Just 1% Better a Day

How One Tiny Thing Can Change Your Day and Your Life

“Habits are the ‘compound interest of self-improvement.’ If you can get just one percent better at something each day, by the end of a year (365 days) you will be 37 times better. Conversely, if you get 1% worse each day, the skill will have diminished to almost nothing at the end of a year.” – James Clear in Atomic Habits

The Japanese have a similar concept. The concept of kaizen teaches us that making small, tiny changes to our routine and lifestyle can add up to overwhelming differences in our overall productivity, happiness, and performance.

An example of this might be to write a page of a novel every day. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you consider that an average novel might have 300 pages, well then you could easily write the whole thing in a year as a result!

Or what if you were to save just $10 a day? Again, it seems perfectly doable. But by the end of the year, you’ll have put away $3,600! Enough for an impressive vacation.

But kaizen is also about the way in which a single small deviation can have huge repercussions when it is amplified by time.

What do we mean by that?

Well, consider throwing a ball to a target. When we do this, our brains actually perform incredibly complex math first. When you throw that ball, you need to get the angle and the force precisely right. If your angle is 5 degrees off, then that might not seem like a lot, but as the ball travels it will deviate from the intended course more and more.

The further it goes, the bigger the gap becomes.

Life is like this.

You might be able to do something only very slightly different every day, but over time those will add up to a greater and greater effect. This is particularly true in scenarios where there is a cumulative effect.

But it gets even simpler than that. When we consider the “Butterfly effect”, we realize that even the smallest thing can add up to having huge repercussions.

Take for example a man shaving in the morning. He might decide one morning not to shave because he’s in a hurry, but ultimately he decides to take the time to shave, after all it’s only a couple more minutes.

That’s only a small difference, right?

But what if on that day, he happens to bump into an old friend on the street? They get to chatting and the friend thinks, “Man, he looks sharp like he has his act together.” They talk for a bit, and as a result, the friend ends up offering him an opportunity to come and interview for a new job.

All because of one tiny choice.

Your unconscious mind it what makes all of those choices for you. It works with the tools and resources you give it. Hypnosis is a wonderful way to install better tools and resources for that powerful creative part of your mind to work with.

With the right tools in place, you can learn to trust your unconscious mind. It knows more about you than anyone else. It knows more about you than your conscious mind does. It can make the right choices at the right times for you if you will give it the right resources, and the best tools, and allow it to do what it was created to do, keep you safe, healthy, and at peace. 


Hypnotically,
Dr. Shane