Choose to Take the Journey

A common meme in the self-help community is that 1% improvement a day will compound and lead to astronomical results over an extended period of time. I think it’s a great idea and one of the first concepts I latched onto when I first began my journey. It inspires patience by removing the need for quick, earthshaking results.

I want to refine this idea by saying that even 1% a day is too much to expect. The reason being is that your faculties vary from one day to the next. Maybe you’re underslept. Or still fatigued from the previous day’s workout. Or you had a particularly strenuous day at work. Your progress will be non-linear. There will be ups and downs. Perhaps on one day you will do 20 minutes on the treadmill. That does not mean the next day you have to go for 21 minutes. You might only be able to handle 15 minutes, but the day after that you might easily manage 30 minutes, and the day after that, perhaps only 20 minutes again.

Because your journey will have hills and valleys, peaks and ravines, you should not judge your success based upon even a 1% daily improvement, but instead on whether or not you have taken action. Do not reach for the results. As long as you are taking action consistently, the results will flow out of you automatically.

What about pushing yourself? In my experience, you will have to push yourself just to maintain a good rhythmic consistency. In the case of working out, how many people do you know can even get themselves to the gym with any regularity? I’m willing to bet, not many. But assuming you have achieved consistency, you will find your workout to be too easy anyway and pushing yourself will occur spontaneously. Boredom will drive you toward a quicker pace, a longer run, a higher incline, and a more varied exercise routine. Therefore just concentrate on the action, not the outcome. There is no rush to get to some arbitrary endpoint. As Krishna said to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits.”