get a firmer grasp on your situation. The same goes for dieting, etc.
Similarly, when you track your WINS, then you’re going to start racking up more of them.
So yes, it’s a powerful strategy, but there’s also a saying common in late-night infomercials that goes: “But wait! There’s more!”
When you keep records and then you stay accountable to someone for those records, you’ll get better even faster. Measuring works, but having support works even better.
That’s what’s so cool about The Competitive Advantage: We’re here, supporting each other, recognizing each other’s wins, and encouraging each other to go for more.
There are plenty of positive benefits to recording and measuring your progress, and it’s essentially the epitome of GAIN thinking.
And remember, you can’t “measure” an ideal, so you shouldn’t base your happiness on anything so ephemeral. The future isn’t a reality yet, and so it can never be part of any meaningful measurement of progress.
One of the reasons this is so effective is because you’ll have something real and tangible to look back on to remind yourself of how far you’ve come and what you yourself have achieved. So, take pictures. Keep records. Measure what matters, and always make sure you have some real evidence of what you’ve done and are working on.
It’s so easy to forget what you don’t keep track of. You can so often and easily take for granted all those things that you should be incredibly proud of yourself for, and in doing so, you miss out on the massive dose of extra confidence you get from having pushed through, earned a victory, and lived to talk about it.
The Most Important Hour of the Day
“When you end your day poorly and without a committed plan, you compromise the next 24 hours. Without a clear and committed plan, you become reactive to what’s around you and reactive to your own lack of energy.”
-The Gap and the Gain
It’s said that if you lose an hour in the morning, you’ll be chasing it all day — and that’s absolutely true, but a great morning always starts the night before. In many ways, the most important hour of the day is the last hour of the day.
What you do during that final hour of consciousness has a tremendous impact on not only your sleep quality but also the nature and quality of tomorrow.
In a very real sense, you see what you’re looking for, and if you wake up groggy, disoriented, and distressed, that’s the filter through which you’re going to look at your day.
Use the last hour of every day to set yourself up for further success and to adequately prepare yourself for what you need to do in order to make that happen. Don’t sabotage yourself by making it more difficult than it has to be to approach the next day with fire, enthusiasm, and purpose.
Even if you do have a rough morning, it doesn’t mean the whole day is shot, but it definitely makes it a lot harder the rest of the day, and why would you want to make it even harder on yourself than it has to be?
You’ll want to make sure that you have some sort of plan for tomorrow — an idea about how you want it to unfold, and then you’re going to put yourself in as strong a position as possible to make that happen.
And if you make a mistake along the way? Realize that even if one particular part of your day didn’t exactly live up to your ideal, the day as a whole can be a GAIN, and that’s what you should be focusing on.
“What you do during the hour before bed sets the tone for the rest of your life.”
-The Gap and the Gain
You’re Already a Winner
You already possess infinite value as a human being simply by virtue of being alive. I truly believe that. You don’t have to “do” anything to be worthy of love and dignity, and so, I guess that kinda makes you a winner already, eh?
A lot of my writing is dedicated to helping people become better in their chosen pursuits and professions, but even if you do fail, even if you do fall short — as we all do sometimes — does it really matter in the end?
Can your failures and shortcomings ever truly diminish you?
I don’t think so, and so I want to close by saying that, although tracking wins and losses is a good thing to do, your life is not a scorecard.
It’s not a spreadsheet, or a bloody arena full of “winners” and “losers,” and you don’t have to “do” anything to be worthy of love and life.
So go in peace and happiness and start taking some whacks and going after some wins. You deserve it.
All the best,
Matt Karamazov