4. Forget Big Goals, Focus On Small Wins

Goals are great but big ones are abstract, far away and sometimes hard to relate to. And it can take months or years to achieve something big.

The secret is small wins. Those little achievements you can see day to day. Anything that went well or worked out. Don't take that good presentation or minor achievement for granted. That's progress and paying attention to those can keep you trucking when you're feeling less than motivated.

Here's Dan:

Over the last several years of writing about this stuff I have kind of moved away from the whole moonshot, big hairy audacious goal approach, and much more towards the small win approach. What I like about small wins is they can cascade. One can lead right into another. Charles Duhigg has a very, very nice term for it, which I think is important. He calls them "keystone habits." And you know Peter Sims has written about "little bets."

Dan Pink's TED talk on motivation is one of the best:

Transcript has been read 12M times: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation/transcript?language=en