A short YouTube segment by Brian Johnson discussing the Sorites paradox as presented by James Clear in Atomic Habits. Johnson explains the paradox (from Greek 'heap') to illustrate how repeated tiny actions compound into large life changes, cites the '1% improvements' concept, and demonstrates via compounding math over 1,000 days and 10 years.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. A little while back we had fun taking a quick tour through James Clear's brilliant brain and equally brilliant book, Atomic Habits. We forgot to chat about one of my favorite ideas from that must read book, the Sorites Paradox. Let's invite James back to the party. Get this, he says, and I quote, there is an ancient Greek parable known as the Sorites paradox, which talks about the effect one small action can have when repeated enough times. One formulation of the paradox goes as follows. Can one coin make a person rich? If you give a person a pile of 10 coins, you wouldn't claim that he or she is rich. But what if you add another and another and another? At some point you will have to admit that no one can be rich unless one coin can make him or her so. So we can say he continues by saying the same thing about habits. Can one tiny change transform your life? It's unlikely you would say so, but what if you made another and another and another? At some point you will have to admit that your life was transformed by one small change. The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1% improvement, but a thousand of them. It's a bunch of atomic habits, he says, stacking up each one a fundamental unit of the overall system. The secret of getting results that last is to never stop making improvements. It's remarkable what you can build if you just don't stop. Small habits don't add up, they compound. That's the power of atomic habits. Tiny changes, remarkable results. End quote. Amazing. Quick etymology lesson, then, quick recap. James tells us that Sorites is derived from the Greek word for heap. Now, of course, when you give someone a coin that doesn't make a very big heap, but then you add another and another and another, and at some point that additional coin makes the person wealthy. And so it is with our habits. It's not, as James says, the 1 1% improvement, it's the 1,001% improvements. And echo. Those improvements don't just aggregate, they compound. Let's bust out our Google spreadsheet for some quick calculations. Again, we start by entering one in the first little box in the sheet one. Then we optimize it 1% every day, compounding those tiny gains for a thousand days. On that 1,000th day, we're 20,000, 751 times better than we were on day one. And note, 1,000 days is only two and a half years. So I say while standing on a soapbox shouting, plus one plus one plus one. And P.S. don't forget, 1% gains for 10 years equals a hypothetical impossible to actually reach, but jaw droppingly inspiring math equation. Quadrillion times better than our current selves.
