We’ve all seen the “tiny gains post. How “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.”
Well……
First of all, 1% isn’t ‘tiny’. I know a few bankers who’d kill and sacrifice their first born for a daily increment of 1% on their portfolio. After all, how many bankers do you know have a 37x return on anything over a year.
Secondly, getting 1% better everyday is not possible. Just getting better everyday is not possible.
If you train in cycling, improving your speed by 7% every week is a ridiculously impossible goal. In cycling we measure power output, so if you improve 1% better everyday, no matter where you start out in — you’ll be out-sprint than Mark Cavendish within a year.
So forget 1% everyday. 1% sounds small — but doing everday puts it in the fairy-tale zone of what’s realistic. But the idea that making small consistent gains instead of large but inconsistent improvements is a good idea.
After all, big gains only really happen on the beginner end of the spectrum. If you’ve never run before, then a proper training regiment is going to vastly improve your performance — and quickly.
As you get faster, the those additional gains are going to be smaller. It’s diminishing returns.
I personally think, this is why we have the Dunning Kruger effect — when you’re a beginner you see big gains initially, and you extrapolate those gains over time, thinking you’ll be much better and much faster than realistically possible. However, with every improvement — the next increment of gains get smaller and smaller for the same effort or time.
So celebrating consistent small gains is the real key to success — except it’s missing one key ingredient.
Dealing with setbacks!!
We all live in the real-world where setbacks occur. You’re training for some large goal, and halfway through (or anytime through) you get sick, or your kids get sick, of you go for a long vacation and training stops. Then when you come back, it’s hard to restart with momentum — and worse you’ve lost some gains. You’re worse off now than you were 3-4 weeks ago, and sometimes that loss is much more than you thought it would be.
Maybe you’re back to where you were 6 months ago — sometimes even worse.
The ‘secret’ is of course to keep on chugging. Consistency even in the face of inconsistent setbacks is the most important criteria for success. Every end of year, I go for a long break back to my Family home — and when I get back my cycling is slower, my running is slower, my chess is worse, and I’m quite sure even my coding/architecture skills take a bit of a hit. The goal is to come back and keep chugging — knowing that it’s only a matter of time before you regain all you’ve lost and then some.
That’s why I hate the “1% better” crowd. It’s not addressing the real issue — which is dealing with setbacks. Anyone would take a 1% better increment everyday — but you’ve gotta tough it out through the valleys of setbacks to see real gains.
What we want to happen is this:
What actually happens looks more like a side profile of a mountain range, as long as it moves in the right direction, we’re making progress:
