Getting 1% better every day is mathematically impossible. Do this instead | Brad Stulberg

0:00 I'm Brad Stulberg.

0:01 I'm author of The Way of Excellence

0:03 and I'm on faculty at the University of Michigan.

0:08 Three key factors in the pursuit of excellence.

0:12 While there are 16 factors of excellence,

0:15 for the purposes of today, let's go into three.

0:20 Goals, consistency, and patience.

0:22 Goals give you a target to shoot for.

0:25 It's important to pick a mountain to climb.

0:27 in uh without a peak there is no mountain

0:30 and a goal is very much a peak that you're striving for.

0:32 So it gives your journey it gives your pursuit some shape in some form.

0:36 A process over outcomes mindset says that first

0:39 you you do you want to pick your big

0:41 aspirational goal and then after you set that big

0:44 goal you want to break it down into its

0:47 smaller component parts because just thinking about this big

0:49 goal can often be overwhelming but if you can break it down into small parts it

0:53 gives you these manageable micro milestones along the way.

0:56 Then the third step of a process mindset is

0:59 to largely forget about the big goal and instead

1:03 focus on those small daily sometimes weekly steps

1:07 that you can take to work toward that big goal.

1:10 Now the fourth part is if you catch yourself stressing

1:13 out or worrying about the big goal ahead of you,

1:15 use that as a cue to ask yourself what could you be doing right now?

1:19 How can you reimmerse yourself in the process?

1:22 And fifth, and finally, remember that occasionally, inevitably,

1:25 you are going to fall off the path.

1:27 And when you fall off the path, your job is simply to step back on.

1:32 A process over outcomes mindset is so important because when we set a big goal,

1:36 there's often this temptation to talk about the goal,

1:38 to think about the goal, to dream about the goal,

1:41 but these things all become stand-ins for actually working toward the goal.

1:44 And the only way that we accomplish really big goals is

1:48 by focusing on the small steps that we take along the way.

1:51 Often times we think that the achievement of some

1:54 goal is what's going to bring us fulfillment.

1:56 But it's it's actually not the achievement.

1:58 It's all the work that we do to get to the goal.

2:01 That's where the joy and the satisfaction lives.

2:03 Don't get me wrong, achievement feels good.

2:05 As I said earlier, excellence is not a let's all hold

2:08 hands and sing kumbaya and pretend

2:10 that winning or accomplishment doesn't matter.

2:12 But it also acknowledges that if we if we tell ourselves if I

2:16 just win this or if I just accomplish that, then I'll be happy.

2:20 We are falling for a trap that is as old as time.

2:22 In the book, I tell the story of Ray Allen,

2:24 one of the best basketball players ever,

2:27 a crafts person, phenomenal technician, three-point shooter.

2:30 And Ray Allen had done everything in his career except win a championship.

2:33 He had been in All-Star games.

2:35 He had won three-point shooting titles.

2:37 He'd even starred in a Spike Lee movie.

2:39 He got game.

2:40 But Ry thought that if he just won a championship,

2:43 then the hole inside would be filled.

2:45 Then he'd be content.

2:46 And finally, after years of trying,

2:48 he won his first championship with the Boston Celtics in 2008.

2:51 And you know what Ray Allen said?

2:53 He said the morning after winning that championship was one of the most

2:57 disorienting mornings of his life because

2:59 he realized that it didn't fulfill him.

3:02 Now, if that is not a perfect encapsulation of this trap,

3:05 of this arrival fallacy, I don't know what is.

3:08 But we all feel that, right?

3:09 My guess is every single individual watching this has at some point

3:12 in their life told themselves a story that if they just get to this achievement,

3:16 then they'll be happy or then they'll be content.

3:18 And perhaps you had contentment and happiness for a couple

3:21 hours or a couple days or maybe even a couple weeks,

3:24 but then you're back to striving in in running.

3:27 It's called the postmarathon blues.

