Using lots of small, short-lived branches conditions you to think about your development in a new way: instead of a single, linear development process, you have

Using lots of small, short-lived branches conditions you to think about your development in a new way: instead of a single, linear development process, you have a number of parallel development efforts, and you know that only some of them will be successful. By taking full advantage of fast branch and merge operations, you train yourself to experiment with many possible implementations of the same idea, without completely losing the history of your trials.