FIGURE 1: The effects of small habits compound over time. For example,
if you can get just 1
percent better each day, you’ll end up with results
that are nearly 37 times better after one year.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way
that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits
multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any
given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be
enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later
that the value of good habits and the cost of
bad ones becomes strikingly
apparent.
This can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We often
dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter very much in the
moment. If you save a little money now, you’re still not a millionaire. If you
go to the gym three days in a row, you’re still out of shape. If you study
Mandarin for an hour tonight, you still haven’t learned the language. We
make a few changes, but the results never seem
to come quickly and so we
slide back into our previous routines.
Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a
bad habit slide. If you eat an unhealthy meal today, the scale doesn’t move
much. If you work late tonight and ignore your family, they will forgive
you. If you procrastinate and put your project off until tomorrow, there will
usually be time to finish it later. A single decision is easy to dismiss.
But when we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day,
by replicating poor
decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little excuses, our
small choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many
missteps—a 1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a
problem.
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of
shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are
flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX
adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south,
you will land in Washington,
D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at
takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when
magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles
apart.
*
Similarly, a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a
very different destination. Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1
percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of
moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference
between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily
habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
That said, it doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right
now. What matters is whether your habits
are putting you on the path
toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current
trajectory than with your current results. If you’re a millionaire but you
spend more than you earn each month, then you’re on a bad trajectory. If
your spending habits don’t change, it’s not going to end well. Conversely, if
you’re broke, but you save a little bit every month, then you’re on the path
toward financial freedom—even if you’re moving slower than you’d like.
Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a
lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure
of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging
measure of your learning
habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get
what you repeat.
If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is
follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices
will compound ten or twenty years down the line. Are you spending less
than you earn each month? Are you making it into the gym each week? Are
you reading books and learning something new each day? Tiny battles like
these are the ones that will define your future self.
Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply
whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally.
Bad habits make
time your enemy.
Habits are a double-edged sword. Bad habits can cut you down just as
easily as good habits can build you up, which is why understanding the
details is crucial. You need to know how habits work and how to design
them to your liking, so you can avoid the dangerous half of the blade.
