How to Get 1% Better Every Day
By: Lawrence Gregory
Tags: Self Improvement, Habit Building, Success, Habits

Change is hard.​

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You already know that.​

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But did you know you can make a massive change in your life simply by improving by 1 percent every day?​

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That’s right!​

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Change doesn’t have to be big and intimidating.​

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If you’ve tried to make progress by biting off more than you can chew, there’s an easier way.​

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Don’t feel like you have to give up on building the habits you desire.​

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Let’s face it.​

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Some people are able to do and achieve more by taking big leaps. Some people can just sustain doing this.​

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Others can’t and that’s totally fine. We’re all different. ​

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You can still achieve what you wanna achieve by taking baby steps.​

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Don’t think you have to achieve some radical transformation to do this.​

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That’s the good news.​

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The bad news?​

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Just as you can improve 1 percent every day, you can also get 1 percent worse every day.​

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Over time, this leads to a rapid decline in your progress.​

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There’s a concept I love which is perfectly explained in a book called The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson.​

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Just for a second, picture this.​

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Imagine there’s the letter T that’s been rotated 90 degrees to the left. It should look something like this >>> | — —

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At the top of the vertical line, you have positive daily habits. At the bottom of the vertical line, you have negative daily habits.​

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The horizontal line displays the actual timeline.​

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Person A carries out what Jeff calls simple daily disciplines. There are small positive actions that are really easy to do. So easy that they don’t require much willpower.​

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These actions could include eating an apple a day. Reading 5 pages of an educational book. Drinking an extra glass of water. Making your bed each morning. 5 minutes of breathwork. 5 push-ups. A daily 20-minute walk.​

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You get the idea.​

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Whilst they don’t seem like they matter, these small productive actions add up over time.​

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It’s getting 1% better every day.​

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On the other hand, what if you didn’t do these things?​

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What if, instead, you ate a KFC bargain bucket every day (I’d love to do this haha!).​

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Didn’t make your bed. Didn’t put away a small sum of money each month. Didn’t take that 20-minute walk each evening.​

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Not doing these things wouldn’t make much difference in the moment of doing them. But over time, the results would begin to show in a negative way. ​

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What you’ll find is this.​

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Person A and B will be taking different actions every day. But at the beginning, you won’t be able to separate the two.​

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However, with the passage of time, the compound effect kicks in. It has to. It’s a law of nature.​

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Person A who’s carrying out the positive daily behaviors will begin to notice a big difference.​

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You’ll see on the timeline, that their arrow starts to shoot upwards towards success.​

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Person B who’s carrying out the negative daily behaviours (or what Jeff likes to call simple errors in judgment), will slowly start to see their health and life decline the more time goes on, and the more they consistently repeat those negative daily behaviours.​

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In the beginning, their life “arrow of time” travels in the same direction as person A. This is before the compound effect kicks in.​

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Here’s a short excerpt from The Slight Edge:​

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“The slight edge is relentless, and it cuts both ways. Used productively, it carries you up toward success.​

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Used carelessly, it pulls you down towards failure.​

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Simple productive actions repeated consistently over time.​

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Simple errors in judgment repeated consistently over time.​

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It’s that simple.​

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You can start with a million dollars, but if you don’t understand the slight edge, you’ll lose it all.​

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You can start with nothing but a penny, yet if you understand the slight edge, you can go anywhere in the world you want to go.”​

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What’s great about this is you have full control over your actions. You can make the desired changes to improve the quality of your life just by taking productive baby steps every day.​

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We can all do this.​

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And, what’s more, it’s never too late to be who you want to be.​

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Start small.​

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Slow and steady wins the race.​

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Repeat the small positive actions every day. Momentum will build, your confidence will grow, and you’ll feel the courage and inspiration to keep going.​

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Am I saying it’s gonna be easy?​

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Of course not. There’ll always be tough days to face. ​

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But even on these tough days, we can still take these small but EFFECTIVE actions to help us move forward.​

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Here’s to better days ahead! :-)