To me, the spirit of this 1% better every day is to have at least tried to be better. That alone counts as or at least towards the 1%. It’s not something you literally measure, but just aiming for. 1% of a day could be as much as changing a thought pattern. It could be not drinking that Coke Zero today - note to self. It could be not letting the full trash can in the bathroom spill over. It’s more about the intention than the measure.

Agreed, but it also has to be noted that this intention, if you remind yourself of it constantly, can fill you with dread add unwillingness which can grow to be a huge self-imposed psychic block.

I want to be better but I've dropped the "every day" trope. That's a meaningless and toxic hustling that only works when you are in your 20s.

Progress is not linear. We are not machines.

Even a machine can't make a linear progress if it doesn't get a steady (or an ever-increasing) energy input or if it can't internalize its previous experience and transform it to a more efficient algorithm.

To me, like you, the most important is the never-ending intention. I'm a pre-diabetic and I have very bad days during which the only thing I could do is eat, poop, drink water, nap, repeat 3-4 times, and the day is gone. But I don't lose sight of my goals and when my energy is back I am catching up on a few important items from my mental backlog, almost every time.

That's the important thing IMO: have a vision, never forget your vision, act on it when you're able. Don't guilt-trip yourself, ever.

Adding to this, it’s hard to know if you are actually getting “better” because it’s so hard to measure. My approach is to try to get better between reflection periods while also scheduling days for self reflection on that goal.

I am 50/50 on if a conscious self-reflection will give you the birds-eye view. For some it might work, for me it doesn't.

Meditation definitely achieves that for me however.

And paying a bit more attention to each moment is less harsh than than trying to increase numeric metrics of “good” or “evil” each day. Paying attention is simple enough you can tell if you are having trouble with it or not without numbers. Although people are good at fooling themselves, they are also able to see thru a brick wall given enough time and stillness.

It's really both intention and action. Intending to take out the trash is meaningless if it's already spilled over. We need more than beliefs to make progress.

I believe OP is talking about both going at your own realistic pace (whatever that means for you), and also actually going.

What's wrong with Coke Zero?

We have to be honest about what “1% better every day” fights against.

For an example, we have lots of time on a day to complete a task but we end up doing nothing on it. Instead we tell ourselves we’ll do a marathon session the next day to make up for it. Only the next day comes and we don’t feel like doing it anymore than we did the previous day. And now we’re dreading it because we set ourselves up having to pull a marathon session. So we do nothing again.

nkozyra: This is all a big problem with unrealistic expectations.

> If I get one percent better each day for one year, I'll end up thirty-seven times better by the end of the year.

OP also seems to assume that 1% improvement today is same effort/as easy as 1% improvement yesterday. it becomes harder to improve by 1% as time goes on, just coz your baseline is compounded too but absolute effort/difficulty may not. 3.65 rather than 37.78 at the end of the year is probably closer to the truth (and that is if one is able to do this every day at all to nkozyra's point)

Have you tried applying this for 4 years yet? Are you now 177 times better than when you started?

> This, too, is an unrealistic expectation. To get better every day (or even most days!) is very hard to do and can put you on the defensive as much as the quest for perfection

Not just getting better every day (which already is very hard) but getting exponentially better every day! That is just plain ludicrous idea.

It's not meant to be taken that literally.

>This, too, is an unrealistic expectation.

"We evolve beyond the person we were a minute before! Little by little, we advance a bit further with each turn. That's how a drill works!"