Unlock the Power of Progress

You probably have aspirations, and you know that to accomplish them you need to apply yourself and get going on relevant work. But you may also be looking, even if subconsciously, for a Hollywood-style breakthrough. A Eureka moment.

And that’s holding you back.

Researcher and Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile and her colleagues, including researcher Steven Kramer, spent nearly 15 years studying the psychological experiences and performance of people doing complex and creative work in organizations. They looked into workers’ emotions, moods, motivation levels, and perceptions of their work environment. The researchers studied what work they did and what events stood out for them. Their aim was to find what contributed most to the highest levels of creative output. (1)

Enter the “progress principle.”

 

Leveraging the Progress Principle

Question:

What sets your best days—your most productive, engaging, and fun ones—apart from your worst days?

When the researchers compared the best days of the workers with their worst days (specifically, their motivation levels, overall mood, and specific emotions), they found that progress in the work was the most common event triggering the best days. And relatedly, setbacks in the work were the most common event summoning the worst days.

Importantly, even minor progress on things could result in outsized positive effects. They found a clear “inner work life effect” related to progress and small wins.

The researchers could see workers enter a “progress loop,” with consistent progress on meaningful work creating a positive inner work life, which in turn drives performance.

“Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run. Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high-quality product or service, everyday progress—even a small win—can make all the difference in how they feel and perform.”
-Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins”

 

The Progress Principle in Action

Working on a big, important project with a tight deadline? If you’re in a company, maybe it’s a product launch, marketing campaign, or a system upgrade. In a nonprofit, maybe it’s a fundraising campaign, big event, or recruitment drive. Or in a school district, maybe it’s a curriculum overhaul, technology integration, or implementation of safety protocols. In a government agency, maybe it’s a public health initiative or disaster recovery program. Maybe you’re working on a career change or writing a book.

Tip: Stop stressing over the deadline and focusing only on the final outcome. Instead, break the project into smaller tasks (e.g., researching, outlining, drafting, editing, presenting, improving, releasing, promoting). And when you complete a task, celebrate your progress.

Share updates with your colleagues. Feel the sense of achievement and watch how it motivates you to keep going while also helping you navigate setbacks.

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

Implication for Managers: The Power of Progress in Action

How does this work for managers? Amabile and her associates found that facilitating progress, even including small wins, is the best way to motivate people on a daily basis

“The key to motivating performance is supporting progress in meaningful work.”
-Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins”

Unfortunately, the managers they surveyed didn’t view that as high on their list of motivational tools. On the contrary: it was at the bottom of their list.

So, what can you do as a manager to boost motivation and create the conditions for productive, creative output by your team?

First, you can use what the researchers called “catalysts” and “nourishers.”

  • Catalysts are actions you take to support the work of your team. For example: setting clear goals, giving workers autonomy, providing adequate resources and time, helping, fostering the free exchange of ideas, facilitating learning from challenges and successes, and tracking and celebrating progress.
  • Nourishers are acts of support. For example: providing encouragement, emotional comfort, recognition, and respect. Helping people feel a sense of affiliation and belonging.

On the flipside, you can minimize what the researchers called “inhibitors” and “toxins.”

  • Inhibitors can range from not providing support (or enough of it) to your team to actually interfering with their work. As management guru Peter Drucker once wrote, “Most of what we call management consists of making it hard for people to get their work done.”
  • Toxins are things like discouragement, disregard for people’s emotions, and disrespect.

These inhibitors and toxins lead to negative feedback loops—the reverse of the progress loop. They destroy motivation and productivity.

Of course, even good managers can sometimes fall short with their behavior, not least because they’re overwhelmed and under pressure.

 

Managing Setbacks

You’re bound to experience challenges in your work sometimes. As a manager, it’s essential that you manage setbacks in your team proactively.

Amabile and her colleagues found that “Small losses or setbacks can have an extremely negative effect on inner work life.” Indeed, negative events can have a more powerful impact than positive events. So, managers are wise to address frictions, hassles, and setbacks directly and quickly—and to view this as an essential part of their job.

“If you want to foster great inner work life, focus first on eliminating the obstacles that cause setbacks. Why? Because one setback has more power to sway inner work life than one progress incident.” -Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle

In business schools and management books, the focus is on managing people and organizations. Seems like it makes sense, but this research points to an important reframe:

When you focus on managing progress, you’re better able to manage people—and even teams and organizations.
“…the most important implication of the progress principle is this: By supporting people and their daily progress in meaningful work, managers improve not only the inner work lives of their employees but also the organization’s long-term performance, which enhances inner work life even more…. Knowing what serves to catalyze and nourish progress—and what does the opposite—turns out to be the key to effectively managing people and their work.
-Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins”

Leadership Derailers Assessment

Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. A critical and often overlooked tool for your leadership development.

