#1307 The +1% Math

In our last +1, we talked about Brian Cain’s wisdom on The 1% Intention.

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?

How can YOU invest just 1% of your day into getting 1% better Today?

Think about it.

And…

As you do, let’s think about some James Clear wisdom on the subject to bring the point home—because the math is CRAZY.

Actually…

Before we go there…

I have to say that I want your potential investment of 1% of your day into HEROIC to be (goosebumps) at least considered as one of the highest-leverage things you could do to improve your life 1%.

14 minutes and 24 seconds.

Choose your own adventure with how you want to split that up in the app.

Of course, you can get “more wisdom in less time” (Theory!) via these +1s, the PhilosophersNotes, 101s, Basic Training and Mastery Series to make sure you have the right strategies.

And, if you feel so inspired, I think you’d be wise to consider a few minutes invested into the Target PRACTICE side of things as this will, in my opinion, always be THE HIGHEST LEVERAGE thing you can do as committing to being our best selves then actually doing the things that help us close the gap between who we’re capable of being and who we’re actually being is how we’ll move from Theory to PRACTICE to Mastery Together TODAY.

Again, early research shows that spending just a few minutes a day using the Heroic app to hit just 3+ Heroic Targets in your Big 3 protocol can help you boost your Energy by 40%, your Productivity by 20% and your connection by 15%.

So…

LET’S GO, HERO!!!

Now…

Back to the math…

Here’s how James puts it in 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 our Notes on Atomic Habits, 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. (Hah. 🤓)

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

Let’s use 1% of our day to +1%.

TODAY.