1% Better: The Astonishing Power of Small, Incremental Improvements

Tucson, Arizona. Photo: Marcel Slootheer

Beginning today (April 5th), a new Strava Challenge is kicking off. Titled "1% Better," the challenge follows a streak concept that exhorts you to "take back just 1% of your day for 4 weeks and chase down that better you. Whether it’s a 15 minute walk or 15 minutes at threshold pace along your favorite route, commit to consistency, to going further than planned, to giving that last effort everything you’ve got. Commit to taking your time back. It’s time to get 1% Better."

For those of us already living the Outside 365 lifestyle, only going outside (technically, going outside isn't even required) for 5x per week for 4 weeks might seem like a meager start, but hopefully it helps some people learn the benefits of daily activity. Hopefully, they feel first-hand how spending even a short time outside can radically transform your life, and they continue beyond just 5 days a week X 4 weeks to then adopt the Outside 365 lifestyle.

One of my personal (and somewhat selfish) hopes is that the engineers finally build a streak tracking feature into Strava that allows us to easily log and track the length of our streaks. I've now used Strava religiously for over a decade, and while I do still use it to track every single one of my outside days, it unfortunately doesn't automagically tell me how many days in a row I've reached. Strava, if you're listening, can you please add this?!

1% Better and the Aggregation of Marginal Gains

The goal of getting just 1% better has reached such a critical mass of acceptance in recent years that it's gone certifiably viral. The origin of the 1% better movement was arguably the kaizen strategy, a Japanese term that means "change for the better." According to Wikipedia, kaizen was explicitly implemented in Japan after World War II to help the Japanese recover from the destruction as they sought to improve their economy and nation. Instead of seeking a single massive change, the Japanese (led by Toyota) sought to simply get incrementally better, but to do so at a constant rate.

The math behind the concept depends on the aggregation of marginal gains. In simple terms, we humans overestimate the impact of a single big change in our lives but underestimate the impact of small changes that build upon each other. In reality, making a small change and a small improvement every single day, day after day, week after week, year after year, can lead to an astronomical difference in your daily life.

Further Illustrating the Power of a 1% Gain

To illustrate, let's take the example of compound interest found through investments. If we start with an initial investment of $1 — just one dollar! — on day 1, and this value increases by 1% per day, how much do you think this dollar will be worth in a year? How about 2 years? How about 10 years?

Would you rather have a flat payment of $1 million now, or $1 with guaranteed 1% gains per day?

Our minds aren't evolved to truly comprehend compound interest and this aggregation of marginal gains, which is why we miss this magic. Here's how it would work out:

If you have just $1 and it grows by 1% per day, by the end of a year you'd have about $37.40. Ok, that doesn't sound like much... but what would this look like in 2 years?

By year 2, you'd have $1,413 to your name. And from here, it starts getting crazy.

Shortly before year 4, you'd be a millionaire.

And what about year 10?

In year ten, you'd have about 5.8 quadrillion dollars. That's 16 digits. 16.

That's almost six thousand trillion dollars.

Hopefully you didn't take the $1 million cash payment instead of the small, incremental gains.

Bringing it back down

Not only are our brains not evolved to comprehend exponential growth, but they're not evolved to understand numbers like one million, much less six thousand trillion. Numbers of this vast scale are beyond what we can even conceptualize.

The point here is this. While we can't get 1% daily gains on any investment, no matter how much we try, whatever gains we do create in our own lives can compound and build, one upon the other. No matter how small the improvements, every single improvement adds up over the years to create a life that would have been unrecognizable a decade ago.

Are you going to get 6 quadrillion times better over the course of 10 years? Of course not. But we still have the power to transform our experience of daily life, and it doesn't come from a massive change that we commit to all at once. It comes from tiny, slow, drips of change that happen gradually and consistently over long periods of time.

This truth helped lead me to the Outside 365 challenge. Going outside every single day without fail might seem to be a very small step or a very small commitment. But each of these daily commitments compounds to create improved health and fitness.

Walking one mile is simple. But if you walk a mile every single day for a year, you'll have walked 365 miles. And THAT is no small feat!