Why Small Can Be Big The 1% effect

How about the relentless commitment to a strategy of the aggregation of marginal gains – the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do? It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements daily. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. We are convinced that it requires something of the magnitude of an earth-shattering improvement. Meanwhile, improving by 1% 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. Think of it in terms of compounding your small, incremental improvements – the compound interest of self-improvement. In the same way money multiples through compound interest, the effect of your 1% improvements multiplies as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact it delivers over months and years can be enormous.

This can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter much in the moment. If you save a little money, you’re still not a millionaire. If you go to the gym three days in a row, you’re still out of shape. If you study Mandarin for an hour tonight, you still haven’t learned the language. We make a few changes, but the results never seem to come quickly enough and so we slide back into our previous routine.

A single decision, a single action, is easy to dismiss. But if you can get into the mindset of daily improvement; even in the tiniest, most incremental ways, an improvement over time will be astounding. A slight change in your commitment to improvement can guide your life to a very different destination. Making the 1% choice may seem insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime, these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily improvements – not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.

If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains [or tiny losses] and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line. Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it.

Some excerpts from James Clear

“The quality of a man’s life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence.”
-Tom Landry

“Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal – a commitment to excellence – that will enable you to attain the success you seek.”
-Mario Andretti

“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”
-Vince Lombardi

“Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.”
-Pat Riley