My wife, Renuka, can't stand the taste or smell of milk.
Yoghurt, though, she's fine with. And that's lucky, because yoghurt does something remarkable to your gut. It's protein, and every spoonful delivers somewhere around 350-400 million individual probiotic organisms. That number sounds impressive, until you find out that a single tablespoon of kefir carries 1.5 to 2 billion of those same live cultures. Kefir isn't just better than yoghurt: it's in a different league entirely.
So, obviously, kefir is a clear winner.
Except Renuka won't touch the stuff.
Kefir can be intensely sour, and to her, it's almost as yucky as milk itself. This realisation feels like a dead end, but is it? What if she got 1% better every day? What would that even mean?
What 1% Actually Means
People wear t-shirts that say they want to be 1% better every day. But what does 1% actually mean?
It means that you are going to be uncomfortable every single day. It means that you have to change what you are doing, because if you haven't changed anything, you haven't improved at all. “Improved” might even be the wrong word, because a 1% change doesn't really feel like improvement. Most of the time, it feels like regression, like you're going backwards all the time.
Take the illustrations that I do almost every day.
When I flip the page and start off with a new sketch, I could easily do exactly what I had done the day before. I could use the same style, the same fonts, even the same layout. That's the logical thing to do because it speeds things up. But let's say the goal is to be at least 1% uncomfortable. It means that I now have to go hunting on Pinterest for a different kind of font and maybe try a different layout.
Often enough, I will change the entire style of drawing and copy someone else's style.
It's possible that all of these three elements might change on a single new page, but the results aren't always joyful.
Sometimes I will end up delighted, and at other times it looks like a mess. And I find the same chaotic environment entering another of my hobbies, which happens to be cooking. If you make a dish every day and it turns out excellent, why would you bother adding more tamarind? Why change the type of chilli? Why throw in the yoghurt if you have never used it before?
If 1% doesn't feel like going forward, why bother with the 1% anyway?
It's easy to assume that 1% growth every day adds up to 365% growth over a year. The 365 bit seems linear, but that's not how it works. When you compound 1% each day, you end up roughly 38 times better by the end of the year.
Not 38%, but just 38 times.
All of that discomfort just to improve by 38 times sounds like a bad deal.
All of that discomfort just to improve by 38% sounds like a bad deal.
However, if you continue to live with that level of discomfort for five years, suddenly that number stops being a number. It becomes a figure so large that it's almost meaningless. Suddenly you are millions of times better. It's almost like trying to picture a billion kefir cultures in a single spoonful.
Of course, nobody can actually measure this improvement in real life.
If you're learning photography, how do you measure a 1% gain or a 5% gain? You can't, but how would you even know? What we do tend to notice is how much faster and more confident you are in your ability.
The illustration that you would have hesitated to put on paper is relatively easy. Now the sentence that you once stumbled upon in a foreign language is no longer a problem. You can easily speak for 45 minutes to an hour with a stranger.
All of this improvement doesn't look like improvement at all when you move in from day to day. It accumulates and only becomes apparent when you look at it in hindsight.
The 1% change is likely to be quite random
Last night, Renuka and I went to the nearby mall. By around 8 pm it's fairly deserted, even while being quite secure. We took one walk around, then another. Soon we had finished seven rounds of walking. Add that to our usual walk and yesterday's steps topped over 18,000. If you've ever tried to do even 10,000 steps a day, you know how hard it can be to keep at it. Yet, we figured we could almost double that number by doing something slightly different after dinner. A slight change in plans and the 1% shows up almost automatically.
We all love the idea of improvement and 1% seems doable.
Yet, it's important to understand that 1% almost never feels like progress. It almost always feels like work, and often regression. Discomfort is almost always the default. And that's what 1% improvement actually means. It's not something you wear on a t-shirt or hang on a poster. It's something live, the way it is in a spoonful of kefir: almost creepily growing and multiplying.
Until one day it's billions.
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