Get 1% Better a Day and You’ll be 37 Times as Good a Year From Now
Ever so often, the phrase “get 1% better each day and you will be 37 times as good a year from now” gets thrown around. It’s also easy to dismiss the actual value of making just slightly better decisions every day. Getting one percent isn’t going to make headlines now, is it?
Let me give you an example from real life:
A Story of Two Small Sprouts
The Amazon rainforest is regarded as one of the most diverse ecosystems on the entire planet. To this date, scientists have cataloged and explored more than 16.000 different tree species. Yet, scientists have discovered that approximately 227 distinct tree species take up nearly half of the rainforest. Why?
Imagine two tree sprouts growing side by side in the Amazon rainforest. It’s a competition for nutrition, water, and sunlight. In the beginning, both plants have plenty of ingredients to start a healthy life. If one plant can grow just a little bit faster than the other, it can stretch taller, catch more sunlight, and soak up more nutrition. The next day, the taller plant overreaches to the other, smaller plant and the additional energy allows the plant to grow even more.
From this point onwards, there is no turning back. The winning plant has a better disproportionate ability to spread its seeds and reproduce all over the forest. Now, it is only a matter of time before the larger plant will completely outgrow the smaller plant which will eventually, due to a lack of nutrition and sunlight, cease to exist.
One plant only needs a slight edge, in the beginning, to crowd out the competition and take over the entire forest.
Winner-Take-All Effect: The similarities between students and runners
On the surface, these are completely unrelated and you might be questioning my sanity right now (probably rightfully so), but students and runners all have one thing in common: It’s a Winner-Take-All market.
If you look at your university class, a few students will get a starting salary 2-3-4 times larger than the rest of the students when graduating. One of those few students might even be you or someone you know. But does that mean that those few students are 2-3 or 4 times better than the rest of the class? Without knowing of their smarts, probably not. In reality, they might be just 5 or 10% better than the rest of the class but those 5 or 10% might be able to deliver 2 or 3 times the value for a company.
Similarly, take the top 2 of the world’s fastest 100-meter sprinters. How much time separates their records? 11 hundredths of a second. 11 hundredths of a second is the difference between a yearly salary of roughly $21 million and some $4 million. The world-record holder isn’t 5 times better than the number 2 but still, the world-record holder has a yearly salary 5 times higher. This is an example of what economists call increasing returns to scale in which an increase in the input yields a disproportionately large increase in the output.
Implications
In reality, the conclusion is quite simple and straightforward: The marginal action that you take now counts the most. You might not notice it tomorrow or in the next week, but over time, your marginal advantage grows exponentially to a disproportionate amount. Truly, the opportunities you receive today are due to your hard work.
You only need to be slightly better than your competition, but if you can maintain a slight edge today and tomorrow and the day after that, then you can repeat the process of winning by just a little bit over and over again. And thanks to the Winner-Take-All Effect, each win delivers outsized rewards.
Similarly, for young people early in their careers, the actions you take set the direction for the next many years. It’s harder to change the trajectory later on than to set it right from the start.
