Big wins should be celebrated. They are a reflection of your dedication to whatever the craft may be that has led to the completion of your goal. However, although wins need to be celebrated, basking in their glory for too long can take your edge off and lead to complacency. Make sure that living off of your past glory doesn’t become what you’re best known for.
One hit wonders
There is a saying in the music industry when there is a band or singer that puts out a hit and then mysteriously disappears out of the limelight. We call these people “one hit wonders”. There are countless examples of them. They top the billboard hot 100 with their hit song of the summer and you never hear another song of theirs again. This is a perfect example of letting big wins create complacency. While there might be the occasion when the hit is so big that the one song might be played for generations, they’ll never be known as a great artist or band. They’ll be known as the band or singer who got lucky, struck a chord of genius, and created one great song! Their legacy is one of wonders of what could have been.
This is all an analogy for what happens when you let one huge victory allow you to become complacent. For me, it’s about legacy. It’s about creating a track record of success over time so I can keep striving for bigger goals. Growth and legacy are what motivates me more so than the high I experience from an achievement. Depending on your individual goals, one massive success might be enough for you to ride for the rest of your life happily. For the truly exceptional who are leaders, their goal is to continuously achieve, accomplish, and create a legacy to leave behind.
Snowball wins instead of sitting on them
A big win can be the beginning of what I call the snowball effect of your momentum. One major success might create that snowball you’re looking for. It won’t be until subsequent successes that the snowball will begin to roll down the hill and pick up steam. Eventually, if you keep at it, that snowball will continue to grow and create an avalanche of success which represents your legacy.
A perfect example of this is acquiring real estate to add to a rental portfolio. Some people bask in the glory of their first deal, but the person who is looking to leave a legacy behind will use their lessons from their first deal to figure out new ways to do it again and again. Eventually, they will develop a process to scale, acquire more doors, eventually multi unit buildings, and maybe even apartment complexes. It all starts with the first big win and then snowballs from there if you give it the energy it needs to do so. Getting complacent will stop the snowball in its tracks and leave you stagnate at the level you currently reside.
Celebrate but look forward
The purpose of this blog is by no means to tell you to not celebrate your wins. If you didn’t celebrate wins, then what would be the good of achieving them? Big wins are hard to come by, and you’ll experience many, many failures before you achieve a big win. However, don’t get caught up in the glory for too long. Build off your wins immediately or you can find yourself at square one later on asking yourself what happened.
A good example of this is a top realtor at a brokerage. Maybe they have a month where they sell 5 listings and make $60,000. Massive win! They go to Vegas for a week or two to celebrate and spend a lot of their money quickly. They come home having lost their momentum. They haven’t called their prospects in 2 weeks and now they’re colder leads that’ll need to be reinvigorated again. They don’t have any new business coming in and now they have to work twice as hard to get it because they have to create new momentum. If they had continued their snowballing momentum from their big month, they would have been able to keep up with the leads in their pipeline, get referrals from their previous sellers, and possibly make more money the next month and so on! Instead, they got caught up in their big month and let it go to waste.
There is nothing wrong with going away and spending time with your family, but you need to have your systems and processes in place beforehand so that you can continue your momentum and make sure it isn’t solely dependent on you and your efforts. In the agent example, it would have been advantageous for them to continue their snowball for another few months, and eventually create a team underneath them within their brokerage. This would allow them to remove some of the responsibility to create new business from themselves and snowball their business even further.
Celebrate big wins, but be weary of the traps that may spring if you allow yourself to bask in their glory for too long. Don’t get complacent!