Why Small Wins Matter (Especially When Everything Feels Too Big)

It's 7:12 in the morning and the list in your head already has forty things on it. The garage. The taxes. The conversation you keep not having. Your health. The career thing. The science project your kid just told you was due Friday.

So you look at all of it and you do nothing. Not because you're lazy. Because the list is the size of your whole life, and nobody fixes their whole life before the coffee's done.

I know that freeze. In January 2025 my family lost our home in the LA fires, and when I say lost, I mean it doesn't exist. We had four backpacks. The morning after, I asked one question: what will make today matter? Looking back, the reason that question worked is it only asked about today. Nobody rebuilds a house in a day. You can do one thing in a day.

So this is my defense of the small win. And I mean the kind that keeps you moving when the big stuff is way too big to look at, not the sticker chart version.

Yes, and there's real research behind it. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer at Harvard had 238 people at seven companies keep daily diaries, sometimes for as long as nine months, and ended up with about 12,000 of them. On the best days, Amabile said, making progress was "by far the most prominent" thing that happened.

The part that gets me is how small the progress could be. In their Harvard Business Review piece they wrote, "Even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously." Amabile also found that 28 percent of small events of all kinds had a major impact on how people felt about their workday.

And these weren't people curing diseases. The researchers describe them as "ordinary scientists, marketers, programmers, and other unsung knowledge workers." Regular folks having regular Tuesdays. The days that felt good were the days something moved.

A small win is something concrete you can finish, not something you hope to feel. The psychologist Karl Weick wrote the paper that put the idea on the map in 1984, and he defined it like this: "A small win is a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance." (American Psychologist, 1984)

I like that definition because every word kicks something out. Concrete kicks out "be more present." Complete kicks out "work on the website." Implemented kicks out "think about calling my mom." And moderate importance kicks out clearing your notifications, which is finished but doesn't really matter.

Same big thing on the left, a small win you could actually finish by tonight on the right.

Because when the problem is huge, a small move looks almost insulting next to it. Weick wrote about this back in 1984. He said the massive scale people put on big problems "often precludes innovative action" because arousal gets "raised to dysfunctionally high levels." In plain English, when the problem is the size of your whole life, you get too wound up to do anything about it.

I'm guilty of this one too. Big list, no move, then feeling bad about no move, which somehow makes the list even bigger. That's the trap working its magic.

A small win changes the question. You stop asking how to fix all of it and start asking what you can finish by tonight. The problem is still the same size. You just found a piece of it that fits in your hands today.

Because they do, by a lot. In the same Harvard diary research, setbacks hit roughly two to three times harder than progress. As the researchers put it, "the effect of setbacks was two to three times stronger."

That math explains a lot about hard seasons. One bad phone call can wipe out a whole morning of good stuff. So you need more wins than you think, and you need to be able to see them, or the setbacks take the scoreboard by default.

This is why I'm a fan of naming the win before the day starts. If you never decided what counted, the only thing you'll remember at night is what went wrong.

Name the big thing, then shrink it until you could finish it before bed. It takes about a minute.

Making the plan helps even before you do the thing. Masicampo and Baumeister found that making a specific plan for an unfinished goal cut down the intrusive thoughts about it. So the big list gets a little quieter once one piece of it has a time on it. If you want more to work from, I put together 37 daily intention examples for a hard week.

The question is basically a small win generator. It doesn't ask what will make your life matter, or your year. It asks about today, which pushes the answer down to a size you can finish. I wrote more about that in the one question to ask every morning.

That's the whole idea behind the app. The Question is a free iPhone app that asks one question every morning: What will make today matter? You answer in under a minute, before the inbox gets a vote. Midday it reminds you what you said. In the evening it checks in on whether you did it, and your streak counts the days you answered. No list to manage.

A few answers that work in a hard season:

None of those fixes anything big. Every one of them is done by bedtime. If you want to try it tomorrow morning, The Question is free on the App Store.

Sending the email you've been avoiding, making one phone call, clearing one shelf, or walking for 20 minutes. Each one is concrete and you can finish it today. Karl Weick defined a small win as "a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance."

No. A small win still moves in the direction of the big thing. Settling is deciding the big thing doesn't matter anymore. Small wins are how you keep moving toward it on the days it's too big to look at.

You don't need a party. At night, ask what you said would matter today and whether you did it. Seeing the progress is the point, because in the Harvard diary research setbacks hit two to three times harder than progress.

One is enough to start. Pick the one that would make today count if nothing else got done. One win you actually finish beats five you half start. If you want it to stick, it helps to know how long building a habit really takes.

If a hard season has turned into something heavier, like not being able to get out of bed most days, please talk with a doctor or a mental health professional. A small win doesn't replace real support.