What a powerful statement by James Clear, a writer and speaker focused on habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling book, Atomic Habits. I love this quote because it takes something that can be such an abstract idea, and gives us an actionable way to make impactful changes.
What I mean by that is this…
What comes to mind when you think of the kind of person that you want to become?
You might say: I want to be an amazing mother. I want to be organized. I want to be calm and grounded.
These are all great things, but sometimes it can seem hard to have any idea how to get from where you are today to actually transforming into the kind of person that you want to become. Say, for instance, how to go from being disorganized to organized, or chaotic to peaceful. We can easily picture the end result but we don't always know what the path from "here" to "there" actually looks like.
James Clear makes it so simple. He says that every action is a step towards who you are becoming. This means that we can evaluate individual decisions and see where our actions are helping us, and where actions are unintentionally hurting us. We can ask ourselves if a specific decision leads us closer or farther from the results we desire which can in turn help guide us towards the life we truly want to live.
This means that even the small actions matter. Sometimes it feels like things are too little to really have an impact or that they don't make a real difference in our lives. But James would say otherwise. This illustration shows the impact of these small seemingly insignificant actions over time, it is what he calls, the power of tiny gains.
This graph shows what one percent looks like compounded over a year in a positive and a negative way.
What a visual!
This is so encouraging to me because it’s a good reminder that the little things really do add up. That improving ever so slightly (1%) in the right direction over and over can end up having a huge impact on where we end up. I love this because it reminds me that we don't have to completely overhaul our lives or make large, radical changes, to get to where we want to go.
The things I’ve been sharing on Instagram this week are comically small things. For example, laying out my clothes for the next day at night instead of finding an outfit in the morning. It takes me one or two minutes the night before but it sets my day up for success right from the start. It makes my morning just a little bit easier. It’s a vote I cast consistently for the kind of person I want to become - someone who is organized, someone who is prepared, someone whose morning is not frantic and chaotic as I try to get out the door (even if I push snooze one too many times), etc. It’s something so small but it truly does make my life easier.
I love this because sometimes it can feel so overwhelming to get from "here" to "there". From where we are now to where we want to be. The good news is that we don’t have to do anything crazy today to be able to get to where we want to be. All we have to do is just keep showing up day after day and getting just one percent better. Taking one more step towards the person we want to become, and someday in the not to distant future we will look back at our life and be amazed at how far we’ve come.
What can you do today that future you will thank you for later…
a little something that will make your life in the future a little bit easier?
Go and do it today. It DOES actually matter for your future.
We only have one life to live... let's make it AMAZING!
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