Day 149: How to improve for decades

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

In his talk on “how to live an asymmetric life,” Graham Weaver advised Stanford Business School students to layer four habits:

(1) Do the Hard Thing

(3) Do Your Thing

(3) Do It for Decades; and

(4) Tell Your Story

So you’ve committed to do the hard thing, taking the harder road to potentially greater rewards. And you’re willing to do it because you’re doing your thing — the thing that you can do with unique focus and intensity.

Step 3, “Do it for Decades,” is obviously about tenacity. Improve 1% every day and you’ll be 37 times better after a year, says author James Clear in Atomic Habits.

How much better will you be when you’ve been doing your thing for 23 years, like Weaver? Well, $1 invested at 1% daily interest rate for 23 years yields $ 67,910,112,577,598,660,000,000,000,000,000.

The Tough Part about Tenacity

Sounds great, right? Just keep doing your thing for decades, and you’ll retire a gazillionaire.

The problem, as anyone who’s ever tried to master a hard skill knows, is that progress doesn’t compound exponentially. Some days we improve 1%. Other days, we take the same actions and improve only .01%. Sometimes we go backwards — and for what seems like forever.

“Falling Up”

Sure, focusing on the small wins can help keep you from becoming overwhelmed. But on those days when you’re left standing alone in the pouring rain while the other team kicks mud in your face, you might need a little extra persuasion to keep doing your thing.

In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor suggests deploying the principle of “falling up.” Setbacks are inevitable. To keep a setback from turning into a defeat, you may need to break things down.

To generate the positive emotions necessary for moving forward, we need to feel a sense of control. When setbacks occur, Achor suggests breaking our challenge down into small pieces. Which ones can you control?

After you’ve identified the elements within your control, break those down into small, manageable steps, and tackle the first one today. Each mini-win generates positive feelings, which fuel the next step.

Doing this process for one day gets you trudging forward again despite the mud. Repeating it for decades produces the asymmetric results Weaver describes.