One Percent Better

Mr. Big is a burned-out teacher. Sunny is his mentor. She works in the cafeteria and “brings the juice!” all day every day. Her #1 lesson and the focal point of the entire book?

Let me repeat the quote from the intro we just reviewed...

“The best place to start is to intentionally invest 1% of your day into yourself and become a better version of you today than you were yesterday. Then wake up tomorrow and do the same thing. Rinse and repeat. It’s actually quite simple.”

Now, let’s review the math.

There are 24 hours in a day. 60 minutes per hour. That’s 1,440 minutes per day.

1% of that?

14 minutes and 24 seconds.

1% of your day.

Here’s the question: What’s the #1 thing you KNOW you could be doing that, if you spent just 1% of your day doing it, would have THE most positive impact in your life?

Seriously. What is it?

1% of your day meditating is 14 minutes and 24 seconds of meditation.

Would that change your life?

How about 1% of your day training? Or 1% of your day with ZERO technology spent 101% focused on being present with your significant other and/or kids?

Or how about investing 1% of your day reflecting on your life purpose? Or LIVING more on purpose—doing the things you KNOW you could be doing for just 14 minutes and 24 seconds TODAY?

+1%. +1%. +1%

Tiny investments that lead to tiny gains. That adds up. Fast.

Let’s bring in some other great teachers for their wisdom on the mathematics of a day and small, incremental gains aggregated and compounded over an extended period of time.

We’ll start with Robin Sharma then talk about James Clear.

In The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Robin Sharma tells us to go ALL IN for just ONE MONTH and see just how much we can change our lives.

He tells us: “Six hundred and seventy-two hours of inner work to profoundly improve every waking moment of the rest of your life is quite a bargain, don’t you think? Investing in yourself is the best investment you will ever make. It will not only improve your life, it will improve the lives of all those around you.”

Then there’s some James Clear wisdom from his brilliant book Atomic Habits.

He tells us: “It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.

Meanwhile, improving 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable— but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.”

1% gains aggregated and compounded for a year equals an astonishing 37x improvement.

And... As I say in that Note, create a spreadsheet (like this) and run that 1% daily improvement out for another year. Guess what? After two years, you’re not 74 times better. You’re now 1,400 (!!) times better.

Why stop there? Run it out another year. After the third year of aggregating and compounding those 1% gains, you’re now 53,405 times better. Four years? You’re 2,017,828 times better. Five years? You’re 76,240,507 times better.

Shall we run it 10 years out? OK. Let’s. Result: Well, on day 3,472 we hit our last normal number. We’re 998,822,690,009,590 times better. (That’s nearly a quadrillion times better by the way.) Then we break our Google Spreadsheet by day 3,650 when we’re at 5.87074E+15. I don’t even know what that means but I assume it’s even more zeroes. lol.

All that to say: Little things matter. A lot. Especially when we compound them over time.

Let’s +1. TODAY.

Are you mindlessly *going* through the motions or are you deliberately GROWING through the motions—consistently dominating your highest-leverage habits so you can make your prior best your new baseline and stay curious about what you’re truly capable of?

Remember: It’s the beginning that’s always the hardest part.

Which is why Aristotle tells us: “By common consent, the beginning is more than half the whole task, and throws a flood of light on many of the aspects of the inquiry.”

It’s also why Greg Krech puts it this way in The Art of Taking Action: “Here’s Newton’s First Law of Physics: An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by some outside force.

Sir Isaac Newton was one of the most extraordinary intellects of his time. He realized that when an object is at rest it will basically stay at rest unless something influences it. It’s also true that when an object is in motion it will basically stay in motion. This is what we refer to as momentum. This is why small steps can be so valuable. They offer momentum at a fairly low cost. In other words, it takes very little effort to create momentum. One pushup, one dish washed, one photo organized, one paragraph written in your novel-to-be. Have you gone very far? No. Do you now have momentum? Yes! And once you have momentum (you are in motion), you are more likely to continue—in motion.”

It’s also why BJ Fogg tells us we need to make our habits TINY and why he named his book Tiny Habits. And why James Clear echoes that in his ATOMIC Habits. And Stephen Guise echoes all that wisdom in Mini Habits.

Want to dominate your day? Start small. Make it easy to win. Then +1 all day every day.

Especially TODAY.