 

The Power of Momentum

This research resonates with the concept of momentum in physics, which is “mass in motion” (the product of the mass of something and its velocity). Think of a big 18-wheeler barreling down the highway. Massive momentum.

Some key points about momentum:

Gaining momentum through consistent, purposeful action fuels motivation, while procrastination slows momentum and saps motivation.

Ask yourself this:

What can you do now to build momentum toward something that matters?

If you have goals you want to achieve and a clear vision of a successful future you’re moving toward, are you taking enough action now and every day to create and build momentum toward your desired ends?

 

The Flywheel Effect

Author Jim Collins famously described this as a “flywheel” in his book, Good to Great.

He described a massive metal disk, weighing thousands of pounds, mounted on an axle. Naturally, it takes great effort to get it to move at first. But if you keep pushing consistently, it begins to move, ever so slowly. Then a bit faster. At some point, after disciplined work and sweat equity over time, there’s a breakthrough:

“The momentum of the thing kicks in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward, turn after turn… whoosh!… its own heavy weight working for you. You’re pushing no harder than during the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort.”

 Eventually, you generate an “almost unstoppable momentum.” The flywheel effect.

“Each turn builds upon previous work as you make a series of good decisions, supremely well executed, that compound one upon another. This is how you build greatness.” -Jim Collins, Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
Source: Jim Collins, “Good to Great”

Collins notes that the good-to-great transformations in their massive research set didn’t happen in one fell swoop with a single grand program, defining action, or miracle moment. Instead, it took a quiet, deliberate, and cumulative process. Turning the flywheel.

Collins describes it as an organic evolutionary process, a pattern of buildup via an accumulation of consistent steps. The pattern: “disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action.” He cites executives in their own words from the companies they studied:

  • “a series of incremental changes”
  • “an evolution”
  • “very deliberate”
  • “evolutionary… building success upon success”

For this kind of business success, effort and action alone aren’t enough. According to Collins, it also requires “an underlying, compelling logic of momentum.” One might say it’s a powerful combination of a powerful business model with an effective strategy that’s well executed consistently over time. When it works right, he says that doing A almost inevitably leads to B, which inexorably leads to C and then D in a reinforcing loop. Round and round the flywheel.

For it to work, you must discover what your flywheel is in your current context (e.g., market and industry conditions). You don’t have to be a pioneer, first mover, or even unique to make it work. But you do need a clear and deep understanding of your flywheel, along with supreme execution of it over a lengthy period of time.

The flipside of the flywheel effect is what he calls the “doom loop.” It’s when organizations start with one thing, then stop and change course. They lurch back and forth impatiently, perhaps even desperately, seeking the big breakthrough that never comes. It leads only to decline and frustration.

Source: Jim Collins, “Good to Great”

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

The Power of Compounding

These principles and practices of progress, momentum, and flywheels have echoes in the financial world, with the phenomenon of compounding and compound interest: Savvy savers earn interest both on the money they save and on the interest they earn. Over time, such compounding can lead to spectacular results—huge rewards for wise, patient, and disciplined savers.

Benjamin Franklin noted this centuries ago:

“Money makes money. And the money that money makes, makes money.”

The phenomenon is so powerful that it’s been called “the eighth wonder of the world,” a quotation often attributed to Albert Einstein.

“Enjoy the magic of compounding returns. Even modest investments made in one’s early 20s are likely to grow to staggering amounts over the course of an investment lifetime.” -John C. Bogle, investor and philanthropist
Source: Wikipedia

 

Conclusion

There are many benefits that come from using the progress principle and its related practices. The advantages include greater motivation, effectiveness, satisfaction, resilience, and confidence. And big results.

It’s also an antidote to the common traps of overthinking, worrying, and rumination—as well as indecision and inertia.

Unlocking the power of progress and small wins can lead to big changes. Why not get started with it, today?

