Abhishek Nair

I’m currently engaged with a book called the Atomic Habits written by James Clear. The book does an excellent job laying down the framework of how habits are formed and shares insightful strategies for building good habits and breaking bad ones. And, as I pursue to cover the content of this book there was an interesting point that I’d come across and its called ‘ the aggregation of marginal gains‘. The idea behind this concept was to improve everyday by 1%.

The author states:

improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done

These improvements are a direct result of creating a system around your habits and the results of these habits compound over time. The way I approach learning a new skill, for instance, in my current pursuit of creating a system on learning how to video edit for my Youtube Channel. I implemented the following system.

1. allocate 2 hours to writing a script on potential ideas
2. spend an hour possibly exploring new ideas
3. Spend an hour on Skillshare to learn from educators on how to improve my video editing skill’s on Final Cut Pro or iMovie.
4. Saturdays are my shoot days – I allocate the early mornings to shoot so I have the natural light.

In this process of mine, I’ve pre-emptively created a habit that I follow spending my Friday’s on the planning phase and the saturday’s on my shooting phase. Now because I batch my days I focus each day on different learning so, my improvement wouldn’t have such an exponential increase as shown above. However, for someone who works on their skill everyday, the 1% rule would resonate with them soo much. So, if you guys are feeling a sense of plateau creeping in change your routine around but work on that 1% everyday.

If you resonate with this post, I highly recommend acquiring Atomic Habits.

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash