Cherishing the One Percent solution
A few years ago, I met a fascinating individual who has become a good friend. We sat beside each other on a flight to Atlanta. He was 68 years old at the time, and off to wind surf in Hawaii for two weeks. This was just the beginning entrée into a life lived well, and full of adventures and great successes.
As part of this conversation, I asked him about his greatest lesson that he would share. It was simple:
“Nothing replaces sustained, incremental efforts compounded over time.”
When interviewing successful athletes, lawyers, entrepreneurs, artists and parents, I find that his insight remains one of the great truths in life. And yet, only a few take advantage of such a simple solution to the sweet rewards life has to offer. Let’s consider why that might be.
Life will give us challenges. This is inevitable.
Many people wait until the challenge is rooted itself in the middle of their lives before considering a change. This often leads to a strong desire for immediate results.
Parents with a child who is regularly transfixed for hours in front of a video game are suddenly shocked when teachers report growing failures at school. The obese patient in the ER with a heart attack seems surprised that his physician’s warnings have come to bear upon his life severely. The employee who shows up late, turns work in even later is surprised when they are suddenly seeking another job.
In my office, some parents arrive with a tantruming ten-year-old who has been wreaking havoc over their lives for seven years, and only after a true crisis do they seek help. At other times, parents arrive with a 17-year-old who hasn’t yet picked up her room, carried a dish to the sink or even said thankyou for the endless trips to and from her varied activities, who are wondering if she is prepared for life.
In each of these situations, the pain of life is bearing down hard and fast. Thus, the temptation is to seek immediate and instant solutions. Thus, they want the 100% solution.
Occasionally, these exist. Not often.
And it’s a cheat. To think that you can with some intense, expensive burst of effort…resolve years of ignoring problems or poor results. Usually this doesn’t work. But we all know, with the advent of instant results in many areas of life, many of us are conditioned to expect more with less.
This is rarely a useful thought process when addressing behavioral, emotional or habit change. We need a more sustained approach.
The one percent solution is the opposite of the 100% approach. The 1% Solution is not about instant change. It’s not about a quick fix. It’s not about the illusion of change.
It’s not about pretending that you can make substantial shifts in your child’s behavior with an instant “behavior chart,” or bigger threats or worse, a massive dose of psychotropic medication. It’s not about surgery to remove a lifetime of poor choices.
So, what is it?
• The 1% Solution is about utilizing one of the fundamental laws of the universe.
• The 1% solution is about change that produces a small result every single day.
• The 1% solution is about the power of sustained effort over time… producing compounding results that must be viewed from the long-term perspective rather than short-term perspective.
• The 1% solution is about HABITS… HABITS that produce happiness, success, and fulfillment.
• And the 1% solution builds beliefs and expectation through the daily results.
Many folks tend to shrug their shoulders at the notion of a one percent daily shift in effort. Yet, the wise know that this is ignorance. Let’s just imagine for a moment that you are about to invest a 1% more each day for one year. One each day, you now get accumulate the results from each prior day. At the end of one year, you have increased your investment by how much? Perhaps you are thinking 50 percent better, or a 100 percent better? Maybe 1000 percent (10 times) better?
Nope. You would have experienced a 3,700 % improvement or gain. That’s right: 37 times better with just one percent a day. This is the beauty of compound interest.
Most of us fail to take advantage of this with our personal lives, our children, and our investments. We fail to see the impact of compounding our efforts daily with investing just a small amount more each day. Those who do, however, end up reaping great rewards.
In next week’s article, I will delve deeper into this simple approach, to explore how you can bring this into practical strategies for you and your family. Until then, pull out a pad and start taking notes on reality. Where might you be in denial, overlooking accumulating problems and seeking some future instant solution or change? Where might you be waiting for your child to ‘just grow out of it” so you don’t have to do anything different? Where might you be hoping that you find that crazed motivation to exercise fanatically like they do on that infomercial? Where might you be withholding love or affection awaiting others to offer you the floodgates of love first, so you can then be free to love?
These are only a few examples of where we might be falsely awaiting the magical, rarely manifesting, instant solution. Note these, and then realize that perhaps we need to point ourselves in another direction. Start to embrace the truth behind, “Nothing replaces sustained, incremental efforts compounded over time.”