A new favorite book of mine that I had heard so many Thought leaders talking about is Atomic Habits by James Clear. A life changing book.
The Premise
Clear discusses how just doing 1% better every day will result in a 365% improvement over the course of a year and that big transformations actually come from continual micro evolutions of the self. This makes changes seem doable so that you actually do them—this being the most important part.
We can get paralyzed by feeling like we need to make these ginormous changes and get frustrated with ourselves when we don’t match up to this unattainable self overnight. We throw in the towel and end up right back where we started at square one.
Embodying the Goal
We don’t eat a salad one day and expect to be down 50 lbs the next day. We don’t go to the gym and look in the mirror and expect to see six-pack abs the next day. These actions are done consistently in faith and commitment toward our goals because they are important to us and we will feel better in the doing of it.
Voltaire, the French writer, said, “The best is the enemy of the good.” What he meant by that is that we have some strong days where we feel our best and we have some not so strong days where we’re still able to do good. Don’t let you not being at your best one day prevent you from doing good or that 1% more. Doing 1% in contribution toward your goal will help keep you going.
Behavioral psychologists who study habits say that the days when you do even the tiniest improvements from what you would have done in the past are the most important.
It’s like compound interest building up over time. Every time you do an action that is in alignment with your vision of who you want to be, that is a vote for you embodying that person you want to become.
Final Thoughts
For me, doing 1% more has been writing at least 2 sentences in my journal, meditating for 5 minutes and doing 1 minute more of a Youtube workout. The funny thing is that I find myself having to resist wanting to do more. I find it to be true that it is easier to act your way into feeling than it is to feel your way into acting. What can you do today to be 1% better?
