The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 191 - 1%

Transcript:

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Hey, Pete.

Pete: So I've had a number of things happen in the last twenty-four hours that have all reminded me of this one particular idea that we've mentioned very briefly on the podcast before, but I thought is worthy of us dedicating an entire episode to.

Jen: Ooh, okay. What is this idea?

Pete: The idea is really about compound interest, or the compound effect, or...what I think we could talk about is the idea of 1% improvements.

Jen: Getting 1% better every day. Yes, I do love this. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Okay, so the places this came up in my life in the last twenty-four hours...it's kind of wild when all of these things happen at once. So I was sharing with you before, I can't remember if I'm re-reading or just reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Jen: You can't remember if you read it before?

Pete: Yeah. I actually, I can't remember. Because I've heard him in so many podcasts and I've seen him talk, so I can't remember if I've listened to the audiobook before or if I've just heard him talk about the book before.

Jen: That is so funny.

Pete: Isn't it bizarre? So I'm re-reading or reading Atomic Habits, great book. And in it, he talks about the idea of minor improvements compounding over time, and how that creates lasting change, which is something that you and I have talked about in the Nudge Forward episode way back in Episode 61. And it's something I think about a lot. I've written blog posts about it. I've had clients tell me that's the most helpful thing that they've heard come out of my mouth, which is not necessarily my IP, but just an idea to share. And then yesterday, I was doing an in-person keynote, which was a crazy, wild, and exotic experience.

Jen: Ooh, like the olden days.

Pete: It was so much fun. Oh my gosh. And in the Q&A portion, which was great, I got this question from one of the people in the crowd about, basically, "Have you got any examples of leaders or organizations who've turned around their culture or improved their leadership development through some of the ideas we talked about today? And like, what was the journey like for them?" And in my response, I was sharing with him, "Well, really the goal, the idea, my hope off the back of this keynote is that each of you takes away one thing, and you get 1% better at it every single day. And over the course of seventy-two days or seventy-one days (it's around seventy-one-and-a-half/seventy-two days), you get twice as good at that thing because of the impact of, the magic of compound interest/just compound in general. So they are like the two different places that this has sort of reappeared in my life in the last twenty-four hours, and I realized we've never dedicated an entire episode to talking about 1%. So, here we are.

Jen: Sidebar- I recently re-read Atomic Habits too.

Pete: Wait, did you re-read? Or did you read?

Jen: I re-read. And it remains excellent.

Pete: Yes.

Jen: Truly, truly excellent. Such a great book.

Pete: Yeah. So, how do you think about...because I know you and I have spoken about this idea of like 1% many, many times. How do you think about it?

Jen: Okay. I love this so much, because as an artist who has a set of hard skills to keep sharp, if you are not...and by you, I mean I. If I am not working on my skills every day, those skills start to get a bit rusty. And at my studio, we have these five affirmations that we do, one of which is, "I practice my craft every day." And it's for exactly that reason. We strive to practice every day and to push ourselves just that little bit harder so that tomorrow, what was hard today becomes a little easier, and there's a new level of harder tomorrow.

Pete: Yes. Yeah, I like that. I like that. I was just thinking about how you distinguished the hard skills that you're referring to.

Jen: Mmm.

Pete: And I was thinking about the keynote I gave yesterday, which was more about real human leadership skills around humility, empathy, and curiosity. And that is a skill set that we can practice every single day to try and get incrementally better at. Do you think the same applies, hard skills, real skills, soft skills?

Jen: Absolutely, absolutely. I think empathy, leadership, creativity, curiosity, all of these are things that can be practiced every single day with the intention of getting 1% better.

Pete: Yeah. I feel like there's this strange dichotomy in this whole idea, which is, on one hand, it seems so easy to just, "Oh, all I have to do is 1% a day. That's very manageable. That's sort of low stakes. That's something I think I could do." And yet I also know, I mean, I myself have occasionally thought this way and I've had clients think this way, which is like, "Yeah, but what if I did 20% tomorrow?" You know? Like, we look for the big dramatic change.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Which is sort of like this myth of, you know, the overnight success. It's like, you just all of a sudden had an aha moment one day, and then your life changed completely. But actually, behind almost every overnight success is like this litany of improvements of 1% a day, or this like timeline of showing up, showing up, showing up, showing up, showing up, slowly getting better, slowly getting better, slowly getting better, and then, "Oh my gosh, all of a sudden, they were an overnight success," but they've been going at it for like five, ten, fifteen years.

