To Achieve Success, Start Detecting Your Small Wins | Mehrnaz Bassiri | TEDxChilliwack

Transcriber: Eunice Tan Reviewer: Tanya Cushman Have you ever tried to weigh an ant? If you're like most people, you're actually doing it every single day.
00:00:28
We weigh ants when we expect that our brand new business idea will topple Amazon overnight, or – here's a good one – when we hope that a single week at the gym will result in 10 pounds of weight loss, or when we commit to learning a new language and then expect to be fluent after a month. We all do this – weighing ants.
00:00:56
We're all taking the tiniest wins and accomplishments of our lives, and we are throwing them on these huge scales, expecting to see the needle move.
00:01:07
We look ridiculous, of course.
00:01:09
Trying to measure ounces of daily progress in pounds is a recipe for despair.
00:01:15
But we seem so stuck in this habit. And we are missing out. We're missing out on learning. We're missing out on succeeding.
00:01:26
We're giving up entirely, thinking that we are not good enough.
00:01:33
The news and social media have played a part in this.
00:01:36
We're constantly bombarded with stories of investors and entrepreneurs going from nothing to millionaires overnight.
00:01:43
And we don't like admitting to our slow progress, failures, and worst of all, our insecurities. Who wants to talk about those? They make us feel frustrated, disappointed – and you know what? – sometimes even embarrassed.
00:01:59
It's easier to keep quiet or to fake it, not realizing that that's what many others are doing.
00:02:06
And then we compare our accomplishments to each other's and feel lousy and insecure because we know that our success story isn't the full truth. But the other guy? Oh, now, he's got it all figured out, right? He said so on his Facebook page. (Laughter) Consequently, these seemingly large successes being accomplished by others have programmed our thoughts and desires to want and expect the same kind of results in our own lives.
00:02:38
We start to measure our progress on an oversized scale.
00:02:44
Imagine for a moment that this very stage is a scale.
00:02:49
It's big enough to weigh a car, right? But do you think it would register anything at all if I put an ant on it? What about a thousand ants? Do you think it would register anything then? Okay.
00:03:06
What about a thousand ants jumping up and down? It's unlikely that a scale this size will register the ants at all, but that's what we're all doing: we're achieving things in small, nearly invisible, increments but then expect them to register on the scale the size of a TED stage. And we feel like failures when they don't.
00:03:32
Karl Weick is an organizational theorist.
00:03:35
He talks about the importance of small wins. What are small wins? "Small" and "wins" don't seem to go together without some conscious effort on our part.
00:03:47
But he says that small wins have a transformational power, and that once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion to favor another small win and another small win until the combination of these small wins lead to larger and greater accomplishments.
00:04:06
But what does that actually mean? It means that losing an ounce of weight puts us on the path to losing a pound, and then two pounds, and then – who knows? – maybe even a hundred pounds.
00:04:21
It means that adding two new words to our vocabulary in a new language does put us on the road to fluency. And it means that selling a few books online can set the foundation to become the largest online retailer or to topple it.
00:04:37
But the weight of these individual small wins isn't significant enough to be detected on our oversized scales.
00:04:46
And when we don't see any changes, we get discouraged. We think it's us – that we're not good enough.
00:04:57
And we give up.
00:05:03
Real progress is the combination of slow, small, and steady steps repeated over and over again. It doesn't look like much when it's happening.
00:05:13
It's more closely related to our habitual behaviors than to our achievements.
00:05:19
In her TED Talk, Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of "Eat, Pray, Love," talks about her struggle with publishing another book after her massive success, feeling that whatever she published next wouldn't be good enough.
00:05:34
The way she found the inspiration to keep publishing was by remembering her journey as a writer – her days of working as a waitress and trying to get published, and how for six years, she kept getting rejection letters.
00:05:50
What kept her going at the time was focusing on what she loved the most – writing – despite the results that she was getting.
00:05:59
And that's how she found her way back to writing after her big success. She said, "Your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential." Gilbert focused on habitual behaviors and smaller progress scales to help her regain the inspiration and creativity after her big success.
00:06:27
She focused on the process, not the results.
00:06:32
And then there's Martin Pistorius, the author of "Ghost Boy." Now, his decision to use small scales to measure his progress gave him a second chance at life and made him a New York Times best-selling author. When he was a child, Pistorius got a brain infection that made him completely paralyzed for a decade.
00:06:56
And eventually, when he started to regain his awareness, he realized that he was trapped inside a body that wouldn't respond to any of his commands.
00:07:06
So he couldn't let anybody know that his awareness was back. But he could feel; he could understand.
00:07:15
In a BBC interview, he used his computer to say, "Success is strange in that it cultivates more success.