3:28 So you train so hard for this big goal, you run a marathon,

3:31 you achieve it, and then the next day you're sad.

3:34 Why?

3:35 because you built up achievement as if it was going

3:37 to be this thing that would give you lasting satisfaction when

3:39 you were actually more satisfied in the training because that's

3:42 the work that you were doing day in and day out.

3:44 If you are new to a craft or new

3:46 to an activity or maybe you're even new to setting

3:49 goals to begin with, a really advantageous and helpful

3:52 framework is called SMARTT and it stands for specific,

3:56 measurable, actionable, relatable, and time bound.

4:01 So, an example of a smart goal could be deadlifting 405 lbs.

4:08 So, it's very specific, right?

4:11 It's a deadlift.

4:12 It's very measurable.

4:13 There's a number.

4:14 or I want to get to 405 lbs.

4:16 It's very actionable.

4:17 You can back into a training plan that you can show

4:21 up and and try to engage in and do every single day.

4:24 It's very relatable if you value health

4:26 or you value performance or you're in the gym.

4:28 And then finally, it's time bound.

4:30 You could say, "I want to deadlift 405 lbs by the end

4:32 of this year." That would be an example of a smart goal.

4:36 Smart goals are really useful because they hold you accountable.

4:39 They're not wishy-washy.

4:40 They give you a specific time frame to work toward that goal in.

4:44 And again, they're very actionable.

4:46 You can say to deadlift 45 lbs,

4:48 these are the the the the four workouts I need to do every single week

4:52 for four years that is going to help

4:54 me achieve that eventual goal down the road.

4:56 So, as this comes together, you can see that when we pursue a goal,

5:01 we're working toward that goal, but that goal is also working on us.

5:04 We want to get to the peak of the mountain,

5:06 but all the growth happens on the side.

5:09 So the peak of the mountain might be a 600 lb deadlift,

5:12 but we are growing as a person.

5:14 We are learning about resilience and overcoming failure and being uncomfortable

5:17 and the power of community and vulnerability and failure and showing up.

5:21 That doesn't happen when we hit the 600 lb lift.

5:24 That happens in the years of training to get there.

5:27 So if we're pursuing our goals in a way that aligns with our values,

5:31 we have this beautiful closed loop where the process is energizing,

5:34 it's satisfying, it's fulfilling, it's shaping us as a person.

5:37 And if we achieve the goal, if we get to the top of the mountain,

5:41 will have brought a lot of zen, a lot of aliveness,

5:44 a lot of satisfaction up there with us.

5:47 Log on to the internet, any social media, and there are so many influencers

5:52 that just are showing their absolute heroic days.

5:56 So, it's the workout that leaves you shredded, and you you go till you puke.

6:00 It's the tech bro that is bragging about the string

6:03 of all-nighters that he or she pulled to to launch their company.

6:06 the runner that talks about that epic workout where they

6:10 did uh 16 400s at 5k pace, whatever it is.

6:13 And what can happen is we can mistake the goal of excellence as having

6:19 these single heroic days when in fact

6:21 the way that you make progress at something,

6:23 the goal of excellence is not to have a heroic day.

6:26 It's to string together many very good days over long periods of time

6:31 to create a heroic year or a heroic decade or a heroic body of work.

6:36 If I wanted to be the best writer,

6:38 the most proficient writer I could be over a oneweek period,

6:42 I would not sleep and I would exist on a diet of Red Bull,

6:47 Celsius, espresso and cigarettes.

6:48 And truly, I think if I did that for one week,

6:51 I would produce an enormous volume of very high quality work.

6:54 That would be a heroic week.

6:56 But if I tried to build a career writing like that, my writing would go to crap.

7:01 And that is the trap of optimizing for short-term intensity,

7:04 for what plays really well,

7:06 for what makes us feel heroic versus long-term progress,

7:09 which is much more a function of consistency.

