Your Simple Guide to Getting 1% Better Every Day

Marie Biancuzzo
ILLUMINATION
Published in
5 min readNov 18, 2023

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A person writing increasing line graphs on a glass panel with a whiteboard marker
Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels

We often hear about the effectiveness of getting 1% better every day. I first read about this idea in James Clear’s outstanding book, Atomic Habits. But how can we put that idea into practice in the real world? Here are four practical ideas that can help you get 1% better every day.

Believe in the promise of getting 1% better every day

Are you falling victim to self-limiting beliefs? Are you fooling yourself into thinking you really can’t get substantially better than you are right now? Then your first step is to believe in the logic of the process.

Clear points out that if we become 1% better each day, we’ll be 37 times better by the end of the year. Okay, let’s try to prove that to ourselves.

For a moment, just think of your abilities as if they were money. You’d start with $1. Now get out your calculator.

If you had daily compound interest of 1%, you’d have $1.35 by the end of the month. Then $1.83 by the end of the second month, $2.48 by the end of the third… and sure enough, by the end of the year, you’d have $37.78.

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