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Thank you for reading the Brainwaves newsletter. I’m Drew Jackson, your content curator, and today I’m writing about continuous self-improvement. Let’s dive in.

Before we explore today's topic, a quick reminder: Brainwaves is published every Wednesday, covering a range of subjects including venture capital, economics, space, energy, intellectual property, philosophy, and more.

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Credit Harvard Business Review

The Power of 1%

Thesis: Continuous self-improvement is critical to personal growth, yet it’s a difficult concept for many. The idea of 1% improvement makes change and accomplishing goals much more achievable. Through compounding, 1% (or more/less) changes grow to become exponential changes over time.

I’m a huge believer in the idea of 1% changes—the idea that you should be continuously striving for self-improvement. I’ve used this methodology to enact large changes in my life through small improvements each day, and I’m very excited to explain this to you.

Many of you have probably already heard of this idea as it’s quite popular. I encourage you to continue reading as I provide some unique viewpoints previously not considered in the frameworks you’ve probably seen before.

To those that aren’t familiar with the idea of 1%, it’s the idea that if you try to be 1% better each day than you were the day before. It’s a very powerful idea, one that I’ll dissect today to show you how small changes create large impacts over time.

Credit Anchor Advisors

Savings Accounts, the Stock Market, and Habits

A key idea behind the power of 1% is the word compounding.

Throughout your schooling you may have heard of the terms “simple” and “compounding” when it comes to growth or interest, but what do they mean in the context of 1%?

Simple interest is the idea that you take your interest percentage (let’s say 10% for easy math) and your principal amount (let’s say $100 for easy math) and multiply them each year to get your interest amount (it remains at a fixed amount for each year). So in year 1, you would get $10 in interest (for a total of $110 in the account). In year 2 you would get $10 in interest (for a total of $120 in the account) and so on.

Compound interest is the idea that you take your interest percentage (let’s say 10% for easy math) and your principal amount (let’s say $100 for easy math) and multiply them each year to get that year’s interest amount. So in year 1, you would get $10 in interest (for a total of $110 in the account). In year 2 you would get $11 ($110 * 10%), for a total of $121 in the account) and so on.

Simple interest pertains to linear, straight growth, whereas compound interest pertains to exponential, increasing growth.

To relate this back to our idea of 1%, simple growth would say that you would grow 1% every day based on your very initial day’s balance/situation and that amount would remain constant every day.

In a compounding scenario, you would grow each day based on the previous day’s ending balance/situation. This means that you can grow off past growth, not just the past balance.

Credit Thrive Hot Yoga

Where Does the Idea of 1% Come From?

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, was one of the main distributors of the daily 1% improvement mindset. He emphasizes the power of small, consistent changes over time. By focusing on incremental progress, individuals can avoid burnout, maintain motivation, and achieve sustainable results.

When you research/hear about the idea of 1% improvements (continuous improvements), many use the story about Sir Dave Brailsford, a British cycling team coach who strived to implement small, incremental changes to drastically improve their performance.

For example, some of the improvements were redesigning their bike seats to be more comfortable. They got better mattresses to improve the quality of their sleep. They painted the inside of their team truck white to see any dust that might creep in and affect the performance of their bike tires. They rubbed alcohol on their tires to make them rough for a better grip. They made riders wear electrically heated shorts to maintain an ideal thigh muscle temperature while riding. They hired a surgeon to teach riders about the best way to wash hands to reduce the chances of getting a cold or infection. They tried different types of massage gel to identify which one recovers the muscles faster.

These improvements led the British cycling team to win 12 gold medals and 7 out of the 10 events at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. They did even better at the London Olympics and a British cyclist also won the Tour de France.

How Powerful is 1%

1% may not seem like much, but considering the compounding factor and the number of compounding periods (every day), it quickly grows to be a large sum.

Below is a graph of 1% being compounded over the course of 1 year. As you can see, if you were to improve your life by 1% each day for 365 days, you would be over 37 times better off than where you started.

If this wasn’t crazy enough, here’s a table of how much you would be better off if you started improving your life by 1% each day:

This compounding almost feels fake. If someone came up to you on the street and told you that by following one simple thing, you could be 73 million times better off in 5 years, you would probably laugh at them.

But, the solution does exist. It’s all about being 1% better each day.

Credit KPMG

Is It Actually Possible to Be 1% Better Every Day?

When I picked this topic initially, I would have totally agreed with the following statement: “It’s possible to be 1% better every day for 5 years.”

But, now I think about it this is a large task to accomplish. Let me break it down for you.

Say you wanted to become 1% better today, how would you do that? Let’s start with weight-lifting for an easy example. Say yesterday you lifted 100 pounds. So if you were going to be 1% better you may choose to lift 101 pounds today.

But, taking a step back, did that make you 1% better as a whole? Not necessarily. Say out of your 24 hours, you regularly lift weights for 1 hour of them, so it represents 1/24th of your life daily. If you were to get 1% better at weightlifting, your entire life would get 1% * 1/24 better, meaning your life as a whole would only be about 0.04% better.

