Planting Small Wins to Grow Boldness
Created at: October 11, 2025
Gather small victories like seeds and sow them into larger boldness. — Arundhati Roy
Seeds as a Strategy for Courage
At first glance, Roy’s image of gathering and sowing reframes boldness not as a sudden leap but as a cultivated harvest. Small victories are the seeds: portable, numerous, and varied. Like good gardeners, we choose them intentionally, prepare the soil of context, and commit to steady tending. Thus courage becomes cumulative—less a flash of heroism than a season of patient cultivation. This shift matters, because it invites ordinary participation; anyone can collect a seed. And once we see boldness as the downstream result of many planted wins, we stop waiting for perfect conditions and begin sowing wherever we stand.
The Psychology of ‘Small Wins’
Building on this metaphor, organizational scholar Karl Weick’s “Small Wins” (American Psychologist, 1984) shows how modest, concrete goals reduce anxiety and spark momentum. Each win boosts self-efficacy—Bandura’s term for the belief that one can act effectively (1977)—and that belief, in turn, enlarges the next goal. The brain rewards progress with reinforcing emotions, creating a virtuous loop. Consequently, fear shrinks to fit the newly expanded sense of capacity. Over time, a trail of minor successes forms a scaffold strong enough to support bolder moves. In this way, smallness is not the opposite of ambition; it is its engine.
Roy’s Own Soil: Literature and Dissent
Extending the idea, Roy’s oeuvre often dignifies the minute as the seed of the monumental. The God of Small Things (1997) elevates overlooked details into a force that reshapes memory and power. Her essays—“The End of Imagination” (1998) on nuclear nationalism and “The Greater Common Good” (1999) on the Narmada dam—begin with local lives and granular facts, then scale into sweeping moral arguments. Later, “Walking with the Comrades” (2011) moves from field notes to systemic critique. In each case, attentiveness to small realities germinates into public boldness. The method is consistent: gather particulars, sow them into narrative, and reap political courage.
From Individual Acts to Collective Fields
Likewise, social movements sprout from discrete actions that accumulate until they tip the landscape. Rosa Parks’s refusal in 1955 catalyzed the Montgomery bus boycott, yet it sat atop years of groundwork by local organizers. Gandhi’s Salt March (1930) began with handfuls of saline earth, then rippled into mass civil disobedience. These were not spontaneous forests; they were fields tended by communities who tallied small advances, learned, and escalated. When we see movements as ecological systems, the imperative becomes clear: keep sowing credible wins, because each one changes the soil for the next planter.
Designing Habits That Germinate Boldness
In practice, boldness grows when we deliberately structure for progress. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer’s The Progress Principle (2011) shows that noticing even minor forward motion fuels motivation. A daily “seed log” that records three small wins anchors this noticing. Next, implementation intentions—if-then plans (Gollwitzer, 1999)—preload action: “If I hesitate to email the official, then I’ll send a three-line draft.” Finally, compound keystone habits (Duhigg, 2012): a weekly debrief that converts wins into next-step commitments. Each ritual moves the seed from pocket to soil, ensuring momentum is captured rather than lost.
Seasonality, Setbacks, and Compost
Yet gardens have seasons; growth is episodic. Some seeds lie dormant until conditions align, and some crops fail. Rather than waste, setbacks become compost—material that, once processed, enriches future attempts. As Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile (2012) argues, systems can gain from disorder when feedback is digested and re-applied. The key is rhythmic review: pause, extract the learning, and replant with slight variation. In this seasonal frame, patience is not passivity; it is disciplined timing, allowing boldness to mature without forcing brittle, premature leaps.
Avoiding Hollow Harvests
Finally, not every victory is seed-worthy. Goodhart’s Law warns that when a measure becomes a target, it can distort behavior. Vanity metrics—likes, tallies, vague “visibility”—often fail to sprout into substantive change. To safeguard the garden, choose wins that align with clear values and credible next actions: a policy draft circulated, a meeting secured, a pilot launched. Then trace a visible lineage from seed to stem: this win enables that outreach, which funds this program. In doing so, we honor Roy’s counsel—our gathered victories do not merely accumulate; they root, thread, and flower into durable boldness.