“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle

Take a minute and sit with this quote from Aristotle today. It’s relatively easy to read it for a second and simply think “If I build good habits, I will achieve and do more good things.”

However, that is a pretty short-sighted view of the point being made by Aristotle. Why? Because what happens when your good habits fail to create good outcomes?

We can easily say that if you’ve done a lot of work to become a good sound designer or musician and you still haven’t landed that dream job or client yet – that you just need to be patient. After all, excellence begets success and that’s habitual, right?

Unfortunately, we don’t control all outcomes of our work. But, we do control our habits. Even in frustrating or failure circumstances, we can do a simple, small adjustment to turn hard times on their head in a positive way. You can do this simply through a little used technique: rewarding yourself.

A 2018 study makes a simple claim – that percieved rewards can reinforce habits. We typically understand this in a routine positive/negative sense – if you do something you don’t want to do (exercise) then reward yourself. Or, if you want to break a bad habit (social media doomscrolling) trade the trigger of the habit and give yourself a reward.

But what I want to encourage you to do is utilize this loop more, and in simple ways. If you’ve recently done an interview and not gotten the job, you should reward yourself. If you’ve struggled through a hard season and not felt overwhelmingly great about it, you should still reward yourself. If you’ve been working hard and you struggled through taking a day off, again, reward yourself.

It seems counter-intuitive to reward yourself after not achieving full success. But what we’re rewarding here isn’t the outcome, rather, the input.

If you went through a job interview, the likelihood is that you jumped past numerous fear-based barriers even if you didn’t succeed. If you’ve been going through a hard season – you’ve likely learned a lot about yourself and perseverance. And if you’ve been working so hard that it’s become uncomfortable to rest, well, you definitely need to be rewarding yourself.

When you’re asking “What should I reward myself with…?” it’s easy to overcomplicate this. Don’t do that – rewards can be simple and still be effective. But what a reward looks like is absolutely personal to you. Some folks can be rewarded by ice cream, others by going outside. Personally, I enjoy just picking up a guitar and noodling.

The benefits of this are tremendous. Ask yourself today what your next reward can be and what it should be for. Again, rewards are for inputs, not for outcomes.

And unrelated (unless buying sound effects is a reward to you – which, good on you if that’s the case!), just a reminder that Small Sci-Fi Weapons goes onsale May 2nd (two weeks from now!). Take a look and be ready if you’re interested, as only 5 copies will be available!