Understanding This One Psychological Principle Might Help You Achieve Your Dream Goals.
And how my Barista tricked me into buying more coffee
Photo by Agnieszka Boeske on Unsplash
Whenever I get a new loyalty card at my favorite coffee place in Melbourne, my barista will give me two ‘free’ stamps.
How generous I thought.
I am only 8 more coffees away from my free coffee. And I just saved almost $9 with the two free stamps.
Winning!
It wasn’t until I bragged to one of my colleagues that I realized that they did that for everyone.
I thought I was special, but I was actually a victim of a brilliant sales tactic.
Even more brilliant was that those two free stamps are arbitrary and already factored into the cost of the loyalty program.
But they had a huge impact on my psychology.
The act of giving me two free stamps gave me the momentum to keep buying coffee from the same place.
It sounds silly but I felt a sense of inertia that I had already built and I didn’t want to stop.
If I didn’t go to them for my coffee, I felt like I was losing. And if there is anything I hate, it is losing.
Whenever I would think about buying coffee from somewhere else, thoughts would go through my mind saying:
“You’ve already got two stamps at this coffee place, go get your third or fourth or fifth. You’re so close to your free coffee.”
You get the point.
Success starts with an M and ends with a D
How does this story help you?
Well aside from admitting I drink a lot of coffee and pay too much for it, this experience taught me an important life lesson.
Momentum matters. A lot.
We’ve all had those experiences where everything seems to be going our way.
We start the day with a small win that gives us confidence. We use that small win to create even bigger wins over the course of a day or a week. You’re feeling good and performing above what you expected.
Everything just seems easy. And success seems attracted to you like a magnet.
We’ve also had one of those days where nothing seems to go your way. A small mistake gets amplified into bigger and bigger mistakes. Your confidence drops and even small tasks seem out of reach for you.
Menial tasks become difficult and you feel a million miles from your best. You just feel like giving up.
Researchers call this phenomenon psychological momentum, which has been closely studied in competitive athletes but can be applied to daily life.
The above graph is a useful model for how seemingly ‘small wins’ have huge psychological impacts on your performance.
One early success has a flow-on impact that makes future successes more likely. The initial success creates a small snowball that gets bigger over time.
Building early but small wins can generate momentum to make large wins more realistic.
How to build daily psychological momentum
If you can start your day with small wins that build your momentum, you’re on your way to creating a successful day.
Build enough successful days and you’ll have entire weeks or months where you’re winning with little effort.
You can be successful and work the least for it. Make success a default, not a nice-to-have.
Your mornings give you a fresh opportunity to shape the day how you want it. Start your day how you want it to end.
I’ll never understand why people start their mornings with low-value activities such as scrolling through social media, responding to messages or watching the news.
You are still creating psychological momentum but it’s not the type that you want. Engaging in these activities sets you up to be reactive, emotional and pessimistic about the world.
Daily morning rituals that build positive psychological momentum:
Waking up earlier
Making your bed
Reading 10 pages of a book
Meditating for 10 minutes
Quality time with family (no tech devices nearby)
Morning walk outside
You can do everything on this list in less than an hour of your day. But they can impact how the rest of your day proceeds.
Once you complete these tasks, write them down. Don’t underestimate how powerful it is to see all your wins tallied up at the end of the day.
The act of writing helps to reinforce the momentum you’re building for the day. It is a similar feeling to crossing items on your to-do list.
These small wins might seem arbitrary and too small to count, but just like my coffee stamps, that does not make them any less psychologically effective.
Small wins scale into big wins.
Summary:
Starting anything is hard.
So make it easier to start. Break down any big goal you have by taking the easiest steps you can take.
Accumulate enough small steps and you’ve built enough momentum to accomplish even bigger wins.
Start small, think big, and scale your wins rapidly.
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