Improving Your Life 1% Everyday

The surprising power of habits and how to harness them to your advantage

Jatin Mehta
Nov 1 · 9 min read

After reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, something inside had changed. It changed my perspective on life and achieving success. James breaks down human behaviour and provides great analogies for us to learn from science and other successful individuals. I felt compelled to further breakdown some of the concepts highlighted in the book and share my learnings.


Small Habits → Big Difference

Would you care if you adopted a habit that improved your performance, productivity, fitter by 1% a day? Probably not.

You have probably faced this dilemma when you first start working out; you put in all this effort, but it feels like you are getting nothing substantial in return; you weight remains more or less the same; your muscles don’t feel like they are getting any larger, etc

But as you probably have heard a million times already, the real changes kick in the long run (for working out; it is usually after 2–4 months of consistent training). Why is that?

To understand, we can use a bit of math (who doesn’t love math? 😊). Let’s assume you had recently gotten into a bad eating habit that resulted in you getting 1% unhealthy every day and on the contrary, your friend had adopted a healthy workout habit that made them 1% fitter every day. It may seem like you and your friend aren’t that far apart right now, but if both of you stick to your habits for one year, your friend will be 37 times fitter than he/she was, and you will decline to 0.

You are shocked how eating that one piece of chocolate after every meal can severely impact you negatively in the long run and maybe jealous of your friend who is in top physical shape and conversely doing better in life (school, job, relationships, etc.).

As mentioned earlier, the funny part is when you tried picking up the same workout habit as your friend, you saw no improvement within the first two months, and you are wondering how your friend just blasted past you. You may be thinking that your friend is just a one-off case or has a genetic lottery. And that couldn’t be farther away from the truth.

Your friend is merely enjoying the gains from following a straightforward principle — the compound interest of self-improvement.

Wait, did I just hear, compound interest? Isn’t that a concept in finance?

Indeed, it is. Similar to how money multiplies through the use of compound interest, the effects of habits exponentially increase as you repeat them. By putting in the same amount of effort and time every workout into each workout, you will see more and more substantial results. Isn’t that just magical?

Similar to the positive compounding of good habits, negative compounding of bad habits, such as unhealthy eating habits, can hinder us.

The Truth about Progress

Do you believe in overnight successes?

Well, if you do. You shouldn’t because there are no such things

You may think that someone magically just burst onto the scene in terms of sports, acting, entrepreneurship, etc. You hear it most often in professional sports where players have break-through seasons where no-name players just burst onto the scene and suddenly start dominating. We probably attribute that to luck similar to winning a lottery.

What we don’t see is the years of hard work and effort that a player, actor or person has put into developing healthy and lasting habits. A basketball player may work on his form for 3 seasons without an average of about 35% accuracy. But on the first game of the fourth season, the player starts shooting with 51% accuracy. How did this double-digit growth come in just a couple of months? Whereas in the last three years, progress seemed slow. The answer lies within understanding the plateau of latent potential.

The valley of latent potential is a fancy word that isn’t fancy and explains our perception and reality regarding progress. You think that progress would be linear. That each basketball player should be getting better by 2% each year instead of breaking out with a 10% improvement in a single season. The player also experiences this himself/herself as they are putting in the work, but not seeing any significant developments. Adam calls this the valley of disappointment, which is when you are below your linear trajectory of progress. However, as the player ignores short term results and keeps putting in the work, his progress trajectory will shoot upwards in the long run.

YOU are YOUR HABITS

It really is that simple. You are the culmination of the habits that you have sustained over the long term. If you have had maintained the habit of waking up before 6 am (even on weekends, 😴), you are an early bird. If you make it a habit to go for a run every day, you are a runner. On the contrary, if you are addicted to smoking cigarettes, you are a smoker. And the list can go on forever. But, it is clear that once we repeat an activity over and over again, it becomes a habit and in turn, shapes your identity.

This is a super powerful message that I internalized as we may think that habits are these restrictions we put on our current self. However, after seemingly going against your own self, you can mould your own future identity. But, we all know how hard it can be to form a habit, especially if it feels like a chore. Adam provides an excellent framework to manipulate your thinking to make this moulding process easier.