Wishing you well with it.
-Gregg

 

Reflection & Action Questions

  1. Are you leveraging the progress principle in your life and work?
  2. Are you managing your setbacks proactively?
  3. Have you discovered the flywheel that will generate powerful momentum for you?
  4. What more will you do on these fronts, starting today?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles & Resources

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Progress and Small Wins

  • “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” -Robert J. Collier, publisher
  • “You have to put in many, many, many tiny efforts that nobody sees or appreciates before you achieve anything worthwhile.” -Brian Tracy, author and speaker
  • “Tiny victories are like gems scattered on your journey, notice them.” -Emma Xu
  • “The great victory, which appears so simple today, was the result of a series of small victories that went unnoticed.” -Paulo Coelho, Brazilian novelist
  • “’the progress principle’: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.” -Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis
  • “Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.” -Charles Duhigg, author
  • “Track your small wins to motivate big accomplishments.” -Teresa Amabile, researcher
  • “The most effective form of motivation is progress. When we get a signal that we are moving forward, we become more motivated to continue down that path. In this way, habit tracking can have an addictive effect on motivation. Each small win feeds your desire.” -James Clear, author

(1) Their research methodology included end-of-day email surveys sent to 26 project teams from seven companies, comprising 12,000 diary entries from 238 people. (Source: Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins,” Harvard Business Review, May 2011.) The idea behind the progress principle and small wins has resonance with other ideas and frameworks, including agile software development (which often includes breaking product development work into small increments, including sprints and rapid iterations) and innovation approaches like lean startup methodology, including its focus on “minimum viable products.” Entrepreneur and author Peter Sims advocates making “little bets.”

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

The Trap of Caring Too Much about What Other People Think

We humans are social animals. We’re wired to think about our role in the group and about how others think of us. It matters in our families, friendships, and work relationships. We can’t survive and thrive without tending to these relationships.

But there’s also a big trap here. The problem is when we’re so influenced by what others think—or, to be precise, what we think others will think—that it causes us to make choices that won’t serve us well over time. We avoid the short-term pain of a possible loss in status in exchange for the long-term loss of missing out on better things.

This dynamic can cause us to drift away from who we really are and what we really want to do. To drift toward the safety of what others expect. We can lose bits of ourselves as we seek approval from or try to please others.

These are common traps. And painful ones.

“The unhappiest people in this world are those who care the most about what other people think.”
-C. JoyBell C., writer

To be clear, it’s not that expectations are bad. We need expectations, and they can be helpful in many ways. The problem is becoming addicted to approval or fenced in by others’ expectations.

 

Haunted by Expectations

I see this again and again—and especially among young people early in their career. As they navigate through the dark and disorienting maze of career options, they feel haunted by the expectations of their parents—and of teachers, coaches, and peers: Be a doctor. Or lawyer. Or architect. Join the family business. Choose a profession. Go for salary and status. Climb the ladder. (Regardless of who you are, what you love, and what you long for.)

There’s a deceptive calculus at work here. The benefits of the approval flowing from those safe and respectable options can turn out to be shallow and fleeting. We can find ourselves in a career filled with things we don’t like—or even resent—and we’ve signed up for about 80,000 hours of it (the average amount of work people do today over a lifetime). So how does that bargain look now?

Meanwhile, there may be other costs: Paperwork. Time sheets. Bureaucracy. Boring meetings. Energy-sapping colleagues. Lousy bosses. All for what?

Quality of Life Assessment

Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.

 

Is It a Good Fit for You?

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with being a doctor, lawyer, architect, or whatever, or with joining the family business, or pursuing a traditional career path IF—and here’s the rub—IF it’s a good fit for you. The key is that it’s your choice and that you’ve tried it and feel that it’s a good fit for you. That it fills you up with energy more often than it drains you.

Of course, not everyone has a choice. Sometimes we’re buried in debt or mired in financial stress and insecurity, or lacking better options. Many people face structural or institutional barriers or biases. But we usually have more choices than we think. It often comes down to our courage and agency, and to our imagination and hustle, despite the obstacles.

My sense is that we tend to overweight the external factors of approval and status early in life, while the intrinsic motivations quietly and steadily grow in importance as we grow older.

Avoiding this trap of getting pushed off course by the expectations winds is especially hard during transitions. Taking a step back to chart a new course summons potent fears of judgment and disappointment from others. But the reality may be that many are excited or even a bit envious about our new adventure (and most probably won’t even notice or think twice).

 

The Costs of Caring Too Much about What Others Think

When we’re in this mode of caring too much about what others think, we tend to:

The need for achievement-based approval can become a compulsion. We become approval addicts looking for our next hit, and then the next. When does it end?

Life is too precious and short to let others determine our path.

