RECENT POSTS BY GESTVLT
Gestvlt
Dec 7 at 1:50pm
Small victories
‘‘Crowd out feelings of panic by focusing on small tasks.’’
- Robert Green, The 33 strategies of War.
White queen to f3
Black captures on d4
White player squeezes own fist under the table
White Bishop to e3
Black queen begins to panic and moves to safety on b4, believing that a counter attack can also be launched from there.
White castles queen side.
Black isn’t bothered, he’s got this in the bag. Soon as he releases his bishop to g4, he will be pinning the white queen to its rook, so it’s all good.
Another fist squeeze
White has got black thinking how he wants him to.
Black unleashes his pinning attack. White ignores, and plays knight to b5, then proceeds to checkmate black in the next move. Game over. Mouths left ajar. Tables are flipped in anger in true Reddit meme style.
What I’ve just described is the endgame of the Halosar trap in chess, but I’m not here to discuss chess, that’s for another post. For now, I am concerned with your understanding of the power of small victories.
You’ve probably heard the sayings 'Inch by inch, everything is a cinch' and ‘Little drops of water make a mighty big ocean’. In my opinion, both were created in reference to the appreciation of small victories. If like me you’d grown up playing video games with insanely-huge -boss vs miniature hero type battles, then you’ve probably known this from time immemorial. Giant, immensely overpowered bosses that hack away half your life with one swing of their flaming sword or sweeping tail. Everyone knows you don’t defeat the boss by attacking wildly (you do if its set to beginner mode), but instead, you claim the overall win by damaging (often hidden) key points in its armada.
Maybe you weaken the tail, and then the exposed belly area, and finally its thorny head, who cares how you do it? The point is that you won via the execution of a sequence of small victories. Case in point being the introductory paragraph, where each fist squeeze celebrated the player’s attainment of a crucial goal, in his advancement towards the overall objective.
Sales people utilize the power of small victories a lot in their work. It’s often called the foot-in the door technique. Like when I worked for a certain cosmetics store in Covent garden, my job was to get women into the store and that was it. For £6.50 an hour. I didn’t need to do nothing else unless I was feeling proactive. Being the only guy in the store besides the manager, I wondered how I would achieve this when I first arrived. It was harder than it looked, given my height, complexion, and bulky build at the time, but I persevered.
I was given a basket of free sample shampoo products to help with my task, and in truth, that was all I really needed. If the ladies stopped to get one (target market was mid-forties and above white women, or wealthy looking Arab visitors), it was a small victory for me. If after doing so, they actually listened to my rambling one-minute speech on its uniqueness, and 24 carat gold content, small victory. Eventually I’d ask them to come in the store for a second and look around, and bingo! task completed, the girls took it from there. (I can argue that seventy percent of the time, the women left the store with a purchase, no matter how small).
Another example is with my writing. A couple of years ago, after I had discovered the Nanowrimo writing contest, I resolved to write a book of at least fifty thousand words a year, despite my busy schedule. I’ve now gone and added this blog to an already cramped retinue of things to be done daily for survival.
The default question to myself now is ‘how are you going to finish?’ But I do so anyway because first things first, I was able to awaken the deconstructing eye within me. If you’ve got this type of minds eye, you begin to see everything as being the sum of small parts. And when you can look at the parts of a problem rather than the whole, big, giant mess in front of you, then with a little bit of strategizing, you can be on your way to small victories in no time.
That being said, one must still be wary of the trap that is the tendency to linger on small wins. There is another saying that goes thus ‘Never count your chickens until they are hatched’. This is pertinent to note here because the head rush from small wins, are almost as addictive as the big ones. Small victories provide these head rushes because they let you see what else is possible. They are meant to set you up for bigger ones, and not leave you lost in your own sauce. However, a lot of people today can’t seem to grasp this. An entitlement mindset of ‘I have to have it all, and right now’ means countless hours spent obsessing over the big details, when you could be cutting it down into smaller, short-term and achievable goals instead. All in all, It seems as though there is a rising comfort in whining over the inability to slay the oversized bosses in front of them.
So many times I see people give up on weight loss programs, because of the pain from the first day’s work out. Or is it the guy who wakes up and whines about his inability to earn billions off his newly created blog; right off the bat. Here is my question to you, have you tried to make two dollars online first? No? how about three? then ten, then fifty? The truth as I see it, is that unless you’ve committed a great crime, wealth is acquired over time, so you must learn to appreciate the small wins.
So, recap, small victories tally up, and if you work to keep the momentum, they will end up becoming your big victory. If instead you see them as insignificant, then you are more than likely going to throw away your bucket of blessings, before it gets full.
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