What does every day improvement look like? At face value you might see progress on a thing each day but how do you track how much you improve every day? Is it too subjective a metric? Quite possibly, but if you are looking to tangibly see the progress each day I would suggest you might have unrealistic expectations. However, it is the small improvements we make that lead to big improvements, which brings me to the compounding effect.

The compounding effect

You might have come across compounding as a term associated with money, and compound interest. This is where you gain interest on your money (through savings/investments etc.) and that interest then earns interest. Over time small amounts of compounding with your interest adds up, and the more interest you earn, the more compounding happens. But compounding is not just for money.

Let’s say you want to learn how to play the guitar. Each day you learn a new chord and combine it with the chords you have learned on previous days. Eventually you will be able to put together chord combinations to play some songs. This won’t happen overnight, but you will be adding to your skills and improving every day. If you actually want to learn how to play the guitar, see my post on ‘how to teach yourself anything’.

Learning a skill makes seeing improvement every day a bit more tangible, but if we take it outside of that, to say, better habits or improving your decision making, how does this work? It is exactly like going to the gym. You turn up on day 1, work hard and the next day you don’t look any different. The same happens on day 2, and on day 7, and on day 20. You are exercising more and are improving your fitness but not physically seeing an improvement. Seeing the change will come but it doesn’t happen right away. Each session you do in the gym compounds to improve your fitness over time, and it is the same for personal development and self-improvement.

Personal development compounding: building good habits

To seek personal development every day is a challenging ask, especially when the small changes appear to make no difference at all. In ‘Atomic Habits’, James Clear states that habits are the compound interest of self-improvement, and improving yourself every day makes a huge difference in the long run. Habits are the system that sits behind our goals – how we actually make progress on and achieve them. The habits you instil will determine the level of improvement you see over time. In his book, James Clear shares the following graph, showing that improving 1% every day leads to a 37.78% improvement in yourself over a whole year.

Getting 1% better every day means improving yourself by over a third every year. Based on the math, if you start today, you will be more than 100% better in three years’ time. Sure, that might seem like a long time to wait, but that’s what improvement every day looks like. It is staying patient and sticking with it when you feel like you are not making progress. It is being consistent with your learning habits, plus time in the game.

'But I want it now'

We live in an instantaneous society, where we get everything now. Want the latest invention? Buy it online and it will be here the next day, or in some cases the same day. Want Ed Sheeran’s new album? Stream it now. Don’t want to wait until next week to see the next episode? Binge watch the whole series on Netflix. Sure, the instantaneous nature of these things have undoubtedly improved our lives, but they have made us more impatient.

This makes anything that takes time a lot harder because it is against everything we have become used to. It is part of the reason we fail to continue going to the gym after January, or start reading self-improvement books and stop after the first one. There is some hard work and consistency required to see the results and that makes us more likely to quit after not much time. To truly seek to get 1% better every day, we need to get over the instantaneous nature of society, because that is not how self-improvement works.

How I improve every day

Having been on a personal development journey for a couple of years now, I wanted to share how the three most important things that have worked for me, including some examples.

Get to know yourself

I took time to truly get to know and understand myself. This took me on a path of learning about my personality, my self-awareness, my purpose and my principles. One example from this journey, is that I am an introvert, but before getting to know myself I didn’t truly understand introversion. I grew up in an environment where being an introvert didn’t seem acceptable, or even at times it was branded as rude. Taking time out to recharge didn’t always seem like an option, and so I didn’t take much time out at all. This was leading to me not being very effective with my time. Truly getting to know myself enabled me to understand that as an introvert, I gain my energy by taking time out. Understanding this has enabled better learning, better interaction and better management of my energy and my time. This is just one aspect of getting to know myself that has enabled an approach to improve every day. If you want to embark on a similar journey see my series of posts on ‘getting to know yourself.’

Read consistently

I read almost every day. It is not the reading though, that makes the improvement. It is taking action on and implementing what I have read. One example is when I read ‘Essentialism’ by Greg McKeown, I behaved like a non-essentialist. I spent time on trivial matters, I said yes to everything and I did not prioritize my life or my time. It is easy to read a book and then forget it, but where it can help your life you should take time to action and apply it to your situation. Now I focus on the truly meaningful things in my life and do not engage with the trivial. This means I have more time to focus on improving at things that will move the needle for me. Over time, reading on different topics outside of my knowledge area has helped my ability to solve problems, and view things from different perspectives. I didn’t notice this shift at the time, but looking back my view of how the world operates, and how I operate within it has changed through action I have taken from reading.

Show up

To improve every day you have to show up with the intent of bettering yourself. Some days you won’t feel like learning, or you just need a rest and that is okay – you should always take time out! My rule is that taking a day off is great, it is a necessary part of optimizing yourself. But I don’t take two days off in a row (there are exceptions for holidays etc.). I know that if I take two days off in a row that will become the habit.

It can be challenging to keep going when you don’t see tangible improvement every day but the sustained effort is worth it with the compounding effect. Do you have an approach to help you improve every day?