7:12 It's not to say that there aren't times to be intense.

7:14 It's not to say that there aren't times to go to the well.

7:17 There absolutely are.

7:18 One of my friends and collaborative partners,

7:20 Steve Magnus, calls this going to see God.

7:22 There are times in every pursuit where we want to go see God.

7:26 But the only way that we give ourselves the fitness,

7:29 the ability to have that intensity is by being super consistent.

7:33 We have to build up to those moments when we go see God.

7:36 And even then, we can only go see God a few times a year at most.

7:41 There's this popular framework in personal development and and in performance

7:45 that is just get 1% better every day.

7:48 And as a mindset, I really agree with it and I like it.

7:52 What it says is that you don't always have to hit home runs.

7:54 You just have to put the ball in play, right?

7:56 You don't have to be a hero.

7:57 Just show up every day and just get a little bit better.

8:00 Just get 1% better every day.

8:02 And as a mindset, that is a wonderful driver of consistency.

8:05 However, what often happens is that people start to take that a little

8:09 bit too literally and they expect that they'll actually get 1% better every day.

8:14 But progress doesn't work like that.

8:16 If I got 1% better every day as a powerlifter,

8:19 my deadlift would be over a,000 pounds right now.

8:22 I'd be the best deadlifter to ever live.

8:24 It's not.

8:24 If I got 1% better every day as a writer,

8:27 I would have nine Pulitzer prizes by now.

8:29 But I don't.

8:30 So, how progress actually works is when we're relatively new to something,

8:33 we get more than 1% better every day.

8:36 We get 100% better every day.

8:37 Then we get 70% better, 50% better, 20% better, 10% better.

8:41 And then we get to this phase where we're making these little incremental gains.

8:45 for getting 1% better every day.

8:47 And that sense of concrete progress is so addictive.

8:50 It's so motivating.

8:51 But what happens to anyone on a journey of progress is that eventually

8:56 they hit a plateau and they stop getting 1% better every day.

9:00 And at this point, the motivation has got to shift

9:04 from these observable concrete bits of progress to curiosity about what

9:09 you're doing into commitment into an unwavering consistency that acknowledges

9:14 that sometimes you are going to get a little bit better.

9:17 But sometimes for a week, for a month, maybe even a year,

9:20 you might be on a plateau where you don't yet see observable progress.

9:24 But if you keep showing up underneath the surface, you're building experience.

9:29 you're building progress.

9:30 To bring this point to life in the book,

9:32 I tell the story of the world champion powerliffter Lane Norton.

9:35 And Lane Norton deadlifted 723 lb.

9:38 So for his age and weight class, the best in the world.

9:43 Guess what?

9:44 Lane Norton deadlifted 10 years prior.

9:47 715 lb.

9:48 So over 10 years, Lane Norton added 8 lb to his deadlift.

9:54 So he wasn't getting 1% better every day.

9:56 He wasn't even getting 1% better every year.

9:59 He was getting about 8% better every year.

10:02 Now, if you divide 8% by 365,

10:05 I would need someone that's better at math to tell me,

10:08 but there would be a decimal and a few zeros.

10:10 So, if Lane Norton was addicted to that kind of progress, if Lane Norton said,

10:14 "I just need to get 1% better every day," he would have quit.

10:17 He worked 10 years to gain less than a percentage point of performance.

10:22 And I asked Lane, I said,

10:23 "What kept you on the path?" And he said it was curiosity about the craft.

10:27 It was self-discovery.

10:28 It was community.

10:29 It was commitment.

10:30 It was discipline.

10:30 And it was this mindset that whether or not I made observable progress,

10:35 I would stay consistent.

10:36 There's a lot of fascinating research that that comes out of sport science

10:40 is the main field that shows

10:42 that when athletes increase their acute training load,

10:45 which is often defined as what you do this week,

10:50 by more than 10% of their chronic training load,

10:53 which is often defined as what you've done the past month,

10:57 rates of injury and illness skyrocket.

