The remarkable power of 1% improvements

This is a domino,

and this is what a huge amount of them lined up looks like.

We know what happens- you know one down, all of them will topple one after the other very satisfyingly. This is what happened on Domino Day 2009, one domino triggered the fall of almost four and a half million dominos that were lined up, which unleashed more than 94,000 joules of energy!!

Here’s something crazier. We know that A domino can knock down objects which are slightly bigger.

Now, Imagine a domino piece was 1 inch tall, and progressively each piece lined up gets 50% larger.

This is what it would look like-

Just on the 18th piece, It would be taller than the leaning tower of Pisa and on the 57th one, It would nearly cover the distance between the earth and the Moon! I was awestruck; I couldn't believe it, so much so that I had to see if this was true using a calculator!

This is the domino effect; One small move can set something huge in motion.

Incremental improvements can have drastic changes, beyond what we imagine.

But how is this useful to us? How do we see it in real life? How can we bring this effect into our lives?

Unless you're like Patrick living under a rock, we all know who this guy in the photo is. Mr Beast, who’s currently the biggest creator on Youtube(pretty much).

To call his videos crazy would be an understatement. Let’s take one of his recent videos- ‘Hydraulic Press Vs Lamborghini’, he crushed a Lamborghini which would be a lot in itself. But he also went on to break the elephant toothpaste world record got, he crushed a few trucks using a train, he created a set from a video game and more. All of those would be pretty insane videos in themselves, but he combined them all in just one video of his. Now imagine all his videos at this production level. It is crazy!

His entire setup must cost 14.1 million dollars!

That is crazy! He’s at a level where he has no competition; pretty much no other creator can produce videos like him.

However, he wasn't always like that; he started off as just a kid, making little videos in his room, at terrible quality. In his first videos, the video and audio quality were pretty crappy.

How did he go from there, to making some of the craziest videos on YouTube today? Well, the answer is constant 1% improvements (you probably saw that coming). As he puts it “Make a hundred videos and improve something each time”. There are so many different things to work on improving- Editing tricks, thumbnails, titles, voice quality, etc. Of course, he also had the obsession to keep going and keep improving.

The point of this story is to not get intimidated by a large goal, but think of it as a journey of tiny improvements. This is for anything we do- time management, sports, art, etc. That is what we talked about last time in the article on how to fix your life

I’m also trying to improve something in this article, can you guess what it is? (answer at the end of the article.)

There’s a neat thing about 1% improvements, or the compounding effect, which is small consistent actions can sometimes be better, than sudden infrequent big moves.

Time has a large role to play in this as well.
Warren Buffet is NOT the best investor, there are investors who get higher return rates than him, but what makes Buffet one of the richest investors is time and the compounding effect. He started investing when he was 11, and now he’s more than 90; he got most of his wealth after the age of 50. There are not many investors who have this same advantage Buffet has. As you start growing and getting better, a 1% improvement could mean so much more; 1% of a big pizza will always be bigger than 1% of a small pizza.

Just imagine if every day you got better by 1% or even 0.1%, think about what that would look like in 1 year, 2 years, or 10 years ahead.

Imagine you start with just waking up earlier every day, just that one step, then later maybe you would add some meditation to the mix, then maybe a 10-minute run, then maybe a night-time routine, then maybe a more organized schedule. This is what just one small change- waking up earlier could do!

Oh, and something to remember is, in the beginning, you might not see very much progress, it's the valley of disappointment, but that shouldn't be something that stops us, because it's just a phase. And sometimes we just might take two steps back, but that shouldn't be something that de-motivates us.

The point of this article is to show you that in your life just through one small step, you could start moving, and with 1% improvements, you could reach over time.

We previously had written an article titled ‘the butterfly effect.’ Its on a similar topic, if you’re interested.

Hope you enjoyed reading this :)

Oh, and the answer is - using more images. Let me know if you like this style of content with more images.

Notes:
”The One Thing” by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan- this is book is what inspired me to write about the domino effect
and JamesClear.com for some of the pictures, in this article. JamesClear.com is a place there are many articles written on habit and 1% improvements check that out!