Brian Johnson breaks down James Clear's atomic habits concept: a 1% daily improvement compounds to 37 times your starting point in a year. Ellen Langer's research shows potential is unknowable until you stack tiny optimizations over time.
January 14, 2019.
About 37 times better.
About 1,400 times better.
About 53,405 times better.
About 2,017,828 times better.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. James Clear wrote a great book called Atomic Habits. And one of the things I most.
Love about it is the fact that.
He'S quantified our plus one game for us.
Get this.
If you get just 1% better each day for a year, do you know.
How much better you'll be at the.
End of the year?
What's your guess?
1% plus 1% plus 1% for 365 days?
How much better are you.
At the.
End of that year of 1% daily improvements? You won't be 3.65 times better. You'll be 37 times better than you were when you started. That, my friends, is the magic of compounding as applied to optimizing little things matter a lot.
But get this.
James tells us that if we really want to see the impact of those tiny little incremental optimizations, we often need.
To look back over the span of.
Two or five or even 10 years. So I busted out a Google spreadsheet.
And did that math as well.
You know how much better you'll be.
At the end of the second year.
Of 1% daily optimizing?
1400 times better. Then things get really interesting. Drop another year on that streak of yours and you're now 53,405 times better. One more year, we're now four years in and you're 2,017,828 times better. Five years, you're 76,240,507 times better.
Nice work.
Now shall we run it 10 years out?
Let's do it.
Result, after a decade of compounding tiny little plus 1% gains, you're now officially five quadrillion times better.
All that to say again, little things.
Matter a lot, especially when we compound them over time. Of course, those numbers are absurd.
That's the whole point.
Harvard professor of the psychology of possibility, Ellen Langer comes to mind. She tells us that although our potential may or may not expand into the realm of quadrillions, it's unknowable. Literally. It's impossible to know what we're capable of until we actually let go of the limits and get to work on what not. On the huge massive action, life changing things per se. On the little things, the tiny little incremental optimizations that when aggregated and compounded lead to very big things. Plus one plus one plus one.
