17 Oct
2026
Big goals take a long time, and the finish line can feel so far away that it's hard to keep going. The secret most people miss is that the journey is made of small wins. If you learn to notice and celebrate them, you'll find the energy to keep walking toward the big ones.
When Jonathan Anthony Burkett was a boy going through some of the darkest years of his life, he made a decision about his future. In his memoir Neglected But Undefeated, he listed his reasons for keeping going: his grandmother was still alive, he wanted to make his grandfather proud, and “I needed to accomplish at least one success in my life.”
Years later, as a young man lying on his bedroom floor with severe chest pain, the same goal came back in a prayer: “I don’t want to die until I’ve at least achieved one thing in my life.”
Notice how modest that goal is. Not fame. Not a fortune. Just one success. Sometimes the most motivating goal is the one small enough to believe in.
A small win is any real step forward: a finished task, a kept promise, a better day than yesterday. It might seem too minor to count. But small wins do important work.
They give you evidence. When you're working toward something big, doubt says you're getting nowhere. A record of small wins argues back with facts. They also build momentum. Finishing one thing makes it easier to start the next. And they keep the big goal from feeling impossible, because you can see that you are already moving.
Look closely at Jonathan's life and you'll find a string of small wins that pointed toward bigger ones.
In his first year of middle school, he and another boy scored the highest in the school on the writing part of a state test. He wrote that it gave him “bright inspiration to become a writer.” One test score didn't make him an author. It planted a seed.
As a teenager with no home of his own, he sat at a bus stop under a streetlight with a pen and a composition book and wrote poems all night, until the streetlight went off at sunrise. Nobody gave him an award for that night. It was still a win.
After his brain surgery in January 2006, he woke up on his nineteenth birthday and decided to see it as “a new year, a new life, and a new me.” Survival itself was the win that day.
Those moments added up. He went on to publish his memoir, write novels, record music and start his own businesses. The big achievements stood on top of the small ones.
Celebrating doesn't have to mean a party. It means pausing long enough to let progress register. Here are some simple ways to do it:
Celebrating small wins isn't settling. It's how you stay in the race long enough to reach the big goals. Jonathan wrote that he still has “mountains to climb and a rainbow to follow to find my pot of gold.” The mountains are still there. But every step up is worth noticing.
He also wrote that “it’s better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.” Even the attempts that don't work out count as steps, because each one teaches you something you'll use on the next try.
So when you hit a setback, don't erase the wins that came before it. Write the setback down too, along with what it taught you. A goal that takes years will include bad weeks. The people who reach those goals are usually the ones who kept counting their progress through the bad weeks instead of only during the good ones.
Tonight, write down one thing you did today that moved you forward, even a little. Tomorrow, add another. Watch what that list becomes in a month.
To read how Jonathan's small wins grew into a life of writing and music, find Neglected But Undefeated on his Books page, or visit his About page to see what he's building today.
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