Small Wins – adamtcroft.com

I’m learning that small wins are actually more important than big wins.

I’m the type of person who would come up with a big plan, a very exciting project to tackle, huge in scope. I would start with all sorts of excitement and churn out a bunch of work in a very short period of time.

But then I’d stop. I’d either be tired, or distracted, or overwhelmed, or all 3. I’ve written before about the importance of finishing, but today I have had to remind myself that starting small is super important.

If you start so small that it’s pathetically easy to start, then you will. Once you’ve started, if you make yourself finish less than what you’re fully capable of in a day then you’ll come back tomorrow. If you do that repeatedly then the small wins get big, and you don’t die.

My story related to this is I’ve been working to learn how to create Reaper Extensions and to work with WAAPI. Doing all of this requires C++ and Win32 API knowledge (for the layman, that means how to program “old school” Windows software).

When I started, I had almost none of that. Add in that there’s almost no documentation about Reaper Extensions, and things get really frustrating quickly.

Today I got my first 3 small wins.

I successfully built an extension .dll file
I got a “Hello, World!” message box to pop up from that .dll
I successfully added an item to an existing menu

I could probably go on and learn how to build windows and connect lots more things, but today I don’t need to. I got my small wins. If I get some more tomorrow, and the day after – then I’ll be going somewhere!