I feel and function much better when I have access to a giant drinking vessel.

My current mega-chalice is a 30-ounce, stainless-steel, double-walled travel mug that I bought for about $15 late last-year, and though it’s laughably big compared to normal cups people typically use around the house, but I find that I drink far more water when I don’t have to get up for refills as often, and thus, the tumbler’s large size is a true asset.

Because I don’t feel subconsciously constrained by a tiny, thimble-sized serving, I drink a lot more water. This, in turn, means I’m very seldom dehydrated: an issue that afflicts way more of us than you might suspect, and which inflicts all kinds of physical and neurological downsides.

The small investment I made in that cup, then, has led to outsized benefits.

The same is true with some of the small habits I’ve introduced into my day: things that, on their face, seem like nothing, but in aggregate, over time, add up to far more than the sum of the time and effort invested.

Every time I receive a donation for my work, for instance, I say the name of the person who made that donation out loud, along with a thank-you, which reinforces that moment in my mind.

It’s a gratitude practice that takes essentially no time, but it 1. reminds me of how fortunate I am to make my living creating things that people enjoy enough that they sometimes give me money, even when they don’t have to, and 2. makes me feel more connected to the people on the other end of what I produce.

One of the most valuable investments of time I’ve ever made was learning the bare-basic fundamentals of cooking, several years ago.

I committed to a year of no ready-made meals, and though I ate-out at restaurants two or three times over the course of that year, for social reasons, I stuck to that commitment, despite not knowing how to cook much of anything, going in.

The early days of that project were pretty grim, but each tiny skill learned—how to handle a chef’s knife, how to use the oven properly, how to make a simple roux—compounded, leading to more discoveries, more skills learned, and far better meals, over time.

Some individual lessons stand out as significant moments in my overall cooking education, and it’s boggling to me how much better my life became as a result of learning how to bake very simple bread and how to roast vegetables with olive oil, salt, and garlic.

Tiny investments, major dividends.

I find that small investments in meta-skills, too, can bear prodigious fruit, at times; especially when they’re related to learning or communication.

It’s taken a very long time to get where I am with my public speaking career, but watching a video of myself and deciding that I needed to focus on using fewer filler words, like “um” and “so” and “like,” improved the calibre of my speaking performances many-fold, despite taking a relatively small amount of time to actually implement.

Realizing that I learn best when I can put what I’m trying to understand into broader context, too, has helped me pick things up much faster than I did before, as has recognizing that I tend to do better when I have multiple sources to learn from—three books and an asynchronous online course, for instance—rather than just one.

Life is filled with tiny opportunities: some that will result in nothing at all, but some that will turn out to be significant investments, leading to major lifestyle, personal, or professional upgrades, despite the minuscule effort it took to make them.

Not every cup acquisition will be life-changing, and not every skill you learn will land you on a more favorable personal or professional path.

But some of them will. And the more tiny, broadly beneficial tweaks we make, the more effort we invest in minor improvements to our lives and ourselves, the more likely outsized positive outcomes become.

If you enjoyed this essay and if you’re able to, consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.