Improvement in almost any area of our lives is hard. Going to the gym after a few months off or even years is always hard, improving at a hobby like playing guitar is hard, starting a new habit, cleaning your room weekly, meditation, or reading more books is hard.
A large part of the reason you struggle to improve is that your brain doesn't want you to. This sounds strange but your brain is constantly in energy saving mode by going through the day, operating how it did yesterday, the day before it saves energy.
Your brain is constantly telling you a narrative about who you are as well, each time you take an action or failed to do so you reinforce whatever story aligns with that and your brain wants to be aligned with your action.
If you say you're an athlete but never go to the gym, pretty soon your brain is going to call you out on this athlete story that you are telling yourself.
So the goal and the path to getting one percent better each day is by getting your brain to believe this story. This is where small habits come in, the first step to getting your brain to believe your story is to create habits that support whatever type of person you want to be.
If you continue on with a small habit like this, like doing 5 or even 10 sit-ups a day, your brain will slowly but surely stop fighting back. When you try to start doing sit-ups each day because it's just something that you do, it's normal and it's part of your narrative.
This is the secret to continuous improvement to setting and hitting your goals and to getting one percent better each day.
As James Clear the author of Atomic Habit has famously said,
“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits, your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits, your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits, and your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. you get what you repeat.”
So, whatever your goals are, be it to get in better shape and work out more, to be a healthier eater, to learn to playguitar, to meditate to read books.
It all starts with these small things that we do each day that help build the narrative around the type of person that we want to be. You aren't going to pick up and be a world class guitar player overnight but by picking up your guitar each day, you cast a vote towards being a guitar player.
If you continue to cast these votes, before you know it six months have passed and you can legitimately call yourself a guitar player. You are in the gym daily - working out, and you're healthier, you look back to the days when you did just five sits-up and laugh because now it wouldn't even make you sweat. You're someone who works out.
The last and maybe most important thing to understand about continuous improvement is that you are building habits each day whether you are aware of it or not. If you take a week off from playing the guitar or doing your sit-ups or going to the gym, you are telling yourself and your brain that you're the type of person who thinks, “ it's fine, to miss several days or even weeks.”
Just like you won't notice positive changes in a day, you won't notice bad ones either. Six months from now you'll know exactly what your habits have led to though. You can either be getting one percent better each day or one percent worse.
Your habits will decide which it will be. I truly believe that habits are one of the most important and beneficial things that we can consciously change in ourselves to affect the direction of our lives.
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