P.S. Darren Hardy echoes all this wisdom in HIS great book The Compound Effect where he tells us: “The same thing happens when a rocket ship launches. The space shuttle uses more fuel during the first few minutes of its flight than it does the rest of the entire trip. Why? Because it has to break free from the pull of gravity. Once it does, it can glide in orbit. The hard part? Getting off the ground. Your old ways and your old conditioning are just like the inertia of the merry-go-round or the pull of gravity. Everything just wants to stay at rest. You’ll need a lot of energy to break your inertia and get your new enterprise under way. But once you get momentum, you will be hard to stop—virtually unbeatable—even though you’re now putting out considerably less effort while receiving greater results.”

Hardy is also the one who helped me get super-clear on the power of “A.M. and P.M. Bookends.”

Here’s how he puts THAT: “The key to becoming world-class in your endeavors is to build your performance around world-class routines. It can be difficult, even futile, to predict or control what will show up in the middle of your workday. But you can almost always control how your day starts and ends. I have routines for both.”

Check out our Mastery Series for more on how to create Masterpiece Days!

Want to become legendary and tap into your ultimate potential?

You’re not necessarily lacking the Ability. The real issue might be that you don’t have the right STRATEGY.

This was a lesson that Brian made vividly real for me and the kids when he visited recently.

How he’d do it? He showed us how to break an arrow with our neck and eat fire!

What’s breaking arrows with your neck and eating fire have to do with this idea? Everything.

Here’s the short story.

Brian took a wooden arrow and placed one end against the wall and the other end against his neck. Then he took a deep breath, stepped forward and SNAPPED THE ARROW in half.

Then he invited us to do it. To which we were all tempted to say: “Nope! We’re good!” (Hah.)

Then he told us, “You don’t lack the ABILITY to break the arrow with your neck. You just lack the STRATEGY on how to easily do it safely.”

Then he taught us how to do it. Then I did it. BOOM!

Same thing with eating fire. There’s a STRATEGY on how to do it. Once you know it, it’s EASY.

And, well, same thing with pretty much E V E R Y T H I N G in our lives.

BJ Fogg echoes this wisdom in Tiny Habits. He tells us: “We are not the problem. Our approach to change is. It’s a design flaw—not a personal flaw.”

Again, it’s a STRATEGY issue not an ABILITY issue.

Which brings us back to the equation A + S + GOYA = R.

Ability + Strategy + Get Off Your Anatomy and DO THE WORK if you want the results!!

You can’t just know what to do. You have to DO IT. Which is why the #1 thing we are most committed to with Heroic is helping you move from Theory to Practice to Mastery. We need to actually DO the things we know we could be doing. Not someday. TODAY.

GOYA and go dominate!!

The 3 Step Success Cycle.

We prepare. We perform. We reflect.

Let’s focus on the reflection side of things for a moment.

Note: One of the absolute best ways to see Cainer’s wisdom in action is to read this article in The Athletic on one of his clients: Cy Young Winner, Corbin Burnes.

Before working with Brian, Corbin was LITERALLY the statistically *worst* performing pitcher in Major League Baseball. Now, he’s one of the absolute most dominant.

One of the keys to his success? He’s constantly (!) working his protocol and constantly (!!!) getting better by reviewing his performance and finding little ways to optimize.

Brian describes it as “well, better, how.” The basic approach is similar to our 1-2-3 Optimizing protocol that we talk about in this +1 on Lanny Bassham’s three-step process.

1. Identify what went WELL.
2. Identify what needs work (that you can do “BETTER”).
3. Identify specifically HOW you will do things a little better next time.

Repeat.

+1. +1. +1.

All the way to the Cy Young.

Feeling any regret that you didn’t start showing up like you meant it years (or maybe decades) ago? Perfect. It is what it is. Accept reality. Use that pain as fuel to give us all you’ve got.

As John F. Kennedy once said: “I am reminded of the story of the great French Marshal Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not reach maturity for a hundred years. The Marshal replied, ‘In that case, there is no time to lose, plant it this afternoon.’”

Then there’s Seth Godin. In The Icarus Deception he tells us: “It’s too bad that so much time has been wasted, but it would be unforgivable to wait any longer. You have the ability to contribute so much. We need you, now.”

I repeat: “It’s too bad that so much time has been wasted, but it would be unforgivable to wait any longer. You have the ability to contribute so much. We need you, now.”

It’s Day 1, Hero. How will YOU get 1% better TODAY? All in. Let’s go!