By the dark hour before the city rouses, a student sits under a sluggish fan, waiting for the lights to come back on. The air is still hot in the room. Her mobile is close to running out of charge, her revision has a lot to do, and, for the most part, the test she is studying for will not be life-changing. No one will thank her for being awake. No one in her homestead will brag about it. There will be no Instagram for the quiet determination to return to the same book she has read after moans and confusion and failure. And yet, so much, in the world’s unaccounted ways, is going on. She is continuing.
We picture success usually with signs. We see it in the form of a foreign master’s degree, a high-ranking title, a desirable wedding ceremony, the earnings that silence family comments, or the announcement that you are “where you belong.” We know to look for success in its social, refined, and polished form. But most lives are not affected by a single revelation of success. Rather, they are transformed via a different architecture: the many everyday and almost imperceptible ways people pull themselves together. To study for half an hour with no electricity, to make the family food budget work during the inflation, to apply again for that job they were rejected for, and to avoid breaking down during a stressful day at work — such are unapplauded success stories. They are not applauded, but they constitute the scaffolding for greater success.
This phenomenon is particularly the case in Pakistan, where success need not simply be a private sense of satisfaction. It is rather something observed, appraised and ranked. In a culture where ‘log kya kahenge’ matters, success is not something intimately yours; it is the property of family, society and public opinion. He or she is expected not only to achieve but also to achieve in spectacular ways that are readily recognised by others. This builds a cruel black-and-white imagery of success, where something that isn’t spectacular enough might as well be nothing. Europe is worshipped, but not the years journeying there. The promotion is celebrated, but the effort and anxiety leading to it are unseen. The marriage is celebrated, but the work it takes to “settle down” is unseen. In this culture, winning back success means rebalancing its focus from the outside to the inside.
To do this, we first need to ask ourselves: What is victory? Our culture tends to think of success as the attainment of a goal, an arrival that can be shown off for others. But that’s a limited view of life. Success is not just an endpoint; it’s a recurrence. It is not only the outcome; it is the persisting under adversity. Someone who continues to show up despite fear, who starts over after setback, who doesn’t succumb to despair in despairing times, has already won something. Elsa Marie D’Silva builds on Karl E. Weick’s concept of “small wins” by noting that when people perceive problems as too big, they are paralysed, but when they are broken down into concrete, moderate, and achievable goals, action can resume (D’Silva, 2024). She describes small wins as focusing on progress each day to avoid discouragement (D’Silva, 2024).
In the second article, this learning experience is extended by arguing that progress isn’t always linear. It refers to small wins as “disparate experiences” and “mini-innovations,” which means progress can be haphazard, incremental and experimental (not linear and dramatic) (“The Transformative Power of Small Wins”, 2024). This is important because many people reject their progress because they don’t see it as elegant. But we can be making headway when we don’t feel like we are. At times, the greatest life changes take place during such uneven, messy times (“The Transformative Power of Small Wins”, 2024).
This bigger picture is all the more important in an unequal economy, where small wins may be a living. For many Pakistanis, success is not just individual self-actualisation but being secure, being able to house and feed one’s family, and being able to escape precarity. With inflation, unemployment, fee hikes, transportation woes and dwindling opportunities, even this is risky. In such circumstances, the capacity to continue learning, saving, applying, helping and hoping is not insignificant. It is a form of agency.
The idea has psychological muscle. In a recent article in Psychology Today magazine, Lindsey Godwin describes a toddler at the airport toddling with each step and being cheered by strangers. She then wonders why we are any less kind to ourselves when we grow up (Godwin, 2024). Godwin suggests we convert every stutter with a toddler into evidence of a failing, whereas it is actually evidence of progress (Godwin, 2024). It also echoes Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer’s Progress Principle, where one of the most powerful motivators is not the “Eureka!” moment but making steady progress, making headway, and moving forward (Godwin, 2024). Godwin notes success can generate an “upward spiral” that increases confidence that forward movement is possible even when the goal is far off (Godwin, 2024).
This finding is conducive to people’s inner battles. Many battles are invisible: anxiety, fatigue, procrastination, absence of self-confidence, feelings of shame, anhedonia, and high standards. One psychological way to look at the meaning of small wins is that they overcome paralysis. A lifestyle article on “tiny wins,” although less definitive than others, notably reports that doing a small task can reduce the frustration associated with uncompleted work (which can be attributed to the Zeigarnik effect), and seeing visible progress, such as a list of previous accomplishments, makes it easier for people to feel like they are not “only thinking” of success (“The Psychology of Tiny Wins”, n.d.). Small wins also relate to self-efficacy, or confidence to change and take action. Thus, a small win is more than a productive act. It confirms the lack of reason for pessimism.
A step forward is also not an isolated act. An act of advance can require greater sacrifices. In Pakistan, this is seen most in ways gender, class and family play out. Success stories like a young woman filling out a college form against the wishes of her parents, a son putting food on his parents’ table while building his career, a student struggling to finish her degree despite a lack of money, a man choosing a career with less certainty but more integrity over a more certain profession — all these are examples. They are consequential forms of persistence. To do otherwise is to see success without being selective. Tropes of success don’t come from the same place; a civil society should recognise this, too.
If success has for a time been obscured by social dynamics, then in sport, it is social media. We see pictures of and read about and talk about social institution milestones such as scholarships, marriages, trips, jobs, “glow-ups”, engagements and achievements, as if life were a comet’s tail. In turn, we feel like we are lagging, slow or broken. But comparing is a cruel and unfair mistress because it makes visible and equal an unequal experience. It compares our back room to another’s spot. It holds allegiance to gravity. The theory of small wins preserves us from this tyranny by offering a perspective on process, context, and positive growth that allows us to see past the glad hand and the gavel.
To reclaim success is not to celebrate timidity. It is to humanise it. Big dreams matter. Excellence matters. Achievement matters. But if the only way that we can publicly prove that we have value is to succeed, then our conception of life is degraded and impoverished. A less deluded view of achievement would be one that has room for being as well as for doing, for trying as well as for succeeding, and for dignity as well as for success. It would recognise that there are larger victories in life which are unseen because they are unseen; they are victories in the unseen places of character building: in resilience, in endurance, in accepting adversity without losing our humanity, and in retaining hope when it is unreasonable.
Perhaps this is the gift of small wins, after all: not a small win after all, but a larger victory. It asks us to consider the invisible labour whereby as humans, we make and make and make our lives invisibly. It invites us to consider that our life is not just but also of return. So perhaps we go back to the invisible person in the room, waiting for the lights to come back on, to open the book again, to (albeit silently) persist. The world might not call it success. But then the world has been too small.