A few years ago, I remember reading about a young man who became paralyzed from the neck down after a bike crash in a motocross race.  Apparently he went over the handlebars and landed headfirst at a significant speed.  At the time I tried to imagine what it would be like to be 19 or 20 years old, full of life, athletic and fit, and waking up in the hospital to be told that I would never walk or feed myself again?  It’s the news that nightmares are made of.  From there, however, the story took an unexpected turn.  After embarking on the little physical therapy that he and his family could afford, the young man was able to move a couple of muscles in his arm but therapists were still insistent that he would never walk again.  Little did they know that over the course of the next twenty years he would bike across the U.S. twice and walk twenty miles across the Mojave Desert.  But the question is, how?

Well the main reason I remember the article is because of one key point that I found truly profound (I’ve since looked up the article to make sure it’s quoted accurately).  Journalist John Rogers summarizes the young man’s (Aaron Baker) thinking, “The chances of walking again, he was told, were one in a million. He eventually used that as a mantra — when people say odds are a million to one, ignore the million and focus on the one — and has learned to walk again. It started with learning to do just one thing, beginning with getting just a few muscles in an arm to work, and then moving on to another task.”  Baker is a model of human determination and he is quick to attribute his success to his mother and others who loved and supported him through it.  But he also utilized a technique with a proven record of success.  Baker focused on one thing and then another and then another.  He benefited from small wins!

Small Wins

Accomplishing small wins is the third principle we propose as essential for Thriving in Crisis (in case you missed it, the first week we encouraged finding a daily routine and the second week we highlighted the importance of serving others).  In crises there are innumerable things to be done, work projects often pile up, house chores multiply, and the system that typically helped us complete all of these things in a structured way is often disrupted.  So where do we begin? What do we start with? How do we prevent ourselves from just giving up and sitting on the couch letting the hours fade away?  One of my fears amidst this global pandemic and world shutdown is to get to the end of it and say, “what did I do with all of that time?”  One of the major solutions in this struggle is found in the power of small wins.

Renowned organizational theorist, Karl E. Weick, illuminated the potential of small wins for tackling large social problems in a 1984 article in American Psychologist.  In it, he argues that much of the reason why little progress is made toward solving social problems can be attributed to the ways in which they are defined.  Often times we think about the magnitude of our problems in ways that paralyze us from actually doing anything about them.  Weick’s paper specifically targets problems such as world hunger, traffic, and diseases, but I believe his point extends to our own personal battles as well.  Have you ever been immobilized by the thought of writing a research paper?  Where do you begin?  You sit down and you aren’t able to write anything, you can’t focus, and the thought of actually finishing this big paper is just too much!  You put it off and end up wasting your time on mindless tasks to keep from having to think about it.  Weick proposes that “small wins” is a strategy for recasting our problems in a methodical way allowing us to break them down into a less frightening series of tasks.  Viewing a problem as a set of smaller, manageable tasks, prevents us from being overaroused and limits our feelings of helplessness.

Making Progress

The real energy behind small wins is what they do for us psychologically.  We have an innate desire to make progress and to accomplish meaningful things.  Theresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, say it this way, “Of all the things that can boost inner work life, the most important is making progress in meaningful work” (Amabile and Kramer, 2011, p. 4).  In their HBR article they highlight daily diary studies tracking peoples’ moods at work with the goal of determining which work activities occur most on employees’ good mood days as opposed to their bad mood days.  The results were clear, making progress, even if that means just a small stride, is far more likely to occur on good mood days as opposed to bad mood days.  And the reverse was true as well, workers were far more likely to experience setbacks and performance inhibiting experiences on bad mood days as opposed to good mood days.  And there appears to be a cyclical loop whereby accomplishing small tasks on meaningful work puts you in a good mood which then gives you the motivation to continue making progress.  Generating small wins might very well create a virtuous work cycle of productivity.  Our desire for achieving forward progress toward a goal was also found in a study by Soman and Shi (2003) who found that when choosing flight paths to get to a particular destination, people prefer routes that take them toward the final destination sequentially than those that do not, even when the routes get you there in the same amount of time.  For example, when flying to New York City from Dallas, would you rather connect through Denver or Atlanta?  Shoman and Shi found support consistent with people choosing the Atlanta connection.

Putting It Into Practice

  • Break it Down.  When faced with a difficult task or goal, reframe the goal in your mind as merely being the accomplishment of a series of smaller tasks.  If you feel overwhelmed, you’re looking at the problem through too big of a lens.  A study on debt elimination by Gal and McShane (2012) supported this conclusion by finding that the power behind becoming debt free wasn’t found in how much debt you were paying off as measured by dollars as much as how many debt accounts you were able to eliminate.  They suggest, “when pursuing a long-term goal, people should focus on checking items off their list rather than focus simply on making progress toward their goal in an absolute sense” (p. 499).  To go back to our research paper example, instead of thinking of the whole 10 pages you have to write, concentrate on just an outline today, four paragraphs tomorrow, and so on.  You’ll likely get to those full 10 pages before you know it.
  • Make a Plan.  A classic study on time management techniques and college grades conducted by Britton and Tesser (1991) found that time management skills were more predictive of a college student’s GPA than his or her entry SAT score.  The set of skills that was most predictive is called “Short-Range Planning” time management techniques.  Students who responded more positively to the following 7-items (from Britton & Tesser, 1991) tended to achieve better grades:
    • Do you make a list of the things you have to do each day?
    • Do you plan your day before you start it?
    • Do you make a schedule of the activities you have to do on work days?
    • Do you write a set of goals for yourself for each day?
    • Do you spend time each day planning?
    • Do you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish during the next week?
    • Do you set and honor priorities?
  • Expect Interruptions.  Nothing impedes progress like an unplanned interruption.  We know that interruptions are going to happen, however, so what happens if we make contingency plans on how to deal with them in advance?  Research indicates that good pre-thinking about encountering interruptions during the day helps people stay more engaged with their work and perform at a higher level (Parke, Weinhardt, Brodsky, Tangirala, & DeVoe, 2017).  Three questions to direct yourself in this regard are:
    • What are the possible interruptions and disruptions I might be faced with today?
    • What is my backup plan for accomplishing my to do list should I encounter a distraction?
    • How can I add some flexibility into my schedule to account for an unexpected interruption?

Accomplishing meaningful goals is difficult enough in times when we have pre-arranged work schedules, class schedules, and social support systems in place.  In a crisis, this difficulty is multiplied.  Breaking down our larger projects into a smaller, sequential series of tasks is one useful tool to keep us on track.  Setting yourself up for small wins, gives you the motivation you need to go after another one and then another one.  As former quadriplegic, Aaron Baker, suggested, when you’re overwhelmed and paralyzed by the odds against you, concentrate on the one and not the million!