The way we celebrate success is fascinating in my view. We always celebrate the big moment, or the final moment, or after the fact. We celebrate after crossing the finish line, or when you receive an award for work well done, that was often completed months or even years ago. Yet this isn’t when success occurred. Success is created much earlier, and it is created in tiny moments of work and sacrifice.
These tiny moments are the ones worth celebrating. Adam Grant said it well when h said that the seeds of success are planted in the daily grind. These are the small moments where we decide to get up early, when we decide to eat one less cookie, when we decide to walk instead of drive, or when we ring a friend instead of automatically letting the next Netflix show automatically play. These individual acts don’t necessarily require giant amounts of willpower, any single one is achievable in itself.
Individually they might seem meaningless and unimportant, but over time these small decisions equal changes in behaviour, that then equal routines and then accumulate into larger results that others start noticing. You look betting, you feel better, you have more in your bank account at the end of the month and you’re being invited to more interesting events. It’s difficult to pin point where it all started, or what singular decision was the crucial one. The answer might even be that none of the vents in themselves were very critically important, but their collective weight equals an outcome you desire.
There is a philosophical school of thought called emergence, and it is one of my favourites. It is both terrifying and terrifically liberating. It basically says that if you believe in cause and effect then the thing that happens now was caused by the thing before it, and on some grand scale it would in theory be possible to predict what was going to happen next based on what happened before (ignore the fact that the computer power required to compute what would happen in the universe next would require a computer at least as big as the universe, and so you therefore get caught in an ever expanding loop – this is a thought experiment not a set of blueprints). The terrifying part is that if you buy this, then everything is pre-determined, and we free will does not exist. We are just a product of the past playing out in a predetermined way.
There is a slight version of this philosophy though, the part that I find terrifically liberating, which says the smallest of changes today can produce giant changes in outcomes in the future. What those changes are incredibly difficult, but that the future has yet to be decided and therefore out actions today matter because they can bring big consequences. This was popularised through the movie the butterfly effect. The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings could cause a thunderstorm a thousand miles away, and was discovered through weather modelling due to a researcher who couldn’t be bothered entering in an additional decimal place because they thought it irrelevant.
The takeaway for my part of combining Adam grants perspective, and the philosophy of emergence is these small moments matter. These are the ones that collectively count over time, they accumulate and build and before we know it w have crossed the finish line. Supposedly Einstein said compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world (I haven’t fact checked this, because I am not sure the attribution is that important). These small actions are like compound interest and build on each other over time, where it can be hard to notice the increase in returns on any one day, but looking back over 10 years you can see a whole lot of progress.
A couple of others ideas occur to me as I write this, the first is that it is easy to fool ourselves and think these tiny moments do not matter. That no one will notice that extra cookie or that we watched that extra show – and you’re right. They won’t. Yet over time they will. I also think this does more harm to our relationship with ourselves that we are often willing to admit. The betrayal to ourselves of not doing what we ultimately know to be right is not costs free, it hurts a little bit and chips away at our own self esteem. We trust ourselves a little less, and maybe even love ourselves a little less for these moments of transgression.
The next key idea is if these small moments matter, then try to have them matter the most by looking for leverage. Small ways in which the next move makes the biggest difference. All positive steps beat doing nothing, but if there is one step which matters the most then do your best to take that one. But if you’re not sure which is the point of leverage, then liberate yourself of the need to take the ‘best’ move, and simply make a move in the right direction.
Just to round of with a little more philosophy, one of my favourite thinkers is Herbert Simon, a polymath and a contributor to many fields including design thinking. He said that before actions come plans inside a persons head, and before that comes the act of imagination. Imaging how you want your future to be. This conveys a powerful idea to me, that our future isn’t decided yet. It is up to us to plant the small seeds of future success through small actions todays. This is not a new thought though, and one that I first read when I was a teenager working at the local superette for $5 an hour for an Indian man, who had a daily flip calendar of Hindu sayings. I tried to google the exact phrase as its now foggy in my head, and came up with this this Lao Zhu quote that roughly reflects the same sentiment: Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny. Or if Hinduism, Confucianism or Polymaths is not your thing, then you can also draw from the bible.
In the gospel of Matthew there is the parable of the mustard seed, in which he says ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field; which indeed is smaller than all seeds but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches’. These tiny moments are the ones in which we can begin to plant the mustard seeds, and yes they will take long time for the compound interest to accumulate, but the best time to plant a tree was yesterday, the next best time is today. What small seeds of success can you plant today?
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