As Charles Schulz once said, “Life is like a ten-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.” We’re all equipped with potential, yet most of us coast along, our metaphorical legs doing the bare minimum while we let life roll downhill. Life’s too short to live as if we have all the time in the world. In fact, the world itself doesn’t even have all the time in the world. Yet, I’d be a hypocrite if I claimed I live every day like it’s my last. 

As the self-help crowd likes to call it, I’ve made it a goal to “be one percent better every day.” It sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? Anyone can do one measly percent. I can do that, I thought to myself, the same way I’d convince myself I can eat just one potato chip or stop scrolling Instagram after just five minutes. (I say that to myself every five minutes.) Still, I was seduced by the promise of this manageable daily growth.

I didn’t come to this life-changing philosophy entirely on my own, though. During the COVID Pandemic, I was at an impasse in my marketing career. Basically, I was stuck in the quicksand of corporate mediocrity, unsure whether to pull myself out or simply sink in with grace. Then, like some divine algorithm reading my deepest insecurities, I came across advice that changed my life. 

James Altucher, author and entrepreneur, preaches that the best safety net for an uncertain future is simple: improve yourself by just one percent every day. I especially liked the way Altucher described self-improvement as being like compound interest. “Progress with yourself,” he says, “is just like cumulative interest, and it should be treated as such.” Huh, if I improved by one percent each day, how much would that amount to over a year? Some quick math estimates 1 percent per day compounded over a year comes to almost 3700 percent over a 365-day period! (The actual amount is 3678 percent or roughly 37.78 times your starting principle.)

Mathematics aside, the one-percent-better philosophy really took hold of me during one of my too common insomnia sessions. It finally struck me that I didn’t need to fix everything all at once. I didn’t need to achieve perfection by tomorrow afternoon. I just needed to make small, barely perceptible steps in the right direction. Now philosophically, the idea that human progress can be neatly quantified into daily one percent increments is, of course, a comforting little fiction. Real growth is rarely linear, and sometimes we have to take a step or two back somewhere in order to be able to make two steps forward elsewhere. As a rigorous, durable philosophy, it crumbles a bit under strict scrutiny. But as a psychological heuristic to combat the paralysis of perfectionism, it works perfectly.

What I also realized was that remaining trapped in a cycle of relentless optimization required in my SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work was actually stunting my real growth. Living by the sterile calculus of a min-maxing mindset leaves no room for the messy, necessary stumbles of actual human progress. Being caught in the efficiency trap preached by so many “experts” was starving my actual creativity. This is why I additionally added an “opportunity cost” to every decision that I made. Economically, this is a basic understanding of cost-benefit analysis, but what I was really calculating is the hidden tax we pay on our time. I had to brutally ask which of my habits and activities were actively stealing from my future?

Social media was the major timesuck in my life. Every hour I spent scrolling was an hour I couldn’t spend writing. So I decided that I needed to rebalance all my various activities to decide which were becoming drains that could be plugged and where little gains could be made without sacrificing anything important. Well, unfortunately, in my case I had to make a drastic change. My attention is a finite currency and spending  so much of it on social media (even for work or work-adjacent purposes) meant bankrupting my capacity for creative output. This meant cutting my usage by about 80 percent starting in 2022. That meant I had to pivot away from SEO and digital marketing entirely into focusing entirely on my writing. It meant developing new frameworks and adopting others that I found helpful. 

Of course, the problem with this philosophy is that, while it’s a useful heuristic, it leaves a lot of wiggle room for laziness. The growth is often going to be invisible, even when it does come. Sure, I can’t always measure growth. Some days I will lose momentum and may even go backwards by bogging myself down in details. The trick is to string together as many “one percent better” days as I can in a row, because mathematically it just works out in your favor over the long run.

The way to combat potential shortfalls in visible progress is to think of just one thing every day you want to get better at, even if it seems inconsequential. You just have to weigh the opportunity costs of everything. Sometimes you have to make painful cuts, leaving a job or even career that is simply not aligning with your skillset or life goals is actually possible. But most of the time, it’s just simple things, like putting a cap on certain activities like YouTube binging or browsing Pinterest mindlessly for some nebulous (mostly now AI-generated) creative inspiration for your next home improvement project. You then free up your valuable time and attention for things to apply to actionable small improvements in various areas of your life.

Once you shift your mindset to looking for ways to improve at something that’s important to you, even just a smidge, you begin to see opportunities everywhere. You don’t need to become a virtuoso pianist or a renowned novelist. Just take a minute to stretch in the morning and make sure you gather your thoughts in a notebook, or even a note in your smartphone about the questions that are nagging you at that moment. Get your daily reading in during spare time. Constantly expose yourself to new ideas from every possible genre, even song lyrics from music you wouldn’t typically listen to in your daily rotation. Make your daily reflections before you go to bed. There are small victories to be found if you’re willing to look for them, and the secret sauce is that little dopamine hit you get when you realize you’ve done something better than you did yesterday. That’s healthy, compared to the micro-dopamine dosing that keeps so many of us addicted to the attention economy. 

So as unpredictable and unfair as life may be, it doesn’t need us to shift into all our gears at once. You don’t need to master every aspect of life in a single leap. But making the conscious decision to improve by one percent each day is less about racing to the finish line and more about realizing that, even if it’s only in first gear, it’s best to just keep moving forward.

~ Amelia Desertsong