Small Daily Improvements

 “Small daily improvements over time create stunning results.”— Robin S. Sharma

Life has no rewind or fast-forward. It is continuously playing and you need to make each second count. That is the key to success. Because in the end, everything will add up and it will show the efforts you have put into it.

James Clear’s book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones explores an interesting subject, on the compounding nature of the long game. Clear writes:

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.

Our brains have a hard time intuitively understanding time, compounding, and uncertainty. All of those things conspire to work against us when it comes to habits and mental disciplines. 

A few quick steps we can take right now to start focusing on continuous improvement

Step 1: Do more of what already works. Progress often hides behind boring solutions and underused insights. You don’t need more information. You don’t need a better strategy. You just need to do more of what already works.

Step 2: Avoid tiny losses. In many cases, improvement is not about doing more things right, but about doing fewer things wrong. This is a concept called improvement by subtraction, which is focused on doing less of what doesn't work: eliminating mistakes, reducing complexity, and stripping away the inessential.

Step 3: Measure backward. Measuring backward means you make decisions based on what has already happened, not on what you want to happen. For example weight loss: Measure your calorie intake. Did you eat 3,500 calories per day last week? Focus on averaging 3,400 per day this week.

Like the saying, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, long-lasting changes to your body are not going to occur in a week! It takes more than a 21-day crash diet to build the body you desire. And despite what you may hear some “fitness gurus” say, you don’t have to kill yourself for hours every single day running on a treadmill to see staggering results. The key to great long-term fitness success is in incremental change.

Start making small, daily improvements toward your goal. Choose bottled water over soda. Choose the stairs over the escalator. Choose that “bad” parking spot far from the front doors. Do that for two weeks and look back at the “easy” changes you have made. Let the small daily habits and changes add up and watch your long-term success come to life!