Aim to be 1 percent better everyday.

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? So yesterday I woke up at 6:30 AM, so today I challenged myself, – or well, last night I told myself – that when I wake up in the morning, I wanna wake up at 6:29 This morning I woke up and got out of bed at 6:27.

[00:00:40] So a couple minutes better than my goal, but if I had woken up at 6 29, that would still have been excellent. So let's talk about why that is. I have been thinking a lot about goals. This is not new. This is literally what I've been talking about for the last like [00:01:00] month and what we can do to achieve those goals.

[00:01:06] Because this year I'm determined is going to be different from other years, right? And so I am thinking about the concept of improving 1% every single day. There's that graph that I always remember from James Clear's blog where he shows what would happen if you got 1% better every single day than the last for a whole year versus 1% worse every single day for a whole year.

[00:01:41] And if you got 1% worse every day, you wouldn't really be that badly off, but if you got 1% better every single day, wow. The change you could make would be statistically [00:02:00] significant and you would look at your life and you would see that change. And yet in the moment, day by day, it's not that big a change.

[00:02:11] Okay? Waking up at 6:29 is really not that much different than waking up at 6:30, but if I could get 1% better, so in my case wake up 1% earlier every single day, I would reach my goal of being able to wake up at 5:00 AM every day really easily, really, really easily compared to going on December 31st to waking up at

[00:02:42] like seven o'clock every single day to January 1st of the new year, trying to wake up at 5:00 AM right away. Would I have been able to do it? Yes, for a small amount of time, but it would not be long lasting change, and there would also be this [00:03:00] danger that I would exhaust myself so badly, that instead of just being able to wake up at 7:00 AM like normal, I would actually be waking up even later because my body and my mind would be so much more exhausted from this energy use.

[00:03:15] this motivation use this willpower use, and as we've talked about, willpower and motivation are in limited supply. So instead of trying to make pivotal life changes, in one day, what if we just chose a few things at a time, maybe two things at a time, and committed to being 1% better every day in them every single day until we got to our goal.

[00:03:45] If you have a goal, right? What if instead of trying to wake up super early all of a sudden, you also try to just wake up 1% earlier than you did yesterday? [00:04:00] Now even with 1%, which is not crazy sounding at all, you might not be able to do that every single day, but even if you did that most days in a year, the amount of progress you would make on your goal, the amount of long lasting change you would affect in your own life would be far more permanent than trying to, you know, accomplish your big, hairy, audacious goals in a single month or a single day.

[00:04:28] like sometimes we want to. We love bright and new shiny things. We love to do new things all the time, but for long-lasting change, we gotta think just a little bit smaller so that in the end we can reach those bigger goals more easily. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.