The Penny Problem: Why Small Wins Aren’t Enough

Why optimizing every detail is burning you out—and how to focus on the things that actually move the needle.

Author

Jon Kalis
April 08, 2025 • Read Time: 8 minutes

The Health Growth Letters is a weekly publication of tips, frameworks, and lessons to help you build a more balanced life based on faith, health, and wellness. If you’ve been forwarded this email you can subscribe here.

What’s on the agenda:

A verse I’m thinking about

I loved a book called “Don’t Follow Your Heart” by John Bloom.

It builds upon the verse in Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?”.

The book pushes back on the idea that we should always trust our feelings. Jon Bloom makes the case that our hearts can actually lead us astray, and instead, we should look to God’s Word as our guide - trusting that obeying His word is what ultimately leads to joy and freedom.

This book came to mind this week as the pastor at our church preached on “carrying the cross” and how the heaviest burdens in our lives are often the things that change us the most.

There is a quote from this book I’ve saved and come back to over and over again, and thought I’d share it with you today:

"Great wines come  from low-yielding vineyards planted in marginal climates on the poorest soils.

Though hard on the vines, these tough conditions are good for the wine, because the vines that are stressed must work harder to produce  fruit, which leads to fewer but more concentrated and  flavorful grapes. By contrast, the vines used for bulk wines have it easy. They are planted in the fertile soils in ideal climates of regions such as California’s Central Valley. Such regions are great for producing tons of grapes to  fill up the bulk fermentation tanks, but not at all great for producing the complex, intense  flavors needed to make great wine, because the vines are not stressed and the yields are way too high.

Stressed vines produce good wines.

This phenomenon of nature is also a parable for how God produces rich, complex, intense faith in his children. Because when it comes to faith, God loves good wine.All you have to do is read Hebrews 11 to see that the great wine of faith often “comes  from . . . vineyards planted in marginal climates on the poorest soils.”And James 1:2 tells us plainly that “tough conditions (“various trials”) are good for the wine” of faith. That’s because faith-vines “must work harder to produce  fruit” leading to “more concentrated and  flavorful” wines.

Now, as a faith vine striving to grow in a hard place, you might be tempted to wish you were a bulk-wine vine basking in the spiritual equivalent of California’s Central Valley. O, for that rich soil, bright sunshine, warm ocean air. Sigh. But here you are, stuck on some coldish, semi-arid hillside where the struggle is  frequent and sometimes severe.

Yes, it’s hard. But it’s not a mistake.

It’s not a punishment.

It’s not mean.

It’s simply that tough conditions produce the best faith.

Your vinedresser has planted you in a unique vineyard with uniquely stressful conditions because he intends for you to produce a uniquely  fine,  flavorful faith wine. And he will tend to your every real need . If you need some perspective today, review Hebrews 11 and the great faith-vine heroes of history. Remember what their vineyards were like and the rich faith wines that resulted. And then remember Jesus and the joy set before every vine that endures in faith.

Jon Bloom in “Don’t Follow Your Heart”

A lesson I’ve learned:
Why a quarter is better than twenty-five pennies

While it’s pretty obvious that 25 pennies and one quarter share the same worth, I think we can all agree we’d rather have one quarter than 25 pennies.

It’s just more practical.

Who wants to carry a bunch of pennies when they could have one quarter?
(honestly, who wants change in general, but bear with me)

When it comes to optimizing our finances and what we put in our pockets, we do a good job.

We know it’s easier to carry a quarter than pennies.

That its easier to put money in an index fund instead of buying individual stocks.

To manage one, or two sources of income vs trying to work three or more jobs.

But when it comes to personal growth we are pretty bad at it.

Instead of consolidating our change into quarters, we spread ourselves thinly across a pile of penny-sized tasks, decisions, and optimizations hoping they’ll somehow add up to something meaningful, but in reality, all it does is cause more work for the same or less return.

Pennies Are Distracting

We live in a world obsessed with hacks and optimizations.

Supplements.

Productivity apps.

Searching for organic foods with no seed oils or toxic ingredients.

Extravagant morning routines (I mean, did you not see the viral Ashton Hall morning routine last week?).

These small tweaks and optimizations are tempting because they give us visible, achievable, small wins. They make us feel productive, and many of them are “productive”, but optimizing these “pennies” rarely moves the needle.

Instead, it burns your attention and dilutes your impact.

It keeps your schedule full, but your work shallow. Over time, it adds up to exhaustion, not excellence all while creating an illusion of progress.

Converting Pennies into Quarters

I want to challenge you to convert the pennies of your life into quarters.

If you looked at your life and personal growth, I bet you could name 100 tasks, optimizations, or things you feel you need or want to do to improve or get better.

These are “pennies”. They have value, but spending your time on them is rarely significant. 

A 25% return on a penny is still less than a penny.

In the grand scheme of things, that optimization, though significant in isolation, does nothing on its own to provide true value. It needs to be combined with dozens of other small wins.

But what if you focused on bigger wins?

All of the pennies in your life likely fall into bigger “quarters”. These quarters are the big buckets of your life - your health, career, spiritual life, and relationships.

But here is where things get cool…

A 1% improvement on 25 cents gives you the same value as a 25% improvement on 1 cent. And I promise you… it’s way easier to get one percent better at something big than it is to get 25% better at something specific.

Thinking “how do I improve my sleep” will always yield better returns than asking “how do I improve my REM sleep”.

A deep conversation beats 10 surface-level check-ins.

One well-executed product launch beats ten half-built features.

A single focused hour often beats a full day of distracted work.

The point isn’t that pennies are useless—it’s that they shouldn’t dominate your pockets.

The Bottom Line

Success—real, meaningful success—isn’t about doing everything. It’s about doing the right things well. You don’t need 25 scattered pennies. You need a few solid quarters, big bets, or goals to give more attention and effort towards.

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