Success Is Just A Series Of Small Wins

As I’ve written about a few times, college certainly was not my favorite experience. It wasn’t that late nights, the huge amounts of work, or the unhealthy food choices. It was about the unmotivated students and (some) faculty that just could care less.

I was reading this blog post and talking with one of my friends recently about this. My quarter life crisis was depressing, seemingly unending, and just plain awful. Looking back on it, I realized that I came up with a decent way to cope with things even though I didn’t know it at the time.

Like Adam mentions in his blog post, doing what you love will keep you afloat. Every single night and weekend I would spend time writing open source software, learning Rails better, or playing a video game. I love these things and it all helps.

But you know what is also very important? Completing things. After all, success is just a series of small wins. Nobody really pays attention to the hardships you wen through, they just see the things you completed.

I realized this after going through this hard time in my life. Those things I loved? Yeah, they were just a bunch of small projects. I was going through something that felt like it would never end, I’d never be able to make it 6 more months till graduation. Having completed a bunch of little projects along the way it felt like I was doing things with my time that were stepping stones to the end.

Creating a small web app one day, finishing it that next day, and then telling my friends about it gave me a sense of accomplishment. Sometimes they would think it was cool and fork it on github so they could contribute back. That’s even more important. You think to yourself “I did something that people thought was kind of cool so this is definitely not a waste of my time.”

The problem with these ongoing things is that you may not feel that you’re getting anywhere. Maybe you need to zoom in a little and focus on the smaller tasks. It’s rare to be an overnight success, but with a lot of little success behind you, it certainly makes everything else seem less daunting.