To use our example, if you were actually trying to get your life 1% better by lifting more weight, you would have to lift 24 more pounds (or be 24% better over the course of 1/24th of your life to be a total of 1% better that day).

When you break it down like that, it’s a lot more difficult to be continuously better through improvements in things you don’t do for very long periods of your day. If you’re breaking your life down into 1% chunks, 1% of your 24 hours would mean around 15 minutes.

Here’s a table breaking this down further:

As you can see, the more you do something, the less percentage you need to be better at it to be overall 1% better each day. If you sleep for 8 hours, you only need to get 3% better at sleeping to be 1% better for that day. I hope all of that math makes sense.

To reiterate, the point I’m trying to make here is that being 1% better (as a whole) each day is a different point than being 1% better at something in your life each day.

If that were the case, and for math’s sake let’s say you do that thing for 1 hour each day and you were going to be 1% better each day, over 1 year you would end up 16% better than you were, over 5 years you would end up around 2 times better than you started, and over 20 years you would end up around 20 times better than you started.

So as you can see, there’s a huge difference between being 1% better as a whole each day and being 1% better at one facet of your life each day.

Back to my original qualms with this issue, I think it’s extremely difficult to continuously be 1% better as a whole, but I think it’s easy to be 1% better at one facet of your life.

The one thing I will say is that this process rewards compounding, so if you put in more effort, that effort will be rewarded significantly over time–meaning that incremental efforts are rewarded (so that extra rep or extra minute seriously matters).

Credit Inc. Magazine

What Does Being 1% Better Each Day Mean?

As I explained above, being 1% better as a whole is difficult, especially for activities you don’t do as much, but here are some examples:

• Make your sleep quality 3% better (if you sleep 8 hours)
• Be 3% more productive at work (if you work 8 hours); Be 6% more productive at work (if you work 4 hours)
• Be 3% more efficient with your time outside of work/sleep (assuming that’s around 8 hours)
• Play a soccer game 10% better than last time (assuming that’s around 2 hours)

As you can see, as the time gets shorter, it gets much more difficult to find ways to be significantly better in a significantly shorter time frame.

As for being 1% better at one facet of your life, there are many more examples:

• Exercise: Increase workout duration by 1% or add 1% more reps.
• Nutrition: Add 1% more serving of vegetables or fruits to your diet.
• Hydration: Increase water intake by 1%.
• Sleep: Aim for 1% more quality sleep.
• Posture: Be mindful of posture throughout the day to make your posture 1% better.
• Strength training: Increase your lifting weight by 1%.
• Meditation: Practice mindfulness for 1% more time.
• Learning: Dedicate 1% of your day to learn something new.
• Digital detox: Reduce screen time by 1%.

Credit HavingTime

Continuous Improvement

The power of 1% refers to a process of continuous improvement. Yet, continuous improvement can mean a variety of different things. A continuous improvement process is an ongoing effort to improve—meaning either incremental improvements over time or a building to make a breakthrough improvement all at once.

In a business-focused article, Wikipedia defines the features of the continual improvement process as the following:

While these are business-focused, they can still apply to our self-improvement. For instance, I would summarize them as the following:

• Feedback: Continual self-reflection to figure out what you need to improve on
• Efficiency: Identify, reduce, and eventually eliminate ways in which you could be better
• Evolution: Incremental, continual improvement rather than expecting large portions of progression

Continuous self-improvement is a lifelong journey dedicated to personal growth and development, involving many principles:

• Lifelong learning: A commitment to acquiring new knowledge and skills throughout life.
• Growth mindset: Believing that abilities and intelligence can be developed through dedication and hard work.
• Self-awareness: Understanding one's strengths, weaknesses, values, and goals.
• Goal setting: Establishing clear and achievable objectives to guide progress.
• Habit formation: Developing positive habits that support personal growth.
• Resilience: Building the capacity to overcome challenges and setbacks.

In all of these, there are opportunities to be 1% better.

Credit Becoming Minimalist

Continuously Strive To Be Better

No matter how you interpret the 1% rule (either 1% total improvement or 1% improvement on some aspect of your life), either way, the messaging is the same: every day, you should be striving to be better than you were the previous day (no matter how big that effort is).

The important factor here is compounding—little effort over time can create big changes. Because of this compounding, making an extra effort (doing an extra 1 minute of exercise, doing 1 more rep, etc.) over time will make a huge difference.

The power of addition (improving yourself by 1% every day) also has an equally powerful opposite: the power of subtraction. Instead of focusing solely on adding new things, people wanting to make 1% improvements can also do so by eliminating inefficiencies or distractions.

Lao Tzu, a Chinese philosopher, wrote “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Approaching your goals using the rule of 1% makes goals less overwhelming. We often convince ourselves that change is only worthwhile if it’s a big goal. Yet, by breaking it down into 1% improvements—1% steps—we can make large improvements more easily and effectively.

See you Saturday for The Saturday Morning Newsletter,

Drew Jackson

Twitter: @brainwavesdotme

Email: brainwaves.me@gmail.com

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