Your 1% Better Needs to Scale

1% better does not equal 1% better on a long enough timeline.

1% better every day compounds 37x by the end of the year, but 1% today is easier than 1% in 6 months.

Progress vibes by Volodymyr Hryshchenko

Aiming for 1% every day is an awesome intellectual shortcut.

Easy to remember, sounds cool, actually works in building and sustaining a positive tempo? This is a recipe for a great mental model.

Except it’s a incomplete.

Without specificity around what 1% actually means, our brains tend to over or under act (usually under) on the progress we want to make. The vagueness in our approach facilitates a vagueness in actions. It’s significantly easier to rationalize that we are doing the 1% we promised ourselves when you keep moving the goalposts (except backwards) on what 1% better looks like.

It’s a lot harder to lie to yourself when you write stuff down.

To take advantage of this fact, define what the bare minimum floor is for you to improve 1% in a single day for the things you care about getting better at. To save your future self some pain and frustration, give yourself a few different options so you don’t always have to do to the same type of thing when the day sucks and you just can’t bring yourself to do any more than the absolute stinkin’ bare bones minimum.

Earlier this year, I was doing this exact exercise.

My pillars of study and corresponding set of 1% floor task benchmarks are:

• Crypto/Web3 Mastery

  • Read 1 article

  • Read 1 white paper

  • Use 1 new dApp

  • Read 1 newsletter

• Technical Leadership Acumen

  • Do 1 coding exercise

  • Read 1 coding lesson

  • Write 5 lines of undirected code

  • Debug some code I’m stuck on

  • Read 1 essay on managing engineers

  • Analyze 1 smart contract

• Startup Progress Development

  • Send 1 work email

  • Send 1 networking request

  • Take 1 phone call

  • Produce 10 steps of an Outline or Plan

  • Complete 1 Plan Step

• Writing & Publishing

  • Write 2 full paragraphs

  • Outline 1 essay

  • Edit 1 essay

  • Press publish on something

  • Engage with 1 person on Twitter

• Fitness

  • Walk outside for cumulative 60 minutes

  • 30 minutes of moderate cardio

  • Do 1 motion focused, light weight lifting session

None of these individual tasks supercharge my skills, but 25 days later? Not gonna lie, I’m getting a lot better at this stuff.

Crucially, I don’t do all of these things every day.

I just do at least one item from each category.

Also, do you notice how there are different levels of challenge here? My 1% for fitness might be way too much for someone just starting out on their fitness journey and my 1% for technical leadership is way too little for a career software engineer.

Your 1% needs to scale for your unique context.

This means over time it also needs to get adjusted to your growth as well. Longitudinally, as you get better at something, your corresponding 1% effort needs to increase to maintain the 1% ratio to total skill level.

Let’s visualize what this means (Check my math and play with percentages here).

By day 70 your 1% needs to be twice as challenging as Day 0’s. By Day 200, it needs to be 7 times as tough. The percent of the total “skill level” stays the same, but the magnitude of the improvement needs to grow over time.

When should you adjust your floor values? Idk, we’re pretty much stretching the limits of the metaphor to death at this point. I’m going to say every 2 months because of this Henry Rollins interview. Not scientific advice, but sounds reasonable.

So every 2 months, I plan on pushing my 1%’s up. The next wave looks something like this.

• Crypto/Web3 Mastery

  • Read 2 articles

  • Read 1 set of developer documentation for 20 minutes

  • Read 1 white paper

  • Use 1 new dApp

• Technical Leadership Acumen

  • Write 10 lines of undirected code

  • Debug some code I’m stuck on

  • Interact with a dApp’s API

  • Read 1 essay on managing engineers

  • Analyze 1 smart contract

• Startup Progress Development

  • Send 3 work emails

  • Send 3 networking request

  • Take 2 phone calls

  • Produce 10 steps of an Outline or Plan

  • Complete 3 Plan Steps

• Writing & Publishing

  • Write for an hour straight

  • Fully Edit 1 essay

  • Press publish on something

  • Engage with 3 people on Twitter

• Fitness

  • Walk outside for cumulative 60 minutes

  • 30 minutes of moderate cardio

  • Do 1 motion focused, light weight lifting session

They didn’t all increase in complexity because I know other stuff is going to be going on in my life, but I raised the floor on items so that they still seem doable, but are generally more complex than the previous levels. I can always adjust it back down. No sweat.

Finally (and most importantly), 1% every day is a lie.

Sometimes shit happens. Just remember this:

James Clear @JamesClear

From Chapter 16 of Atomic Habits: "The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit."

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