1% Better

Improving yourself is a scary thought. How do I work harder than I already am? How can I make the time to level up with an already demanding job? The idea isn’t that you have to get better all at once, but to get a little bit better everyday. What that means is doing 1 or 2 things that will make you better consistently. Shifting your focus to have the 1% mindset. I know that 1% has a negative connotation, but don’t worry the 1% I’m talking about is how you get better.

If I told you to go to the gym, read, do your 9-5, then spend time with your family, and get a solid nights rest; it would seem almost impossible to fit anything else in. The truth is, there are plenty of times throughout that jam packed day for you to get better. All you have to do is want it. I’ve talked about changing your mindset before, and I still stick by it. It is really tough, but once you do it, it will make a huge difference in your life.

Having the 1% better mindset is the idea that you will do one thing everyday to get better. Even if you read 10 pages in a book everyday, in 20 days you will have read 200 pages. Taking that approach to tasks in your life make them more manageable. You don’t start off climbing Mt. Everest, you build to it. You don’t go out one day and run a marathon, you start by taking the first step. Getting over the idea of instant gratification is a challenge, but once you realize that working for something is far more rewarding then a half-assed approach, then you can start to really appreciate your accomplishments.

In the beginning of the year, I started to take this approach with a few things in my life. One of the biggest challenges for me was making myself better mentally. This meant growing through education as well as understanding how my brain worked and how it could improve. Now, it may sound odd at 34 years old that I don’t understand how my brain works, but in reality I had never thought about it. I had not thought about the best way my brain absorbs information, or what my biggest distractions were? These where things I knew I needed to do to be better.

In the past I had always hated reading, especially if it was books on ways to improve. When I examined why I had hated reading, I realized it was because I was always reading something that someone else told me I had to read, or I was reading the latest and greatest Marketing Book. It always felt like school. I knew that reading was one of the best ways to educate myself but I also wanted to enjoy it. My trick was to trade off with myself. Read a book that would make me better, then read something I wanted to read and continue with this pattern. I started with a book that had been on my shelf for years. A few times I had started it, then stopped, and tried it a few more times. This time I went in with a goal. Read through this book, then I would reward myself with a fiction novel I had been waiting to read. Little by little I got through that book and actually found myself enjoying it. Then I moved on to the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. I have read more books in 2018 than I have since I left college.

Reading just a few pages each day helped me adjust my mindset when it came to reading and improving. Taking on a 300 page behemoth on Content Strategy seems daunting at first, but when you take it on 10 pages at a time, you end up finishing a lot faster then trying to tackle the whole thing at once and getting frustrated.

This process can be applied to almost anything in your life. Working out, eating right, work, even writing this blog. It took me several days, but I wrote a few words each day and chipped away at it. You’d be surprised how fast doing just a little becomes a little more, and a little more, each day.