The Personal OS — The Power of 1%
(This is part of the Personal OS series that can be found here)
Many of us (hopefully) are familiar with the compound effect with regards to their bank savings:
“Deposit 100$ into your saving account and after 1 year you will get 105$” (assuming your bank is giving you 5% interest)
After 20 years you will have 265.3$. Which is 265.3% of your original investment. Nice.
This is what we call “let your money work for you…”.
What happens when you are taking the compound effect and apply it to your life. Your habits.
If you could improve only 1% every day, you will get an improvement of almost 3800% after just one year (1.01³⁶⁵= 37.8). WTF ?!
What will happen if you decrease your ability in just 1% every day? After only one year you will get down to 3% of your original amount (0.99³⁶⁵= 0.03).
This is amazing!
So what is the takeaway? You only need to improve small things in your life— tiny gains every day and eventually, you will see a huge improvement.
Although 1% sound like a very small amount, improving by 1% every day is a lot. Nevertheless, the principal is the same — consistently perform tiny gains on a daily basis and you will see the improvement.
Some suggestions of small (baby steps) improvement you can take every day:
- drink 1 more glass water
- eat 1 more vegetable
- save 50$
- take the stairs
- get off the bus 1 stop earlier
- park a car on the other side of the parking lot
- take the long way when walking
- workout for (additional) 10 minutes
- go to sleep 30 minutes earlier
- read one (more) page in a book
- write one (more) paragraph in your blog
- breath for 1 minute a day
- say thank you to your peers
- say I love you to your family
What are YOUR tiny gains ?! comments below to share with us.
More from the Personal OS:
- Build your own personal operating system with these small tiny habits that will compound over time and improve your life — The personal OS (Operation System) — booting
- A formula for building new habits. Understanding how habits works and how can we build new ones by attaching them to existing triggers in our life - The Personal OS — Building habits, Teaching an old dog new tricks
- A repository of habit triggers and actions to inspire you for your new habits based on the habit formula — The Personal OS — The Habit Repository
More where this came from
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