How to get 1% better every day

You have heard it before — you should make 1% improvement every day. But how? What does that look like?

At face value you might see progress on a thing each day but how do you track how much you improve every day? Is it too subjective a metric? Quite possibly, but if you are looking to tangibly see the progress each day I would suggest you might have unrealistic expectations. However, it is the small improvements we make that lead to big improvements, which brings me to the compounding effect.

The compounding effect

You might have come across compounding as a term associated with money, and compound interest. This is where you gain interest on your money (through savings/investments etc.) and that interest then earns interest. Over time small amounts of compounding with your interest adds up, and the more interest you earn, the more compounding happens. But compounding is not just for money.

Let’s say you want to learn how to play the guitar. Each day you learn a new chord and combine it with the chords you have learned on previous days. Eventually you will be able to put together chord combinations to play some songs. This won’t happen overnight, but you will be adding to your skills and improving every day.

Learning a skill makes seeing improvement every day a bit more tangible, but if we take it outside of that, to say, better habits or improving your decision making, how does this work?

It is exactly like going to the gym. You turn up on day 1, work hard and the next day you don’t look any different. The same happens on day 2, and on day 7, and on day 20. You are exercising more and are improving your fitness but not physically seeing an improvement. Seeing the change will come but it doesn’t happen right away. Each session you do in the gym compounds to improve your fitness over time, and it is the same for personal development and self-improvement.

Personal development compounding: building good habits

To seek personal development every day is a challenging ask, especially when the small changes appear to make no difference at all. In ‘Atomic Habits’, James Clear states that habits are the compound interest of self-improvement, and improving yourself every day makes a huge difference in the long run.

Habits are the system that sits behind our goals — how we actually make progress…