It gets worse: The expectations of others are a terrible guide for deciding what’s right for us in our own particular context. Those expectations can be unrealistic, or even contradictory. What should we do with that? If we try to please everybody, we’ll fail miserably. No matter how hard we may try, we can never do things just as others might want or expect.

By surrendering to the Siren call of people-pleasing, we violate a silent sacred pact with ourselves, denying our nature and denigrating our integrity, leading to a downward spiral of self-doubt and inner turmoil.

 

Caring Too Much about What Others Think: Why Is This So Hard?

It’s easy to understand this problem conceptually, harder to self-diagnose because it’s emotionally charged and sometimes subconscious, but very difficult to address properly. Why?

For starters, we’ve been doing this for our whole lives—a tough habit to break. It’s been part of our conditioning as children—seeking the attention and approval of our parents and striving again and again to demonstrate our worth. When we did what others expected of us, we basked in soothing acceptance.

Our brains and bodies seek the chemical rewards of this stimulus-response feedback loop from our neurotransmitting hormones. This loop began in early childhood and it’s etched deep into our neural pathways. According to the late leadership expert Edward Morler, the stages of human development include moving from a focus on “Am I good enough?” in childhood to a healthier focus on “I am enough” in mature adulthood.

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

Related Traps to Caring Too Much about What Others Think

This excessive need for approval can also manifest in many related traps, including:

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

How to Stop this Downward Spiral

Okay, so we know it’s a big problem. What to do about it? Here are 8 things we can do to stop this downward spiral:

  1. Acquire more self-awareness (in part by paying attention to our instincts and listening to our inner voice)
  2. Develop a clear and compelling personal purpose, values, and vision so that we’re clear about our deeper why, what’s most important to us, and what we want for our life
  3. Cultivate self-acceptance: Appreciate what we have and do well while shutting down our unrealistic inner critic
  4. Take time before saying yes to a new task or commitment and have clear and high standards for what we’ll spend time on
  5. Gain perspective: How much will what they think matter in a week, a month, a year, a decade? In the final analysis?
  6. Experiment with what it feels like to experience disapproval, sitting with it and getting a sense of how much it matters (if at all?)
  7. Notice how people may respect us for setting boundaries and for being clear and committed to our goals and aspirations
  8. Imagine and pursue the freedom and power on the other side of this mental block—the gift of finally letting ourselves be who we really are and long to become
“The most freeing experience of my life thus far has been to…
be unapologetically myself, and to stand in my own light.”
-Hannah Rose, therapist and writer

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Are you caring too much about what others think in some areas of your life?
  2. Which ones?
  3. Which action steps above will you start taking?
  4. Who can you turn to for help or accountability?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations to Help You Avoid Caring Too Much about What Others Think

  • “Being dependent on approval—so dependent that we barter away all our time, energy, and personal preferences to get it—ruins lives.” –Martha Beck, author
  • “The first step toward change is to refuse to be deployed by others and to choose to deploy yourself.” -Warren Bennis, leadership author
  • “I was driven by the expectation that I needed some type of profession. [I was also] driven by parental expectations and by looking at my peers.” -Warren Brown, entrepreneur
  • “Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.” –Paolo Coelho, Brazilian novelist
  • “I was dying inside. I was so possessed by trying to make you love me for my achievements that I was actually creating this identity that was disconnected from myself. I wanted people to love me for the hologram I created of myself.” –Chip Conley, entrepreneur and author
  • “You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically—to say ’no’ to other things. And the way to do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside.” –Stephen R. Covey, author
  • “The problem comes when people are so eager to win the approval of others that they try to cover their shortcomings and sacrifice their authenticity to gain the respect and admiration of their associates.” –Bill George, leadership expert and author
  • “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” -Steve Jobs, entrepreneur
  • “Listen to your heart above all other voices.” -Martha Kagan
  • “‘Finding yourself’ is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. ‘Finding yourself’ is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.” -Emily McDowell, writer and entrepreneur
  • “So long as you’re still worried about what others think of you, you are owned by them. Only when you require no approval from outside yourself can you own yourself.” -Neale Donald Walsch, author
  • “Most people are controlled by fear of what other people think. And fear of what, usually, their parents or their relatives are going to say about what they’re doing. A lot of people go through life like this, and they’re miserable. You want to be able to do what you want to do in life.” -Janet Wojcicki, professor, Univ. of California at San Francisco
“I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.”
-Fritz Perls, Gestalt Prayer

 

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, & TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!