10:59 So what that means is that if you try to take

11:03 too big of a jump from your historic body of work,

11:06 from what you've been doing, you set yourself up to get injured, to burn out.

11:11 So while that is very measurable in sport, in my reporting,

11:14 I saw this in just about every field that when we go

11:18 on these benders of just trying to do an enormous amount of work,

11:21 when we get caught up in hustle culture and we try

11:23 to be hero of the day or hero of the week,

11:25 we have a really good day or a really good week,

11:28 but then the following month or two months or in some cases year goes to crap.

11:32 And then you end up on this performance

11:35 trajectory where you have a couple great days,

11:37 but in between those great days are shitty months.

11:40 And that's not how lasting progress is made.

11:42 You don't go to the gym and kill yourself

11:45 once a week to gain muscle and to gain fitness.

11:47 You got to go to the gym four days a week.

11:49 And in order to go to the gym 4 days a week,

11:52 you can't kill yourself on any one because the goal isn't to destroy yourself.

11:56 The goal is to build a consistent

11:58 rhythm that allows you to incrementally gain overtime.

12:01 If you're interested in establishing consistency for yourself toward a goal,

12:05 here are a couple uh ideas that can help.

12:08 You generally want to stop one rep short

12:11 or one sentence short or one meeting short.

12:14 So very rarely do you just want to leave it all out there on any given day.

12:17 You want to have a little bit in the tank

12:19 so that you can pick up that rhythm the next day.

12:21 Another way to think about it is you want most efforts

12:24 to be somewhere between a five and a seven out of 10.

12:27 Cuz once you start tapping into that 8 n 10 out of 10,

12:30 you're drawing from the bank that you're going to need

12:32 for the rest of the week or the rest of the month.

12:35 If you go below a five out of 10,

12:36 you can kind of get into that easy going through the motions,

12:39 you're not really challenging yourself zone.

12:41 But a five to seven out of 10, adjust, manageable challenge.

12:44 That is like the approximate zone of consistency,

12:47 the approximate zone of development.

12:49 And then the final thing I'd say is

12:52 be an be an anthropologist of your own progress.

12:55 So look back at the times that you overshot

12:57 the target and what led you to do that.

12:59 Was it a lack of confidence?

13:01 Was it insecurity?

13:01 Was it comparing yourself to what other people do?

13:04 And how can you try to short circuit that temptation in the future?

13:09 Patience means understanding that there's no

13:12 such thing as an overnight breakthrough.

13:14 Every great accomplishment, every great attainment,

13:16 every great achievement in science,

13:18 in the arts, in sports, in business, it was always years in the making.

13:21 So, we've got to play the long game.

13:24 We have to commit to showing up through those ups and downs,

13:27 in turns, in setbacks, in highs and lows.

13:30 Um and and we've got to zoom out and really

13:33 give ourselves a chance to stay on the path over a long period of time and not

13:38 rush our progress because when we rush our progress, we get in our own way.

13:42 That's when we get injured, when we burn out.

13:43 I think it's a very natural human inclination to want to rush.

13:47 And I think that it's perpetuated by the modern world,

13:52 which is very high velocity.

13:54 Like everything moves fast.

13:55 The news cycle moves fast.

13:57 Entertainment moves fast.

13:58 Our cars move fast.

13:59 We communicate in microsconds with the click of a button.

14:02 There's so much velocity in life.

14:05 But the path of excellence of making progress in a heartfelt pursuit.

14:10 It's often a nanning game.

14:11 It takes time and you can't rush your way through a nine-inninging game.

14:15 And as badly as you might want to be in the bottom of the seventh,

14:19 it could just be that you're in the top of the third.

14:22 When thinking about patience as a integral factor of excellence,

14:26 it's really important to understand and expect plateaus.

14:29 Plateaus are a feature because they're what happens

14:33 when you stop getting 1% better every day.

