Little Victories

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It seems like several lifetimes ago but a while back, I met some great people through my involvement in Twitter chats surrounding adventure and motorcycle travel. Many of those people have become cherished friends over the years, far outlasting those long-gone chats.

One of the people I met is my pal Terry Tyson, mentalist extraordinaire. We always joked that Terry was the “Yoda” of our Adventure Travel Q&A chat (#ATQA). He dispensed little nuggets of wisdom in less than 140 characters. (We ended #ATQA in 2017, before tweets grew to the 280-character limit).

I would often jot Terry’s nuggets down, wanting to think and expand upon them. And, most often, I would lose track of them, buried in the depths of the hundreds of things I wanted to write about.

But in the process of cleaning up the Val in Real Life space here this week, I found this draft blog post with one of Terry’s little gems. Lo and behold, here it is six or seven years later, and his words ring truer than ever.

Small achievements can be the most satisfying and enlightening. They render detail to the larger narrative and give it meaning.

Terry Tyson

It would be easy to dismiss them—those little victories. Each one in and of themselves might not be noteworthy in day-to-day life. But collectively they create momentum and a broader sense of success. They’re the cogs in the wheel of progress; the necessary mechanism to create a positive feedback loop in everything we do in life.

Because big victories don’t magically happen. They’re built upon the framework of the smaller wins it took to get there. If we don’t stop and acknowledge those little steps, it might feel like we’re not getting anywhere. But in fact, we’re simply still on the slow path to something bigger. And if those landmark achievements aren’t built of the small achievements as Terry describes, they can’t have the depth and sense of accomplishment we humans thrive upon.

Terry’s words struck me then. And now, in the context of the pandemic and my personal challenges of late, they are even more impactful. They are the exact reminder I need to be able to forge ahead with a realistic and renewed outlook on this entire situation.

In a way, I’m sort of glad this post had time to age. That’s not usually the case. Typically the writing magic vaporizes if the words sit too long in wait. But I like the timing now. I hope you do as well.

Celebrate the little victories, friends. Acknowledge, cherish, and build on them even in a time that feels out of control.