Jen: Yeah. You know, it's possible to have a huge leap in whatever area you're working on. And I don't knock that. Like, great, yay, high-five, good for you. But the thing that I think is important about the 1% mentality is you are building a strong foundation that has sustainability. And, you know, if you put in your, "Well, tomorrow I'm going do 20%," after a while, you're going to get tired, you might burn out, you could injure yourself. So that idea of 1% every day as a practice helps to build strength and resilience in that area, as opposed to fatigue and exhaustion.

Pete: Right. Yeah. And I think there's only so many 20% improvements one can make on any given skill. Like, progress is kind of like a low curve, I think, which is hard for me to describe to people who don't know what a low curve is. But it's like it goes straight up, like we progress kind of almost straight up for a while, and then it starts to tail off.

Jen: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Pete: You know? And like, progress becomes slower and slower and slower, or harder and harder and harder. So you might go, "Yeah, I got a 20% improvement straightaway," but it tends to tail off. So maintaining that is, I think you're right, is really difficult. Hence, "Let's just start with 1%, and continue." Or even, you know, the other way I've just thought about the maths is like, even if you commit to .5%, you know?

Jen: Yes.

Pete: It's like, in one hundred and thirty-nine days, you'll be twice as good as opposed to, you know, seventy-one days. But like, even point .5%...which again, feels so absurdly manageable. But it's kind of remarkable what happens over time.

Jen: Mm-hmm. Okay, this is making me think of two things that I participate in that have that kind of 1% better every day mentality, but do it in a cycle. So stay with me here, because I hope this isn't like totally tangential. At Mark Fisher Fitness, one of their mottos is, "1% better every day." And when you start a cycle there (their cycles are four weeks), the first week of class is hard. But the second week is really hard. And the third week is excruciating. And the fourth week is brutal. And then after the brutal fourth week, the next week, you go in and it's easy again. So, they go in these cycles. And the other thing that I participate in, which works similarly, is the New York Times Crossword puzzle. Which, every Monday, it resets it easy, and it gets harder and harder and harder and harder and harder throughout the week. And then, it resets at an easier level. And I'm just...I'm curious about that. I haven't really ever thought about that before, in regards to the 1% better. Is it that bringing it back to basics and fundamentals, like we're doing at the gym on Week One of a cycle, because you've pushed yourself so hard in the excruciating Week Four, in Week One, now when you're focusing on basics and fundamentals, you can push that technique 1% better in a different way?

Pete: Interesting. Yeah. I feel like there's perhaps a point around, what is better? You know?

Jen: Ah.

Pete: Like, 1% better doesn't necessarily mean it has to be 1% harder.

Jen: Right.

Pete: And so, going from the hard back to the easy isn't that you're not improving by 1% on that day, it's actually, perhaps you're improving, to your point, you're improving 1% better at technique, because you're less fatigued so you can actually focus on something like technique.

Jen: Hmm.

Pete: Yeah, so sort of like getting clear on or redefining, what is "better"?

Jen: Yeah. I think maybe I shared...have I ever shared that? Yes. On the Pete Interviews Jen episode, I talked about when I was in college, having a pretty heinous ankle injury. And in order to recover, one of my dance teachers put me back in all of the Level One classes to work on all of my technique again, and I was such a much better dancer after going through that. And it's making me wonder how I might design some of that into my own practices. Interesting.

Pete: Yeah. And so, we've been talking about this idea of the compounding 1% effect on skills. Where I get really curious or where I...I'm constantly kind of surprising myself, when I realize all of the different areas that this just mental model can be helpful. So the obvious one is finance and, you know, savings. So, the...I can't remember the exact specifics. But I'm pretty sure, because of the compound effect, Warren Buffett made 99% of his wealth after the age of sixty. Like, it's something crazy like that. Which is, well, it's all about the time in market, not timing the market. And so, he was the person who has been in the market for the longest, that over time, the compound became such that once he got past sixty, the amount of money just compounding over time became so absurd that it just kept increasing at this crazy rate. So, the finance is an obvious one. Like, right? You know, if you put a dollar away every single day, in seventy-two days, you'll have twice as much money. So, that's pretty cool. But then there's other things I think about, like what about our relationships? And how we might show up and deposit 1% more generosity into the piggy bank of our relationship, or 1% more caring, or 1% more kind, or compassionate, or patient, whatever it is? And how that investing in our relationships by one dollar, or 1%, or that equivalent every day, what that does over time. Like, I think there's all these different areas of our life where this can apply as a useful mental model.