00:07:23
Once I had achieved something, it encouraged me to try even harder.
00:07:28
It expanded my perception of what was possible.
00:07:31
If I could do this, then what else could I do?" In my case, when I was a child, I had a condition called selective mutism.
00:07:46
It's a severe social anxiety disorder that impacts your ability to speak in certain social settings, like at school or around people you don't know.
00:07:57
And I remember many, many awkward situations where I was asked questions or I was expected to speak but words wouldn't come out of my mouth – it doesn't matter how much I wanted to talk.
00:08:09
If my parents were around, I whispered in their ears, and they spoke for me.
00:08:15
And it's taken me years of taking small steps – trying, failing, and trying again – to become more comfortable in social settings.
00:08:29
So today, standing before you on a TED stage is an accomplishment that's the result of all those small wins that I decided not to ignore.
00:08:41
Where in your life do you need to recognize the small achievements? Focusing on progress helps us keep moving forward – doesn't matter where we are in our journey.
00:08:54
Wins, no matter how big or small, are just one more thing to throw on the scale that's sensitive enough to detect them.
00:09:04
Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile talks about the importance of detecting our small wins.
00:09:09
She says that keeping a work diary helps us to reflect on our days, keep track of all those small, little achievements that normally go unnoticed, and use this reflection as a tool to plan our next step.
00:09:23
Because seeing progress – doesn't matter how small – keeps us happy, motivated, and productive. But the thing is, most of us have hectic work schedules and we don't get a chance to reflect on our day.
00:09:36
So keeping a work diary forces us to sit down, reflect on the daily happenings, and helps us to detect and celebrate our small wins even on those frustrating days that we don't think we got a lot done.
00:09:49
Not only that, it also helps us to work through difficulties and to find weak areas that we need to work on.
00:09:58
But it's too easy to dismiss our small wins when we're facing setback.
00:10:03
In fact, research shows that the negative effect of setbacks is two to three times stronger and more powerful than the positive effect of progress.
00:10:15
So even the smallest setbacks and negative events can bring us down and focus our energies and attentions on them.
00:10:23
So it's helpful to have a few people in our lives, whether they're coaches, close friends, or partners, who can remind us of our small wins when we can't seem to remember them ourselves.
00:10:37
When I was younger, my mother used to tell me, "Ganbatte, Mehrnaz. Ganbatte." "Ganbatte" is a Japanese phrase used as an encouragement, meaning to "stick with it" or "try your best." She passed away six years ago.
00:10:58
But today, every time I feel like I'm not making a lot of progress or when I feel like I need the encouragement to be brave or to keep going, I imagine her telling me, "Ganbatte," and that brings me back to focusing on my habits and readjusting my progress scale.
00:11:19
Working towards mastering something is a never-ending loop because learning is a never-ending process.
00:11:26
The process starts with defining a vision, building habits, and learning strategies.
00:11:32
This path emphasizes practice, effort, patience, and concentration.
00:11:40
It's how one reaches their highest potential.
00:11:44
So it doesn't matter whether you're winning or losing or how fast, how slow you're seeing results. Instead of focusing on the outcome, strive for improvement and work to better your craft. This way, every morning when you wake up, you know that you're a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday.
00:12:07
In my work as an educator, I've noticed that an effective way to adopt smaller scales to measure our progress is by setting goals that lead to consistent action.
00:12:20
Because we all know what goals without actions are called, right? New Year's resolutions. They're wishes.
00:12:32
There are four steps to this action-packed goal setting.
00:12:38
Step one – have a clear vision of what it is exactly that you want to accomplish.
00:12:44
Now, your vision doesn't have to be something big and complicated. It can be something simple or personal, like wanting to lose weight, wanting to learn a new language, wanting to build a successful business. Whatever it may be, be specific.
00:12:59
But once you've set your vision, don't focus on it.
00:13:03
Knowing exactly what you want will set your final destination. But then you want to bring the focus back to where you are so that you can plan the journey. Step two – break down your big vision into three to four smaller, achievable goals so that you can see the individual components you need to work on to get you closer to that vision. For weight loss, for example, you may want to focus on your eating habits, sleeping habits, meditating, and exercising. For business and career growth, you may want to focus on your communication skills, your networking, and keeping up to date with the developments in your field.
00:13:46
Step three – focus each individual smaller goal on the process of learning, mastery, and improving.
00:13:55
Now, the improvements won't look like much when they're happening. So keep a work diary and look back on your journey on a weekly or a monthly basis so that you can see how far you've come and how much you've accomplished.
