How to Get 1% Better Everyday

“If you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.” — James Clear.

We convince ourselves that meaningful change only happens when there’s a larger goal attached to it. Whether you’re losing weight, building muscle, growing a business or improving your mental health, we get so caught up in trying to achieve some world-changing improvement that all of our friends will pat us on the back for.

That’s one way to do it — but 9 times out of 10 we’ll fall off the wagon before we ever see that earth-shattering result.

Instead, if we focused on getting just 1% better everyday, we might just see some real, meaningful change (even if we don’t notice it day to day).

Author James Clear refers to this idea as “Continuous Improvement”. British Cycling coach Dave Brailsford called it “The Aggregation of Marginal Gains”.

But we like to call the “Smallest Meaningful Action”.

The Smallest Meaningful Action isn’t always sexy or ground-breaking; but it fucking works.

The typical approach to self-improvement is to set a large goal, then try to take big leaps in order to accomplish the goal in as little time as possible. While this may sound good in theory, it often ends in burnout, frustration, and failure. Instead, what happens if we dedicate ourselves to making small changes or improvements every day?

As you can see above, if you get just 1% better everyday at something that matters, by the end of a year you’ll be 37x better by the end of it.

For example; if you can only do 1 Pull-Up now, then focusing on becoming 1% better at Pull-Ups everyday will leave you with a max set of 37 Pull-Ups a year from now. Fucking mental hey?

In the beginning, there is basically no difference between making a choice that is 1% better or 1% worse; in other words, it won’t impact you very much today, if at all.
But as time goes on, these small improvements or declines compound and you suddenly find a very big gap between people who make slightly better decisions on a daily basis and those who don’t.

Now, I don’t mean you’ll get 1 extra rep every day, or even every week. Your 1% improvement might look like better grip strength, a cleaner technique or even just being able to finally get your chin all the way over the bar. But that’s how we move mountains — by chipping away a single stone every day.

So how are you going to get 1% better everyday? By following these 3 simple steps:

1. Avoid small losses:

Most people think that making improvements is about doing more things right. I’d argue that it’s more about doing less things wrong.

Think about this for a second; if you started working with me to improve your Back Squat, and I said that I wanted you to start doing more Lunges, Leg Extensions, Box Jumps and Leg Presses and expected you to get every rep perfect every time because getting stronger at these exercises will improve your leg strength, you’ve got a lot of work to do and the margin for error increases.

But if I said all I want you to do is Squat 3 times a week, we’ve taken away the non-essential shit, reduce the complexity of your program and eliminated our likelihood of mistakes.

This is called Improvement by Subtraction and it fucking works.

By doing less of what doesn’t work, we reduce our margin of error and improve performance by focusing on what matters.

2. If it works, do more of it:

I’ve coached enough people to know what humans by nature chase what’s exciting. We brush over the simple things that work because they’re not “Instagram-able”, new or interesting.

You’d be surprised how many people who want to improve their Bench Press want to do 10 different variations of Chest Flies every session instead of just doing Presses, Push-Ups and Dips.

There are a lot of example of small behaviours that add up to big results if we just focused on doing them everyday, like…

Never skipping a workout.
Brushing your teeth (it’d blow your mind to see how many people don’t do this every day).
Doing the important tasks at work, not just the most fun.
Spending more quality time with your kids, not just buying them a PS5.
Eating 1 more serve of vegetables.
Having more sex and reconnecting with the wife.

Progress gets lost underneath boring solutions; but the most effective solutions are often the simplest.
Only problem is we tend to overlook those simple, effective fixes in favour of trying to find something more exciting.

You don’t need something new. You don’t need a better plan. You just need to realise what’s already working and do more of that.

3. Look backwards:

Everyone loves looking forward to the horizon. That’s why we have goals. We plan milestones based on some future outcome.

But I think it’s more effective to look backwards.

Measuring backwards means you look at what’s already worked for you, not on what you want to happen.

For example, if you want to lose weight, take a look at your average daily calorie intake last week.

Did you eat 3000 calories? Cool, eat 2800 this week. I guarantee you’ll lose weight.

Want to improve your Deadlift max? If you did 150kg last week, do 152kg this week. Boom! Improvement.

Trying to get laid? Talk to 2 people this week instead of 1. You’ve literally doubled your odds of success.

Measuring backwards is a powerful and underrated tool for making progress. Look at what you did last time, and then get a little bit better.

So now you know all our secrets for getting our members better year by year, month by month and day by day.

Now ask yourself, how are you going to get 1% better today?