2022 in review: the power of tiny gains
Sometimes we get so lost in our day-to-day craziness that we fail to se our own progress. When in doubt, zoom out!
It is often said that we overestimate what we can accomplish in a day and underestimate what we can accomplish in a year.
Source: Aroound
I am a total nerd when it comes to personal improvement. There’s a Japanese concept that I read about earlier this year called Kaizen. It’s supposed to hold a culture of continuous improvement where everyone actively engages in improving the everything around them.
The concept of Kaizen began to build a mainstream following with the works of Masaaki Imai, a Japanese organizational theorist and consultant.
In 1986, he published a best-seller, entitled "Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success” and founded The Kaizen Institute.
Kaizen prioritizes a focus on small, daily improvements, rather than large, step-function leaps. It teaches that progress and growth are the result of daily actions to drive the small improvements.
James Clear has a brilliant visualization of the impact of continuous improvement in his book Atomic Habits:
There are a two key takeaways from this image:
Compounding is Magic: 1% daily improvements for an entire year will result in a ~38x improvement by the end of the period. This is one of those "a-ha!" moments on the power of compounding.
Compounding is a Double-Edged Sword: it cuts both ways. If you get 1% worse each day, you're going to be in a lot of trouble after one year.
The conclusion is that dramatic change is possible in one year through consistent, tiny daily improvements. That all sounds amazing, but how do we actually make that happen?
You have to really want it
The number one rule to improving is pretty obvious: wanting to improve.
Many say becoming great at something is just really wanting to be great at it. I’m not sure I would go that far, but desire sure does help. When you have the willingness to make progress at something, you'll find the energy and motivation to make it happen.
When you're getting started, write down exactly what you want to do. Be specific about your desires. Put this in a place where you can see it—it helps with vision.
What really helps me is writing down concrete steps that can take me to the places I want to go. Start from top to bottom, filling out the blanks. For example: I want to work in Technology, I would need to learn about the Cloud and Software development. But to get there, I would need to understand coding and learn some coding languages.
It would end up being something like this:
Learn coding logic -> Learn Python -> Learn SW dev —> Land job in TechNow that’s obviously extremely simplified, but you get the gist. Start with your end goal in mind and work your way back to where you’re currently at. That should give you a good starting point in determining which path you need to follow.
Be a planner
This might not come naturally to everyone, but I personally think it’s important to plan things ahead of time. Consistent, continuous improvement requires consistent, continuous action. For me, this means that if I want to improve at something, I will do that something every single day.
It sounds simple, but it actually isn’t:
If you want to improve your cardiovascular health, do some form of cardio training, every single day.
If you want to improve your writing, write, every single day.
If you want to improve your thinking, read, every single day.
If you want to improve your relationships, spend time being present with those people, every single day.
Your plan should be brutally, painfully simple.
What are the 2-3 daily actions that you would need to take to create tangible, compounding progress in your area of choice? These should be the simplest daily actions. Dumb it down as much as you can to make sure you will be able to stick to it.
Deliver
Planning is great, but you have to actually sit down and do the work. There are several paths for executing that you can follow, and you could even combine them once you start building more resilience.
To start with, building a habit is easier if you don’t make things too intimidating for yourself. Start easy. The 30-for-30 approach is a very popular method that works wonders.
Do the daily action for 30 minutes per day for 30 straight days. 30 days is meaningful enough as a commitment that you can't be half-in, but 30 minutes is short enough that you can convince yourself to take it on. 900 minutes of effort in a single month is enough to create tangible progress that will keep you pushing forward. This is my favored approach for getting started on any new area of progress, be it coding or creative writing.
After some time, you can begin to block out time each day when you will enter a deeply focused state to make progress against your area of choice. These blocks are generally 1-2 hours for most people and should be completed without distraction. This is the favored strategy for big professional goals, which often require more time and focused energy, but it can feel intimidating given the requirements. Note: Cal Newport's book on this is great.
Keep yourself accountable
Create methods to track (and adjust) your goals and progress as the days go by. This will not only allow you to understand where you’re standing, but also work as intrinsic motivation to keep you going!
You should also remember to be flexible: allow yourself to adjust as needed along the way.
Downward Adjustments: Overly-ambitious daily process goals should be adjusted down. Set them to be overly-achievable. The human psyche responds well to wins—manufacture them early and benefit later.
Environmental Adjustments: Environments that are unsuited to achieving daily process goals should be adjusted. If my daily process goal is to eat a balanced, nutrient-dense breakfast, a kitchen full of junk is an environment unsuited to my goal. Deliberately adjust your environments to match your goals.
Remember: the only goals we achieve are the ones we track.
Reward yourself
Give yourself micro rewards for completing the process. We often fail to incentivize the process, instead focusing all incentives on actual goal achievement. I believe this is the wrong way to go about it because it fails to stress the beauty of the learning process, while overhyping the happiness you will feel when achieving your goal.
Start incentivizing your completion of the daily actions that will contribute to the long-term achievement.
Action Item: Establish a weekly micro reward (one that doesn't set you back from your core goals). Write it up on your screen or whiteboard so that you know what you can look forward to if you stick to your plan.
It is truly remarkable what we can achieve in a year if we consistently put our minds to it.
Whether your goal is to learn a new skill, improve your health, nourish your relationships or get a much desired promotions, there are a ton of micro-actions you can do that will take you to your end result. Just write them down, stick to daily progress and zoom out every once in a while. If it helped me, it can definitely help you too.