Robin Sharma explains why celebrating small wins boosts performance and motivation. A Harvard study of 238 managers found their best days involved incremental progress, worst days setbacks. He recommends recording three positive things nightly and keeping a daily progress journal to counter the brain's negativity bias and increase dopamine.
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Hi, it's Robin Sharma, author of the Leader who Had no Title, founder of the Titan Academy, and welcome to this mastery session. Well, this mastery session is all about the small win principle for maximum performance. And I'm going to dive right in. So I read this fascinating article a little while ago in the Harvard Business Review and it was called the Power of Small Wins. And the researchers studied 238 managers. And at the end of the day, the managers were asked to write in a journal about the quality of the day. And what they found was this. And they studied 12,000 of these journal entries. 12,000. And what the researchers found is this one powerful insight. And here it is. On the days that the managers had what they called their best days, the managers had made some acts of incremental progress in their journals. They had said, you know, well, we were dealing with a computer bug and we made a tiny win towards the vision of the organization, or we were dealing with a difficult customer, but we made some progress in building the relationship. And on the days that the managers recorded their worst days, it was because there was some kind of a setback during their days. Now this, I believe, is a really powerful insight for you and I as we rise to world class in our productivity, our performance and our impact on our industries. What it means is this. If you want to stay fired up, develop a truly focused mindset, feel emotionally alive, feel inspired, develop higher levels of drive, and stay on your best game, then we need to do this. Stay. Celebrate tiny wins at the end of every single day. I'm going to repeat that again because it's so important you want to stay on your best game. Celebrate progress versus looking for perfection. So how do you do this? Well, there's two tools that I want to offer to you with great respect and great encouragement. Number one, I call it the nightly three. At the end of your day, maybe you're going to, you know, keep some kind of a piece of paper by your bedside. Maybe you do it after dinner, maybe you do it while you're going for a walk. But just think about three great things that happen to you during the day. Again, that's celebrating the progress. Because here's another big idea. Our brains are hardwired for negativity. Our brains are hardwired, according to science, for ingratitude. And it helped us so many thousands of years ago when we fought saber toothed tigers and lived on the savannah. We have a negativity bias in the brain. So literally our brains focus on what's negative in our environment. That allowed us to survive thousands of years ago. But here it is in the modern age and we still are training our brains subconsciously to focus on what went wrong during our day versus all the progress and the things that went right. And using this tool, it will allow a pharmacy of mastery to operate in your brain. So you release dopamine, you release serotonin, you feel better, you feel stronger, you become undefeatable. The second tool I offer to you to really leverage the small win principle for maximum performance is keeping a daily progress journal. Now, if you followed me before, you know I love journaling. It heightens awareness, it deepens your intentions, it boosts performance. It's a great place to capture creativity. But if every day you write about your progress, you write about where you're winning, that's a great question to journal on. Where am I winning? You start to train your brain to focus on progress. You focus on where you're winning, you focus on what's positive. And again, according to the science, that will fuel you emotionally, it'll make you feel stronger, you're going to grow in confidence and you will take your productivity to your next level of world class. Hi, it's Robin. I invite you to subscribe to this podcast and definitely go over to robincharma.com for more information. Tools, resources on mastery, elite performance and living a world class life.