Jen: Ooh, that is so interesting. Okay. I've been married, now, for a long time. I've been with my husband for twenty-one years.

Pete: What's the secret?

Jen: Twenty-one years.

Pete: That's amazing. That's incredible.

Jen: Isn't that crazy?

Pete: It's wild.

Jen: It's twenty years, it's twenty.

Pete: Still, it's older than some of our listeners.

Jen: And so long that I can't even tell the years apart, at this point. But what's really interesting, to your point about investing in relationships, in my youth, in relationships, the idea was the other person would have to change something and like do it right now in order for this to work out. You know? And I think what you learn when you're with someone for such a long time is like, you are changing a little bit every day, as opposed to like, "You better invest 100% in turning yourself around in this relationship, or else we're done-zo."

Pete: Oh yeah, I think everybody just feels called out right now. That's very real, yeah.

Jen: Well, it's just, I've never really thought about it in terms of an intimate relationship, or even a less intimate relationship like a business partnership.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: Looking to improve that relationship in smaller increments, going back to my earlier point about sustainability, that is building a foundation for a successful relationship, rather than, "Let's see how quickly we can turn this, even though there's nothing underneath it to support it."

Pete: Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I quite like about the model is that it brings it back to the focus on the process, and less about the outcome, so it's a practice that doesn't really have an end state. You know, if I'm showing up and trying to get 1% better every day, it's not so that in a year's time, I'm like, "I've clocked it. I'm finished. I give up. I've mastered empathy, because I've been doing it 1% percent better every day." You know? That's not what we're playing here.

Jen: Right.

Pete: What we're doing is reminding ourselves that kind of the process or the practice is the point. And giving ourselves a little almost like metric on how to focus on that, I find to be incredibly helpful as just a way to remember that that's the goal, is the process and the practice.

Jen: Yes. Of course, this calls up Simon Sinek's Infinite Game, of course.

Pete: Right, right.

Jen: Because what it sounds like what you're saying is, stay in it. Stay in the game infinitely, for as long as is possible. And that doesn't mean...not to put words in your mouth. That doesn't mean that you can't have milestones you're aiming for along the way. Like, if you are investing your money and you're, you know, seeking that 1% every day return, that doesn't mean you can't celebrate when you hit an additional zero at the end of your balance.

Pete: Right. Of course. Of course, of course. I think definitely recognizing the milestones, and you know, it's kind of like goal setting, in a way. It's like recognizing the milestone or hitting the goal, and not falling into the trap of hanging success or fulfillment or joy or happiness on that milestone. To me, we bring those into the process. I get joy and satisfaction and fulfillment in the 1%. I mean, this rhymes with the the Jerry Seinfeld idea, where he used to draw a cross every single day that he wrote jokes. And he talks about, like, "Eventually, you have so many crosses in a row on a calendar that it looks like a chain, and you get obsessed with not breaking the chain."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And he's...I'm pretty sure he still does that, like after all this time, because he realizes that the process is the work, even though he might have achieved all of the outcomes that you could possibly imagine for a stand-up comedian. Well, I feel like this is an episode I'm going to want to revisit time and time again. Because like I said, I feel like I'm constantly surprised by how frequent and important and timely this 1% idea is. Like, I'm going to go to Italy later this year, and I'm like, "Oh, maybe I could just get 1% better at learning some Italian every day. And between now and when I go, I'll know, you know, X% more Italian than I did when I started." Or, like the bank account example, "I want to save this amount." Or, "I want to invest this amount into my relationship." I just think that, I don't know...it feels very, I guess universally applicable to learning new skills, investing in new ideas, investing in, I mean, literally investing in one's future. I guess what I'm saying is, in order to create any form of change, a very helpful mental model is, "Improve 1%, or change 1% every single day."

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.