14:35 And in many ways, when you're on the plateau,

14:37 that's when all the interesting stuff happens.

14:40 When you can't predict progress, when it becomes nonlinear,

14:43 when you really have to lean into discipline

14:45 and you have to practice your values and find

14:48 the rewards intrinsically because you're not getting that external

14:51 validation and that external little dopamine hit of progress.

14:54 Plateaus are also a feature because generally speaking,

14:58 before we have a breakthrough, we experience a plateau.

15:02 So, it's like pounding a stone.

15:04 And the stone might crack on the 32nd pound,

15:07 but the first 31 lbs, you're building tension.

15:10 And even though you're not seeing the stone crack,

15:13 tension is building in the stone.

15:14 And when we work on goals,

15:16 we're going to get to a point when we need to build that tension,

15:19 when we're going to be on this plateau.

15:21 And if we stick to our process, if we stay consistent,

15:24 we give ourselves the best chance at eventually having the breakthrough.

15:28 Micro objectives are so important in the pursuit

15:32 of big goals because they keep you really present.

15:35 So, let's use the metaphor of a mountain again.

15:39 If you're constantly looking at the peak

15:41 of the mountain at the start of your climb,

15:43 you might get really discouraged cuz it's quite far away.

15:46 You might also trip and fall because you're not looking down.

15:50 You're not climbing where your feet are.

15:51 But if instead of looking at the peak of the mountain, you say,

15:55 "My goal for today is to gain 200 m, 300 m, whatever it might be in elevation,

16:01 then instead of having to look all the way up

16:03 at the peak of the mountain and be overwhelmed and potentially trip,

16:05 you can just look up at the next section." And that is

16:08 such a powerful focusing mechanism to keep you climbing where your feet are.

16:12 And this is true on an actual mountain, but it's also true metaphorically.

16:16 The other reason that micro objectives are really

16:19 important is because they serve as a motivating force.

16:22 Right?

16:22 If you view uh the mountain as just getting

16:25 to the peak and the peak might take 4 months,

16:27 it's really hard to sustain motivation.

16:29 But if you give yourself some contrived

16:31 little victories along the way, some milestones,

16:34 you can feel that that progress being made in in in route to the bigger goal.

16:39 A profound example of this that that's not a mountain climber,

16:42 but another athlete comes from the bobsutter Kelly Humphre.

16:45 Kelly Humphre is a three-time gold medalist and a five-time world champion.

16:49 She's competed in five Olympics.

16:51 So, you can do the math.

16:53 She's been at top of this sport for 20 years.

16:56 Just incredible longevity.

16:57 And I asked Kelly, I said, "Kelly,

16:59 tell me about your goals." And she said, "My goal is really simple.

17:02 My goal is to win a gold medal every four years." And I joked, I said, "Simple.

17:07 Simple doesn't mean easy." And then she said, "Here's how I go about this goal.

17:11 I break that big goal of win a gold

17:14 medal every four years down into two by two years.

17:17 And the first two years is about building a base.

17:20 And the second two years is about sharpening the edge of the sword.

17:23 And then each of those 2-year increments gets broken down into one year.

17:27 And each year has a specific training focus, a specific training objective.

17:31 Each year gets broken down into quarters.

17:33 Each quarter gets broken down into months.

17:36 Each month gets broken down into weeks.

17:38 And each week gets broken down into days.

17:40 and every day I just have to show up and execute my workout.

17:44 That to me is this wonderful example of a process over outcome mindset

17:49 that embraces the power of consistency and that requires a lot of patience.

17:55 So there is this really nice interplay between setting goals,

17:59 which again gives your path,

18:01 gives your activity some form, committing to consistency,

18:04 which is what keeps you working toward your goal,

18:07 and then having an attitude of patience,

18:09 which is what allows you to play the long game

18:14 to give your consistency a chance to manifest into progress.

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