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Winning begets winning
The best defense is a good offense.
4th quarter. 2 minutes left. Your team is up a touchdown. The defense has dominated the entire game - attacking the quarterback, aggressive blitzing, and the like - and now it just needs one last stop to win the game. Then all-of-a-sudden, the strategy changes. Your defense starts playing Prevent1. Sure enough, it gets picked apart and gives up the game-tying touchdown. You had all the momentum, and then decided to concede some ground. What happened? In the football example, there is certainly some nuanced strategy involved. But the point is that something much more insidious happens with this strategy change: the mindset changes from playing to-win to playing not-to-lose.
You may be wondering what this has to do with you. It’s not about football. It is about approaching life as an opportunity to improve. And the only way to get your brain in that state is by collecting wins. That starts with winning the day today. What exactly does it mean to win the day? Simply, it means you got closer to the person you want to be. The specifics will differ for everybody, but you know in your soul whether you had the courage to do the hard thing or whether you made an excuse.
The human brain is funny, it has no steady state. You are either getting closer to where you want to be or further from it. When you are winning, your brain starts thinking how do I win more. When you are losing (or even just trying to maintain), your brain starts thinking how do I lose less. That’s it. There’s only two states of mind.
To further the point, think about some simple math for a second. If your goal is to prevent decay, no matter how successful you are, in the long term you are approaching 0. If your goal is to win each day, even only a single percent a day2, in one year you're 37x better than where you started. On any y-axis you care about, you either approach 0 or you get to orders of magnitude higher than what you are capable of today. Grim or empowering, your choice.
The stakes are so high because changing from one state to the other is very hard. I’m sure you can think of a rut you have been in and how difficult it is to get out. Momentum, for better or worse, is a powerful drug. When you have positive momentum, keep pushing. Ride the momentum knowing that you have a superpower at your back. When you have momentum in the wrong direction, use every ounce of willpower to get a win. That voice telling you to wait for motivation or the perfect moment? It's lying. The perfect moment is now. Remind yourself that the hardest part of changing course is the first step. It won’t be easy but take solace knowing better days are ahead.
Every day is an opportunity to take a step towards the person you want to be, there are no neutral days. But it is not about just winning a single day per se. It is about what that win does to your brain. It is about getting your brain into a state of attack and building momentum. Over the long term, this is the difference between mediocre and extraordinary. And mediocrity is poison for the soul. So when you wake up tomorrow, repeat until you are obsessed: Win the day. Win the day. Win the day.
In football, prevent defense seeks to prevent the offense from completing a long pass or scoring a touchdown in a single play and seeks to run out the clock, at the expense of allowing short-yardage gains
The British cycling team went from average to extraordinary by instilling a mentality of stacking small wins