How To Be Ahead Everytime And Enjoy The Rewards!
Sic Parvis Magna - Greatness From Small Beginnings
The Consequences of Becoming Just 1% Better Every Day:
There’s this really powerful concept of becoming 1% better everyday. But what does it mean? It means to focus on one small step you can take today to get one step closer to where you want to be tomorrow.
But first you must ask yourself:
“What are the most important things that I need to attend to so that I’m in better shape tonight than I was in the morning?”
This is proper self-orientation.
You may feel uneasy because you will present yourself with things that you may have been avoiding. But it doesn’t help to run away from them because you are stuck with it, so the least you could do is something worthwhile in the face of them.
Then you implement those tiny changes, which will build your strenght and character.
By confronting the future and developing a valuable plan and implementing it, you will begin to see a huge positive effect on everything that surrounds you.
It will compound into something really significant!
This concept is what we call continuous improvement. Where you identify an oportunity for change and develop a plan; then you implement changes on a small scale; then you check your results overtime and determine if any difference was made; and finally you simply repeat the process.
Following the rules of compound interest, if you improve by 1% every day, in one year, you would be 37 times better than you were in the beginning.
Can you imagine?
On the other hand, if you were to become 1% worse every day, you would be 0.03 times worse by the end of the year, so not much difference in that from where you are right now, but you can see the big gap between these two values.
The Pareto Principle:
Once, a man named Vilfredo Pareto made an exciting discovery. He noticed a tiny number of pea pods in his garden produced most of the peas. Then he went on to see if it applied in other areas of the world. It did! For example, he found out that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by just 20% of the population.
This idea that a small portion of things produce most of the outcome is known as the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule.
There was also a research conducted in the amazon forest where they discovered, from the thousands of species of trees, only few dominated the forest area. Scientists refer to this as Accumulative Advantage. What starts with a small advantage builds up over time.
One plant only needs a slight advantage in the beginning to take over the entire forest overtime. As you only need to be a little bit better than the competition to secure all of the rewards. When a small difference leads to outsized rewards it’s called the Winner-Takes-All effect. You only win by 1%, 1 second, 1$, but you get 100% of the reward. What starts as a small margin is begins to trend toward the 80/20 rule.
This idea can be referred to as the Matthew Effect, which references a passage of the bible that says, “To those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, everything will be taken.”
The Kaizen Effect:
This method was developed in the post-World War II era.
Instead of telling companies to make radical, drastic changes to their business infrastructure and processes, the management theorists exhorted them to make continuous improvements in small ways.
While Kaizen was originally developed to help businesses improve and thrive, it’s just as applicable to our personal lives. When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur.
Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made. Don’t look for the big, quick improvement; seek the small improvements one day at a time. That’s the only way that happens, and when it happens, it lasts.
The Kaizen mindset reminds you that all improvements must be maintained if you wish to secure your gains.
When tackling big goals, it’s usually advised to only work one goal at a time, but with the Kaizen approach, working on several things at once is entirely doable. When you’re facing a complex problem or trying to do something bold, start with a smaller version of the larger problem. Focus exclusively on that small problem and solve it. Use the answers to this small issue to expand your knowledge to the big picture.
Narrowing your focus is a mental mode that you can apply whenever you want to start a new behavior or take a new project that seems too big or overwhelming to handle.
So go out there, start small, stay consistent!
Start Doing This Now And Watch Your Life Greatly Improve!
The Kaizen Effect reminds me a lot of the ideas from James Clear's Atomic Habits. “All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”
― James Clear