00:14:10
And finally, step four – as good as it feels to receive social acknowledgement, don't announce your big and important goals to anyone and everyone. Instead, select one or two people who can act to remind you of your small wins when you need the encouragement, and focus your goal talks with them on the process of working hard and making improvements. Why am I telling you this? Research shows that when we share our big and important goals with other people, as soon as we receive social acknowledgement and social recognition, our brain's tricked into thinking that we've already accomplished that goal. So we become less likely and less motivated to pursue those activities that get us closer to achieving it.
00:15:01
Let's do a recap. Step one – have a clear vision. Step two – break down your vision into three to four smaller, achievable goals. Step three – focus each goal on the process of learning, mastery, and improving. And finally, step four – select one or two people to act as your support.
00:15:27
You will notice that once you get this four-step process right, you will build the habits that will automatically lead you to your big vision without you having put the focus on it.
00:15:45
At some point, we've all missed out on learning and succeeding because we were too busy weighing ants.
00:15:53
We've avoided opening doors of opportunities because we thought we weren't good enough.
00:16:01
Now imagine a world where no potential is wasted, where all of us, as individuals, communities, and society, work to become better versions of ourselves day after day.
00:16:17
I'll leave you with the same words of encouragement that my mother used to say to me: stick with it. Ganbatte. (Applause) have you ever tried to weigh an ant if you're like most people you're actually doing it every single day we weigh ads when we expect that our brand new business idea will topple Amazon overnight or here's a good one when we hope that a single week at the gym will result in 10 pounds of weight loss or when we commit to learning a new language and then expect to be fluent after a month we all do this weighing ads we are all taking the tiniest wins and accomplishments of our lives and we were throwing them on these huge scales expecting to see the needle move we look ridiculous of course trying to measure ounces of daily progress in pounds is a recipe for despair but we seem so stuck in this habit and we are missing out we were missing out on learning we're missing out on succeeding we're giving up entirely thinking that we are not good enough the news and social media have played a part in this we are constantly bombarded with stories of investors and entrepreneurs going from nothing to millionaires overnight and we don't like admitting to our slow progress failures and worst of all our insecurities who wants to talk about those they make us feel frustrated disappointed and you know what sometimes I've been embarrassed it's easier to keep quiet or to fake it not realizing that that's what many others are doing and then we compare our accomplishments to each others and feel lousy and insecure because we know that our success story isn't all truth but the other guy oh now he's got it all figured out right he sets on his Facebook page consequently these seemingly large successes being accomplished by others have programmed our thoughts and desires to want and expect the same kind of results in our own lives we've started to measure our progress on an oversized scale imagine for a moment that this very stage is a scale it's big enough to a car right but do you think you would register anything at all if I put an ant on it what about a thousand ants do you think it would register anything then okay what about a thousand ants jumping up and down it's unlikely that a scale this size will register the ants at all but that's what we're all doing we're achieving things in small nearly invisible increments but then expect them to register on the scale the size of a TED stage and we feel like failures when they don't Karl Weick is an organizational theorists he talks about the importance of small wins what are small wins small and wins don't seem to go together without some conscious effort on our part but he says that small ones have a transformational power and that once a small one has been accomplished forces are set in motion to favor another small win and another small win until the combination of these small wins lead to larger and greater accomplishments what does that actually mean it means that losing an ounce of weight puts us on the path to losing a pound and then two pounds and then who knows maybe even a hundred pounds it means that adding two new words to our vocabulary in a new language does put us on the road to fluency and it means that selling a few books online can set the foundation to become the largest online retailer or to topple it but the weight of these individual small wins isn't significant enough to be detected on our oversized scales and when we don't see any changes we get discouraged we think it's us that we're not good enough then we give up real progress is the combination of slow small and steady steps repeat it over and over again it doesn't look like much when it's happening it's more closely related to our habitual behaviors than to our achievements in her TED talk Elizabeth Gilbert the author of Eat Pray Love talks about her struggle with publishing another book after her massive success feeling that whatever she published next wouldn't be good enough the way she found the inspiration to keep publishing was by remembering her journey as a writer her days of working as a waitress and trying to get to get published and how for six years she kept getting rejection letters what kept her going at the time was focusing on what she loved the most writing despite the results that she was getting and that's how she found her way back to writing after her big success she said your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential Gilbert focused on habitual behaviors and smaller progress scales to help her regain the inspiration and creativity after a big success she focused on the process not the results and then there's Martin Pistorius the author of ghost boy now his decision to use small scales to measure his progress gave him a second chance at life and made him the New York Times bestselling author when he was a child Pistorius got a brain infection that made him completely paralyzed for a decade and eventually when he start to regain his awareness he realized that he was trapped inside a body that wouldn't respond to any of his commands so he couldn't let anybody know that his awareness was back he could feel he could understand in a BBC interview he used his computer