You’re Winning Every Single Day — It’d Be a Tragedy If You Failed to Notice

You get more of what you focus on, so why shouldn’t you focus on winning?!?

Image: Pixabay

“You’re experiencing wins every single day, most of which go unnoticed or unacknowledged. Celebrating your wins gives you jet fuel to keep going and extends a token of appreciation for how far you’ve come, instead of focusing on what’s missing.”

-Tommy Baker, The 1% Rule

I’ve written before about how good things happen to almost everyone on Earth at least once a day, and how, if you can find it within yourself to be happy whenever something good happens to someone else, then you’ve basically found more than 7,000,000,000 reasons to be happy.

This is powerful stuff, but it also applies to you, specifically, in the sense that we are often blind to how often we’re “winning” in life.

We focus on what went wrong, rather than what went well today.

That last set was tough, but we put forth our max effort and got through it. We took the time to have that tough conversation, and we made some real progress repairing that relationship. We went above and beyond earlier when that customer wasn’t expecting it.

If we’re paying attention, we can find dozens of moments like this — large and small — peppered throughout our days, and it’s time to start giving ourselves more credit for these mini-accomplishments.

Much has been written about “negativity bias,” but it’s basically the idea that human beings tend to pay more attention to threats in our environment, than we do to rewards.

This made sense in an evolutionary context, as threats to our survival were everywhere. In contrast, even the best things that could have possibly happened to us wouldn’t be as good as the worst things happening to us — death — would be bad.

Does that make sense?

In other words, good isn’t as good as bad is bad.

Succumbing to threats could have taken us out of the evolutionary game completely, so over thousands of years humans began to pay much more attention to them than they would to anything that was going well.