Leading a 1% Life!

None of us wants to lead a miniature life. That is why we set goals on every new year day! And this new year is no special. You might have great plans for your future, a new venture, a new course, a new skill to acquire or any other goals related to your professional or personal life. But COVID-19 might have obstructed 90% of your plans, which you had otherwise planned to act upon.

If I ask you how the lockdown is, you may tell lockdown has affected 50% of your lifestyle. Those who work from home, you may still follow the same routine, or even more work as some may end up working more than office hours.

However, while you have planned to live your life 100%, you put all the blame on the coronavirus, moaning your plans have been thwarted. But, are you living at least 1% life?

The question may offend you. You would say corona has not battered you to that extent. You still follow a certain routine. But, leading a 1% life doesn't mean leading less than 100%. On the contrary, it is actually a journey to reach your fullest potential.

There are many areas in your life, where, if you improve just 1% each day, after a year or two, you are going to get an amazing outcome. For instance, if you don't exercise every day, have no control over food, don't read, don't have thirst for knowledge, this is the time to begin.

If you don't have a reading habit, start by reading just one to five pages a day. If you do so, within a year, you will finish reading more than a thousand pages. If you already have inculcated the habit, increasing the number of pages will take you to next level.

If exercise is not your routine, start by  exercising for five minutes a day. Once you get adjusted to the routine, you may increase the time up to twenty minutes or half an hour.

If you have not bothered about your eating habits, check the quality of the food you are eating. You can gradually develop a habit of eating healthy food.

If learning something new is not your way, this is the time to realize that you will be outdated if you don't pay attention to it. Reading is one such aspect of learning something new. There are many online courses available that will help your advance in your career or in your personal life.

All these activities don't yield fantastic results immediately. There won't be any dramatic changes in your body just because you exercised for a few minutes. By reading a few pages each day, you don't look wise. By eating healthy food for a few days, you never feel better. By pursuing a new course, you may never get a promotion. But doing all these on a regular basis for years will definitely yield great results.

We always see sports champions on track for a few minutes. It looks so easy for us when they run fast in a running race, or hit a boundary in cricket. But what took them to that kind of perfection is nothing but years of enduring practice.

When British cycling professionals couldn't win a single medal for about 100 years in Cycling Championships, Dave Brailsford, its new performance director came on the scene. What made him different from earlier coaches was his relentless commitment to a strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do.

As part of his strategy, they made one per cent improvement in every area of cycling. They redesigned the bike seat to make them comfortable. They rubbed  alcohol on the tyres for a better grip. They used indoor racing suits which were more comfortable and aerodynamic. They even tried many massage gels to check which one led to the rapid recovery of muscles. The riders were even trained to wash their hands in the best way to avoid catching a cold. They selected particular kind of pillows and mattresses that would give them a good night sleep. They even painted the cycle track in white so that they could easily check for little bits of dust that could degrade the performance.

By making all those hundreds of tiny changes, they finally came out as champions for the first time in 2008 Olympic in Beijing, and after 4 years, they set seven world records and nine Olympic records.

Here is a simple calculation on how you can elevate your life just by improving 1% each day. If you improve just by 1% in all aspects of your life, by the end of the year, your life will be 1.01 to the power of 365, i.e 37.7 times better than what you are today.

At the same time, if your become 1% worse each day, your life will reduce to 0.99 to the power of 365 i.e. 0.03 from 1.

When the British cycling team can win world championships by improving 1%, why couldn't you become the champion of your life?

To be or not to be is your choice.