I loved playing Subway Surfers as a kid. If you haven’t heard of it, Subway Surfers is an endless runner game where you jump over trains and dodge obstacles.

In the game, there were “power-ups” that temporarily assisted you in running further and more easily dodging obstacles, like shoes that allowed you to double-jump or a jetpack that let you fly over obstacles.

There was, however, one power-up nobody bothered to get: the point multiplier.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, success in Subway Surfers wasn’t necessarily measured by how far you run but rather by how many points you accumulated (although the two were correlated). The best Subway Surfers players in the world aimed to get the highest number of points possible, which meant that the point multiplier was actually quite important for “winning”.

Recently I’ve been stretching before sleeping. It’s a great way to wind down, as it loosens both your body and mind. Science also confirms this.

You don’t even need a long stretching routine – mine never exceeds five minutes, so it isn’t a hassle whatsoever. Despite this, I still sometimes have the urge to just go straight to sleep, especially when I’m tired – after all, what’s five minutes of stretching really going to do anyways?

However, I find that if I take those five minutes to stretch, the quality of the sleep I do get is exponentially better than whatever five extra minutes of sleep would do. Stretched-sleep is deeper and more restful sleep, leading me to feel better the next morning.

That’s the benefit of multipliers. Sometimes, it isn’t the raw number of hours put into something that produces a better result. In Subway Surfers, it isn’t really the distance ran that determines your final score. Rather, going out of your way to catch or to implement multipliers can have exponential benefits, much more than you would’ve realized.

Unfortunately, humans don’t naturally think this way. A lot of us would much rather get right to the action and not waste time with ancillary things like “multipliers”. But if I’ve learned anything from Subway Surfers, it’s that these small supporting actions can often disproportionally and positively impact our success. Cleaning your room at the onset of a new work week? Taking two minutes to organize your notes after a meeting? It makes me consider where else these multipliers exist and how we can best leverage them in our daily lives.