The first is forming habits that align with what you believe and who you wish to become. This seems quite straightforward, but the lack of aligning beliefs is what causes so many habits to not stick with us. The habits we often form are oriented by outcomes such as getting a six-pack. But focusing on moulding and shaping your identity results in lasting change.

The mantra that has helped me to internalize this is:

I do/other verbs (name of activity)→ I am a(n) (identity)

An example that really helped me get started with eating healthier is changing my mindset from I eat healthy foods to I am a healthy eater. While this may not seem much like a difference on the surface level, the real impacts are at the subconscious level. Instead of thinking that my identity is separate and that I only eat healthy for the sake of it, telling yourself that you are a healthy eater reinforces this habit and aligns it with your core beliefs and perception of yourself.

Building Habits is as Easy as 1,2,3 (& 4)

James lays the foundation for creating lasting behavioural change in the form of four laws:

  1. Make it obvious: if you want to start doing yoga, make sure you put your yoga mat somewhere you will inevitably look within the first five minutes of waking up. This involves a lot regarding optimizing your space for success (putting the fruits in a large fruit container on the dinner table to catch your eye). I have had great success in leaving a book by my side table to remind myself to read before going to bed (that’s how I was able to finish Atomic Habits)
  2. Make it attractive: Make sure your yoga mat is clean and in good condition (and as a bonus, your favourite colour). If you wake up in the morning and the mat is looking old and dirty, the battle has already been lost (there is a very very low chance that you will go out buy one that instance and the task will be delayed indefinitely). In fact, I have been trying to make my working space look as inviting and attractive as possible to encourage myself to do work.
  3. Make it easy: make sure you start off by doing easy yoga poses and not starting off with super hard and complicated poses (you can always build your way up). I heavily relied on this technique as a way to get into the habit of eating fruits more regularly as I started off by eating my favourite fruits and then incorporate a variety of fruits.
  4. Make it satisfying: habits that feel dreadful won’t last for long. It is essential to make them satisfying in one form or another. To make yoga more satisfying as a non-athletic person, you can give yourself a reward (in the form of 15 minutes of game time). If you feel good after making a habit, chances are that you will want to do it again.

Since breaking bad habits is just as important as starting good habits in self-improvement, we can leverage the inverse of the above laws to break our bad habits (we all have them). To cut a bad habit, you need to make it invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying.

Note: I have purposely not gone in-depth with the mentioned laws. James explains these laws and in its reasoning, much more eloquently and in a concrete manner in the book. I would strongly recommend reading it for yourself as the 4 laws and 4 inverse laws together make up the bulk of the book.

What about motivation?

You may be thinking to yourself that building all these habits must require a lot of motivation. There is no way that you can just quickly implement these laws and hacks to build great habits without motivation, right?

Well, right and wrong. Let me break it down, a degree of motivation is definitely required to start and maintain these habits. However, anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. The test comes when your habit doesn’t bring the same level of excitement as it once used to. The ability to keep going in those tougher times is what makes habits really stick with you in the long run.

With that said, you can maximize your motivation by following what James calls the “Goldilocks Rule.” The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. This means that you cannot let your habits become boring routines, you must keep making tiny tweaks to keep the habits fresh and exciting. For example, if you are getting bored with running along the same route, explore a new path. James mentions the importance of preventing habits from sliding into boredom as “The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.”

Everything has a downside

You heard that right. Even something as great as good habits come with their disadvantages. While good habits can help us grow, they can also inhibit our growth. WHAT? Let me explain.

While habits help us get things done without putting much thought, they also create a blind spot in our growth. We start paying less and less attention to the action or habit itself to find errors or areas of improvement. This blindness caused by the effectiveness of habits is what causes our growth to stagnate. We find ourselves clinging on to our identity instead of continually improving. So just like everything else, all good things must come to an end as tone point or another.

I apologize if that last but got philosophical without any warning.


If you liked this article, feel free to give it some 👏and comment on your thoughts in the comments! If you want to stay updated about new articles covering everything from self-growth to machine learning, follow me on Medium.

I would love to meet anyone new, connect with others and chat about literally anything. Feel free to reach out via my LinkedIn or by email: mehta.r.jatin@gmail.com!

Jatin Mehta

Written by

AI and Growth Enthusiast. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jatin-r-mehta/

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