Brian Johnson breaks down the math of 1% daily improvement: 14 minutes 24 seconds a day compounds to roughly 37x growth in a year, according to James Clear's Atomic Habits. The Heroic app claims three daily targets boost energy 40%, productivity 20%, and connection 15%.
Questions this episode answers
1,440 minutes per day.
14 minutes and 24 seconds.
Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Energy +40%, Productivity +20%, Connection +15%.
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Heroic One. In our last Plus One, we talked about Brian Cain's wisdom on the 1% intention. Let's review the math. There are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes per hour. That's 1440 minutes per day. 1% of that 14 minutes and 24 seconds, 1% of your day. Here's the question. What's the number one thing you know you could be doing that if you spent just 1% of your day doing it would have the most positive impact in your life. Seriously, what is it? How can you invest just 1% of your day into getting 1% better today? Think about it. And as you do, let's think about some James Clear wisdom on the subject to bring the point home because the math is crazy. Actually, before we go there, I have to say that I want your potential investment of 1% of your day into Heroic to be at least considered as one of the highest leverage things you could do to improve your 1%. 14 minutes and 24 seconds. Choose your own adventure with how you want to split that up in the app if you feel so inspired. Of course you can get more wisdom in less time theory via these + ones. The Philosopher's Notes 101's basic training and Mastery series to make sure you have the right strategies. And if you feel so inspired, I think you'd be wise to consider a few minutes invested into the target practice side of things as well as this will, in my opinion, always be the highest leverage thing you can do as committing to being our best selves and actually doing the things that help us close the gap between who we're capable of being and who we're actually being is how we'll move from theory to practice to mastery together today again, early research shows that spending just a few minutes a day using the Heroic app today to hit just three heroic targets in your big three protocol can help you boost your energy by 40%, your productivity by 20%, and your connection by 15%. So let's go hero. Now back to the math. Here's how James Clear puts it in his brilliant book Atomic Habits. He tells us, and I quote, it is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, he says, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it's losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth shattering improvement that everyone will talk about. He continues by saying, meanwhile, improving 1% isn't particularly notable. Sometimes it isn't even noticeable. But it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here's how the math works out. If you can get 1% better each day for one year, you'll end up 37 times better by the time you're done. Conversely, if you get 1% 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. Now, 1% gains aggregated and compounded for a year equals an astonishing 37x improvement. And as I say in our notes on atomic habits, create a spreadsheet, which I linked to in this +1, and run that 1% daily improvement out for another year. And guess what? After two years, you're not 74 times better. You're now 1400 times better. Why stop there? Run it out another year. After the third year of aggregating and compounding those 1% gains, you're now 53,405 times better. Four years, you're 2,017,828 times better. Five years, you're 76,240,507 times better. Shall we run it out? Ten years? All right, let's result. Well, on day 3472, we hit our last normal number. We're 9988-2269-0000-9590 times better. And that's nearly a quadrillion times better than where you were on the first day. Then we break our Google spreadsheet by day 3650, when we're at 5.8707.4e +15. I don't even know what that means, but I assume it's even more zeros and all that to say little things matter a lot, especially when we compound them over time. Let's use 1% of our day to plus 1% today.
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