I attended the Sandia Starforgers Retreat last month, where one of our fantastic instructors led the group in a few exercises. Somehow we got into the habit of cheering for the small things people wrote or decided in response to those exercises. It was spontaneous, but it felt right, even when the specific achievements were small.
That retreat was valuable to me in many ways, but that particular moment planted a seed that I kept thinking about when I got home. Specifically, I was thinking about how I didn’t mind cheering for other people’s small wins, but I have trouble celebrating my own. I have too many mental habits engrained by my childhood in a white, protestant, midwestern environment to feel entirely comfortable celebrating anything less than a “Significant Achievement.”
Now, intellectually, I know better. There’s interesting research about how the feeling you get when you choose to celebrate helps engrain better habits. I have even used that technique *on myself* in the past, so I know it works.
When I first started trying to build a serious writing habit, I created lots of little success opportunities. My daily wordcount goals were small and easy to hit. My other expectations were low, and only gradually increased as I learned what I was capable of. Those first weeks and months of habit building felt great, all the time, because I constantly felt like a success, even though I knew I had a long way to go. That feeling kept me coming back, and coming back every day was the key to real progress.
But recently, I haven’t been feeling that way, and this experience at the retreat got me thinking about why. And about why that’s a problem.
Looking back, I can see a familiar pattern. I didn’t recognize it as it was happening, which is especially silly because it’s a pattern I’ve repeated throughout my life.
When I considered myself a beginner, I felt good about celebrating those small wins. But I knew that growth required raising my expectations. As I built skills and confidence, I increased my wordcount targets, and I also increased my standards for the quality of that output.
I kept leveling up. Increasing my skills, getting more reliable output. At the same time, I started using more of my time for things that were harder to measure: things like exchanging beta reads with other authors and researching agents for the querying process.
At some point, I stopped setting small goals. I had replaced them with BIG goals, like finishing a draft, or getting a book published. Big goals are important, too, but they don’t provide the same little dopamine hits that I’d once gotten for meeting my modest goals. I could go weeks, even months, without celebrating a win.
The consequences for this kind of mistake happen in slow motion, but for me, they are always the same. The natural high of celebration disappears. I stop having as much fun. I’m more likely to feel sad and frustrated at the end of the day, but I tell myself that nobody feels great all the time. I start to think of my work as “the daily grind.” And the really sneaky part: I start becoming less effective at what I’m trying to do. It turns out that being tired and sad doesn’t make for very inspired work. The harder I work, the less I accomplish.
Let me repeat that: The harder I work, the less I accomplish.
This is where burnout comes in, my friends. There is a direct line between failing to celebrate my wins and actually winning less.
I’ve seen that cycle before. It’s an old pattern, coming back in its most insidious form. But this time, thanks to those little celebrations at my retreat, I caught it early. And I’ve spent the last month or so building some small celebrations back into my daily life.
I have another novel I’m working on, and I’m not going to finish that for a while. But I know what I need to do today to get myself closer. My new daily goals aren’t as small as when I first started, but they also don’t require me to be at my very best every day. Because the whole point of these goals is that I can hit them, most of the time.
And when I do, I celebrate, in some small (often silly) way. For me, that usually means doing a silly little dance before I move on to the next thing. It’s easy, it’s free, and it lifts makes me feel like a success.
It’s the celebrations that keep me coming back, after all.