The Story Behind “One Percent”
Benjamin Franklin said, “Little strokes fell great oaks.” Warren Buffett advised, “Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill.” The Japanese have talked for centuries about Kaizen, which means ‘small continuous improvements.’
Instead of trying to make radical changes in a short amount of time, if you can just make small improvements – just 1% better – every day, that will gradually lead to the change you want in your life.
What does 1% a day mean? It just means get a little better each day – as simple as reading one extra page of a book per day, or watching one TED talk per day, or exercising for only five extra minutes per day. Reducing diet by a small portion every day when trying to lose weight, walking a few 1000 extra steps a day & so on.
It is hard to quantify. But the important thing to know is this – One percent better each day, compounded, is almost 3800% better each year.
A big change indeed, with just one percent.
James Clear wrote in his book, Atomic Habits –
‘I like to refer to habits as the compound interest of self-improvement, and the reason why I like that phrase is that the same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them over time. ‘
If you can get just one percent better each day, you end up 37 times better by the time you get to the end of the year.
A new day, a new week, start small.
To improve, make those little changes in your lifestyle & stay blessed forever.