Losing the Trees to the Forest: The Importance of Small Victories

The Winding Road to Nowhere

I’ve been at this writing thing for a few years now, but am I any closer to accomplishing my goal than when I started? Have I done anything worth anything? Or is it all just noise in a void?

What if I’m just doomed to fail? What if sticking to this dream was just some kind of massive calculation for a problem I have yet to solve? Is it really worth pressing onward just to keep on failing?

For all my talk of gratitude and optimism, thoughts like those are never too far away. It’s normal to be faced with doubt every once in a while, but enough misfortune, loneliness, and inability to trust yourself to know which way is up, and those mental parasites will come creeping from the corner to drag you into a psychological quagmire.

As a writer, the one thing I fear most is succumbing to stagnation and losing my grasp on who I am, what I need to do, and where I need to go, and there are times where I feel awfully close to that nightmare being realized. It’s like being stuck on the winding road to Nowhere, Kansas that passes deep through Identity Crisis, Ohio and ends at It Was All Meaningless, Illinois.

Left unaddressed, this mental plague will spin you into a self-sustaining loop of fatigue and frustration and you feel endlessly stuck in the mud with no amount of pushing or pulling able to set you free. It’s worse than just failure: it’s depression, decay, degeneration. It may not be enough to tug you away from your ambitions, but that won’t take away all the mental and spiritual hurting it puts on you.

Luckily, there is no greater sword against psychological threats to ourselves than awareness of them. From there, the next step is to pull back the bleak curtain and find there is more to this journey than mere tangible accomplishments.

Rediscovering the Trees

There’s an old, ubiquitous saying about losing the forest for the trees, meant to symbolize the importance of not losing the bigger picture on the road you take, but it feels important to speak up for the people who suffer from the opposite: the people who see nothing BUT the bigger picture and end up losing sight of the trees that compose the forest.

Every single story begins with a word, every word a letter, every letter an idea, and every idea a thought.

Worrying solely about the final product while you’re still in the outline or drafting phase will just put you in a vicious cycle of analysis paralysis and self-doubt, regardless of whether or not you’re writing for school, work, passion, or fun. The same goes for songwriting and even creative pursuits beyond old-fashioned literature. Heck, who’s to say this doesn’t even apply in some minor way in professions beyond the liberal arts like engineering and traditional business operation?

As important as it is to remember there is a greater mission (professional or personal) on the horizon, don’t let that hold you hostage; recognize that each individual step is important in its own right, both to the establishment of your foundation and the learning of key lessons that will help your future self. No matter what happens or how hard or slow things get, hold tight the things and experiences that drove you to pursue this destiny in the first place and put yourself in a position where you can recall what it is that gives you that vital sense of fulfillment.

Find Hidden Victories…

When one thinks of a victory, one will likely think of a definitive, material triumph over adversity or adversaries, and for some, it’s easy to feel like anything short of dominating success is objective failure.

What are the odds that you’re succeeding in ways you don’t even realize? Just because you planned to write a thousand words in a week and didn’t meet that goal doesn’t devalue whatever it is you did end up writing. Maybe you aren’t going home with the gold, or the silver, or even a smiley face sticker. The fact you showed up at all and gave it your earnest effort means you were able to stand proud alongside those who did.

Daring to try means more than just putting yourself out there to try and win something. Through your actions, you successfully influenced the world around you as well as yourself to create something that is truly yours.

The frequency and depth of your failures should never overshadow the unsung accomplishments of what you achieved thanks to your own effort. Even if you feel like the only one who ever has your back, it’s worth recognizing the courage it took to try and the will you had to push yourself as far as you did.

Learn From Defeat…

Knowing the value of an attempt is important, but there’s a reason so much as a single stumble on your journey can end up haunting you far more consistently. Whether it manifests as “failure,” “loss,” “defeat,” etc., the absence of success can be quite tough to deal with. If its grievous and humiliating enough, the only thing you might take away from the experience is that you should never have tried and should never try again.

But look past defeat as a mere label. Dig a little deeper and try to think about what happened in terms of more than just what was lost. After all, even a net negative isn’t always nothing but negative.

If you made a big mistake, you now have some insight regarding the things you probably shouldn’t do, or at least how you can do it just a bit better next time. If someone is doing something better than you, be it in a competition or just in general, then you can consider them a point of reference and learn from their mindset, mentality, etc. that you can account for and even incorporate into your own way of doing things (especially if you choose to reach out and see if there’s something they can do to help you improve. After all, nobody said you had to do any of that on your own). If something you put your whole heart into just didn’t make its way into the hearts and minds of the public, understand that a lack of eyes upon you will never steal away all the work you put in, and there may be a day yet where it finally gets the recognition it deserves.

What matters most in the wake of a failure is not allowing yourself to get stuck on the failure itself, lest you find yourself in all kinds of familiar mental traps. Overthink it and you’ll get caught in a terminal case of analysis paralysis, perpetually holding yourself up with hypotheticals and planning rather than improving in any practical sense. On the other hand, overdoing it in the wake of frustration as the result of short-sighted attempts at fault compensation can burn your brain out and lead you headfirst into a psychological meltdown. If you find yourself on the doorstep of any kind of toxic mentality, it’s on you to step back, take a deep breath or three, and give yourself a much-needed mental reset before getting back to it.

…And Don’t Give Up!

Living in an age of gratification has lead to the idolization of the end result, leading us to dark places in the wake of forgetting that life is a bumpy ride regardless of the route we take. I’ve seen the effects well enough while working in education, my heart breaking every time a saw a kid I considered full of potential get caught plagiarizing or cheating because they felt the grade they got was more important than the lesson learned. Worse to see still are the self-declared no-hopers who don’t even give an ounce of effort because they either see no future for themselves or simply prefer the instant joys of games and gossip.

It's seeing them that helped me find the strength to recognize that drowning myself in hopeless thoughts was no better than those young men and women simply throwing their lives away and remind me that there is no flop or breakdown so damning that cannot be overcome with enough comprehension and tenacity.

If you’ve got an honest reason to move on from a dream, then by all means, follow your heart. Lack of honest passion makes chasing a goal a hollow, if not toxic experience, and it’s a different but equal kind of courage to know when it’s time to walk away to find and follow what it is that will make you truly happy.

However, if there’s a part of you that just can’t get up, that screams within you, “This is what I want to do and who I want to be,” then it’s not worth letting failure or fear of failure be the insurmountable gap between you and your calling. Do whatever you gotta do and meet whoever you gotta meet so that win or lose, you’ll have sparks flying.

As I said before, all things begin as a single thought, but no more does it take to see the smallest ember swell into a mighty blaze.