Have you ever heard about The One Percent rule?
It says that if you keep improving by as little as 1% each day, the compound effect of those changes is incredible.
Conversely, if you are going to get worse by 1% each day over a period of one year, the cumulative effect is going to be disastrous.
Because it is so small of a change, we don’t see any immediate or short term results:
- Reading 10 pages a day for a week doesn’t seem to make you smarter;
- Exercising for 15 minutes a day won’t make you fit;
- Learning 8 new words a day might not make any difference in a week;
But doing that consistently results in:
- Reading 15 books in one year (considering ~240 pages/book on average);
- Increasing your life expectancy by 3 years1;
- Learning 2920 new words in one year, which will allow you understand ~84% words in a text written in a new language2;
A Question To You
Think about what is one area in your life you can improve by 1% today? If you stick to it, you’ll be surprised how big of a difference it will make in the long run.
If you liked this article, consider subscribing below and following me on twitter (@iuliangulea).Wen CP, Wai JP, Tsai MK, Yang YC, Cheng TY, Lee MC, Chan HT, Tsao CK, Tsai SP, Wu X. - Minimum amount of physical activity for reduced mortality and extended life expectancy: a prospective cohort study ↩︎
Paul Nation and Robert Waring - Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists ↩︎