Small Wins

In a recent email from The Tonic, they unpacked Charles Duhigg’s ideas on how small wins lead to big victories. Having just recently updated our Stitching To-Do Lists and feeling like there were some ‘big victories’ required, we read on.

After reading the opening sentence to the article – ‘maybe you’ve got such a long list that you don’t even know where to start or how you’re going to accomplish it all’ – there was a resounding ‘absolutely’ from us!

Charles recommends we start any ‘victory’ with some small wins. Although in and of themselves they may seem relatively insignificant, they have a snowballing effect that leads us to the victories we’re seeking.

‘Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favour another small win... that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.’

Small wins are usually simple, many taking as little as 15 minutes to accomplish, but what they do is plug you into a winning cycle. Once you’ve accomplished something, it’s easier to keep the momentum going. This in turn leads to more action and therefore more results.

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Unfortunately, the opposite is also true.

When we don’t take the action we often know we should, we experience little if any momentum. This in turn leads us to take less action and therefore experience less results.

The Tonic’s advice? Choose the easiest thing on your to-do list, get up and just do one simple thing towards achieving it. For Mike and Alec (founders of The Tonic), their simple wins include going for a quick walk, doing the dishes or a load of laundry, sweeping, journalling and meditating.

So, as we begin to contemplate what the small wins look like in the stitching before us, we’d love to hear what you consider the small wins to be in your time with needle and thread. We look forward to collectively collating a list that we can all use when the stitching before us requires a victory bigger than what feels possible!