to say success is strange in that it cultivates more success once I had achieved something it encouraged me to try even harder it expanded my perception of what was possible if I could do this then what else could I do in my case when I was a child I had a condition called selective mutism it's a severe social anxiety disorder that impacts your ability to speak in certain social settings like at school or around people you don't know and I remember many many awkward situations where I was asked questions or I was expected to speak but words wouldn't come out of my mouth it doesn't matter how much I wanted to talk if my parents were around I whispered in their ears and they spoke for me and it's taken me years of taking small steps trying failing and trying again to become more comfortable in social settings so today standing before you on its head stage is an accomplishment that's the result of all those small wins that I decided not to ignore where in your life do you need to recognize the small achievements focusing on progress helps us keep moving forward doesn't matter where we are in our journey wins no matter how big or small are just one more thing to throw on the scale that's sensitive enough to detect them Hurra Business School professor Theresa honourable talks about the importance of detecting our small wins she says that keeping a work diary helps us to reflect on our days keep track of all those small little achievements that normally go unnoticed and use this reflection as a tool to plan our next step because seeing progress doesn't matter how small keeps us happy motivated and productive but a thing is most of us have hectic work schedules and we don't get a chance to reflect on our day so keeping your work diary forces us to sit down reflect on the daily happenings and helps us to detect and celebrate our small wins even on those frustrating days that we don't think we got a lot done not only that it also helps us to work through difficulties and to find weak areas that we need to work on but it's too easy to dismiss our small wins when we're facing setback in fact research shows that the negative effect of setbacks is two to three times stronger and more powerful than the positive effect of progress so even the smallest setbacks and negative events can bring us down and focus our energies and attentions on them so it's helpful to have a few people in our lives whether they're coaches close friends or partners who can remind us of our small wins when we can't seem to remember them ourselves when I was younger my mother used to tell me gum but a man has gum but a gum but it is a Japanese phrase used as an encouragement meaning to stick with it or try your best she passed away six years ago but today every time I feel like I'm not making a lot of progress or when I feel like I need the encouragement to be brave or to keep going I imagine her telling me gambits a and that brings me back to focusing on my habits and readjusting my progress yeah working towards mastering something is a never-ending loop because learning is a never-ending process the process starts with defining a vision building habits and learning strategies this path emphasizes practice effort patience and concentration it's how one reaches their highest potential so it doesn't matter whether you're winning or losing or how fast how slow you're seeing results instead of focusing on the outcome strive for improvement and work to better your craft this way every morning when you wake up you know that you're a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday in my work as an educator I've noticed that an effective way to adopt smaller scales to measure our progress is by setting goals that lead to consistent action because we all know what goals without actions are called right New Year's resolutions their wishes there are four steps to this action-packed goal setting step1 have a clear vision of what it is exactly that you want to accomplish now your vision doesn't have to be something big and complicated it gave me something simple or personal like wanting to lose weight wanting to learn a new language wanting to build a successful business whatever it may be be specific but once you've set your vision don't focus on it knowing exactly what you want will set your final destination but then you want to bring the focus back to where you are so that you can plan the journey step 2 break down your big vision into three to four smaller achievable goals so that you can see the individual components you need to work on to get you closer to that vision for weight loss for example you may want to focus on your eating habits sleeping habits meditating and exercising for business and career growth you may want to focus on your communication skills your networking and keeping up to date with the developments in your field step 3 focus each individual smaller goal on the process of learning mastery and improving now the improvements won't look like much when they're happening so keep it working work diary and look back on your journey on a weekly or monthly basis so that you can see how far you've come and how much you've accomplished and finally step 4 as good as it feels to receive social acknowledgement don't announce your big and important goals to anyone and everyone instead so like one or two people who can act to remind you of your small wins when you need the encouragement and focus your goal talks with them on the process of working hard and making improvements why am I telling you this research shows that when we share our big and important goals with other people as soon as we receive social acknowledgement and social recognition our brains tricked into thinking that we've already accomplished that goal so we become less likely and less motivated to pursue those activities that get us closer to achieving it let's do a recap step one have a clear vision step two break down your vision into three to four smaller achievable goals step three focus each goal on the process of learning mastery and improving and finally step four select one or two people to act as your support you will notice that once you get this four step process right you will build the habits that will automatically lead you to your big vision without you having put the focus on it at some point we've all missed out on learning and succeeding because we were too busy weighing ants we've avoided opening doors of opportunities because we thought we weren't good enough now imagine a world where no potential is wasted for all of us as individuals communities and society work to become better versions of ourselves day after day I'll leave you with the same words of encouragement that my mother used to say to me stick with it gum but a [Applause] you