Build on Your Wins Instead of Your Losses

Practical tips and Stoic wisdom that help you focus less on the negative and more on the positive

Your life would get better if you focused on your good decisions as much as you focus on your bad ones.

Ever find yourself thinking purely about all the mistakes you’ve? You’re not the only one. As humans, we tend to focus on negative events—the losses over the wins, the failures over the good decisions. This tendency is called “negativity bias,” meaning negative events and emotions have a stronger impact on our psychological state than positive ones.

This is something I found myself doing often—dwelling on all the bad decisions I’ve made (or thought I’d made) and overlooking the good ones.

Marcus Aurelius once said, “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”

In 2024 I found myself reading Matthew McConaughey’s book Greenlights. In his book he talks about how reverse engineering your successes is just as important as reflecting on your mistakes.

We frequently replay our mistakes long after they happen, letting them become overwhelming. However, it’s equally important to focus on what you’ve done right. By dissecting your successes, you can see exactly how you achieved them—and by recognizing more of your “wins,” you’ll be better equipped to replicate them.

The next time you get a win or feel proud of something you’ve done, pause and reflect on how it happened. Don’t just chalk it up to luck—acknowledge the effort and circumstances that brought you there.

Epictetus famously said, “We are disturbed not by things, but by the views which we take of them.”

So, I encourage you to consider what you’ve done right—those moments when things went well.

How did you get there?

Even “luck” isn’t purely random when you’re actively working toward your goal. People might say, “You just got lucky,” but you were really in the right place at the right time because you were doing the work that put you there.

I love the story comedian Matt Rife tells about his journey to success. Some might consider him lucky because he’s now so popular. But people don’t see the years and years of hard work he poured in before that one viral video changed his career.

Viktor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

So remember, your wins are just as important to contemplate as your losses. Luck often comes as a result of the effort you put in.

If you need a simple way to track your achievements, try jotting down three small “wins” each day. Over time, you’ll retrain your brain to look for the positive, instead of dwelling on the negative.