The Misery of Linear Celebration of Accomplishments

Don’t celebrate in a linear fashion, otherwise celebrations will slow down to near non-existence. Celebrate the journey with random milestones, ones that aren’t tied to any particular destination.

It’s a natural tendency to celebrate things in a linear fashion. Say you have a youtube channel, so you’d celebrate the 1st view, 10th, 100th, 1,000th, 10,000th, 100,000th, 1,000,000th and so long. Except, this is a terrible idea. Look at how much each increment increases by. Progressively, celebration becomes few and far between. Then what motivation would be left? We constantly get bombarded news of overnight success, or fast rising stars. Too bad that’s not the same for all of us. There’s an availability bias on fast rising stars, everyone wants to report on that. It took Gigguk, the anime youtber, 10 years to reach 1 million subs. In contrast, it took a vtuber a few months to hit 400k. There isn’t as much fanfare for Gigguk’s long and arduous journey. So media gives the illusion of constant overnight success, instead of the slow slow and tedious road towards success.

  With a linear celebration and the illusion of instant success, we’ll all be constant depressed at our slow progress. Instead, celebrate incremental progress and the milestones. Don’t make things about some arbitrary number eons away. Make it small and constant. Instead of 1,000 to 10,000, make it each 1,000 people. Or create our own goals, things that matter and mean something for us. Celebrate along the journey, constantly, to feel it’s a path worth taking, to feel the pride and joy of our accomplishments. Don’t let some random number dictate whether we should celebrate something we take pride in. Don’t let those numbers halt all sense of feeling it reaching it.

  Even for my own podcast and blog, I don’t look at the numbers. No matter what the number is, I’d be disappointed it’s so low. So instead, I celebrate the small things, an interesting topic that episode, how my recording and vocals have improved, or improving my description by learning from other podcasts. In reality, it’s likely that I’ll never earn enough from the podcast or blog to sustain myself. I’ll never have millions upon millions of daily downloads like Joe Rogan. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t have a cake at the 50th episode, to celebrate the long and arduous journey thus far. So take joy in what we do, slowly, surely, and do it constantly with small, non-linear milestones.