What Does 1% Look Like?

What does 1% look like?

Do you know?

Numbers like that don’t always land for me— I need examples.

1% of the population of New York City is just under 85,000 people, or approximately the population of Sioux City, Iowa.

1% of a million dollars is $10k, which isn’t nothing, but is still less than $1,000 per month paid out over a year.

1% of a mile is just over 50 feet. That’s not even the distance from one end of Home Depot to the other.

1% of a year is three-and-half days or half of a week. Sunday morning to Wednesday after lunch. That’s it.

1% of a day is a mere 24 minutes. Not even half an hour.

What if I told you that make massive change toward everything you want for your life, all you needed to do was 1% of the work to get there each day?

1% change— what would that look like?

Teeny, tiny, incremental changes made consistently result in massive changes over time.

All big things come from small beginnings.

The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision.

As it sprouts through repetition, it grows stronger and blooms into the results you’re chasing.

I love the book Atomic Habits by James Clear for a lot of reasons (definitely check it out!), but one of my favorite tools he recommends in it is something called “habit-stacking.”

This is exactly what it sounds like.

You begin with a habit that’s already in place in your life and attach a new one to it so that the first one begins to trigger the second.

He encourages you to keep it tiny— 1% is the name of the game here— so that it’s really do-able.

Here’s an example of where I applied this:

I knew I wanted to add an active visualization practice to my days.

Active visualization is where you spend some time imagining your dreams and goals in full color and intense detail— every aspect of them that you can possibly imagine so that you can truly begin to see yourself living out your dreams.

So when I was thinking about how and where to add 10 minutes of active visualization to my day-to-day schedule in a way that could be consistent but not high-effort, I looked for a place to “stack” it that would make sense.

I have an established morning meditation practice that begins my day, and since meditation means I’m already working with my mind, it seemed both logical and relatively effortless to slide visualization right on top of that habit.

And it worked like a charm— every morning now, I move right from my meditation into my visualization without so much as changing positions on my cushion.

What habit have you been wanting to add that you could apply this idea to?

Sometimes it takes a little more finagling than that to find the perfect stack, so stay with it and wiggle where you need to.

When we make small, easy changes, we’re far more likely to stick with them than when we try to overhaul the entirety of our lives.

And it’s the sticking with them day in and day out where the real magic happens.

It’s the backbone of new habits and real change.

Imagine what might look different in your life if you’d started that habit a year ago.

Now imagine how your future self with thank you a year from now for beginning today.

Don’t wait.

1% change.

Keep it tiny. Keep it daily. See the change.

You’ve got this.

You are an inspiration all of us.