Improve 1% daily and you will be 37 times better in a year
Here is how you can do it for your business
People write and talk about this concept so much that I almost skip articles like this automatically.
Everyone knows that small improvements are supposed to be the simplest way to get huge results. This advice has almost become a cliche. The problem is that everyone writes about this in generic terms, dancing around the concept, but never building a useful plan.
I am going to show you exactly how you can improve your business by 1% every single day.
Why Virtually All Advice Lacks Results
I read all the recommended books on improvement. You likely have too. They did not magically lead to the results I wanted to achieve. They build up my expectations, only to lead to inevitable disappointment.
Advice on how to optimize your life or business is useless unless you follow it with action. Knowledge isn’t power. That is what most authors want us to believe so we keep buying their books. Without action knowledge is useless.
That is why most self / business-improvement books never lead to success. They do not give you the action steps required to succeed. They talk about cliches and obvious concepts without relating them back to you.
In the end most of these books lead to discouragement. I often felt that the problem must be me, because these books sold millions of copies, why are they not leading to results? I must be the problem right?
To be fair, a book has to be written from a 30,000 foot view, because the author is writing the book for the masses and not for you. But 1% improvement is a personal experience. It begins with you and your team. It begins with people.
And that is exactly why these books do not deliver the results we hope for. We need to tune into ourselves first at a personal depth a book simply cannot.
To Improve Daily You Must Start With People
We are all unique. We have different:
Drivers
Opinions
Emotions
Worldviews
Motivations
All these affect our work ethic and how we see ourselves inside our work, within our team. The thing that drives one person to work hard may not be the same thing that drives another person. Yet all the books teach us that we need to build a system based on their advice.
The problem is that this advice will definitely not work for all people. Now you have a system you built on these great books and you realize that you are not getting the results you wanted. That’s because the book did not help you focus on the individuals that need to act on the advice.
Great Systems Are Built Around People
The most successful businesses have systems built around the uniqueness of their team. That is where 1% daily improvements can be achieved. You need to know what motivates each person in your team as well as what causes them stress. Then you optimize for it.
Systems that are created without the involvement of your team will fail. If you build something from the top down instead of from the bottom up then you will never reach a level where 1% improvement is part of your culture.
Failure of a system is easy to recognize though and you can change it immediately. Here are the most common ways system failure shows itself:
You feel stressed way too often
You feel like your system is not being appreciated
You feel like you must micromanage way too often
You feel like you are being asked redundant questions daily
You feel like your team isn’t performing as well as they should
These are the cues your body gives you. These are all emotions you need to listen to, because they are the roadmap to optimization.
Stress
Repetition
Frustration
Redundancy
Micromanaging
Lack of Appreciation
You need to tune into these feelings. Most systems never do that. They do not build a culture of 1% improvement. Top down systems assume that people's feelings will simply adjust to the process.
To Improve 1% Per Day, Focus On Reducing Stress A Little Bit At A Time
If you want 1% daily improvements you need to have a culture that makes people feel motivated to want to improve.
Why should someone want to improve into a system they had no part in creating?
Why should someone want to improve their own workflows if they have no incentive to do so?
Why should someone want to change their daily habits when they don’t feel appreciated?
The way to improve your own daily routines and your team's performance by 1% daily is to eliminate stress, frustration etc 1% a day. Just get rid of what is causing you and your team to feel bad. It is quite obvious really isn’t it? If you make people's lives better, little by little, every day, success will come automatically.
Here is an action plan that actually works. Do this every day to begin your 1% improvement journey:
Your body clearly tells you when you feel stressed or frustrated. Begin listening, show genuine interest and then adjust the system for it.
Talk to your employees daily and ask them how they are feeling? Identify their painpoints. They feel emotions about their work, the same way you do.
Make it part of the company culture to talk about the negatives in peoples daily lives. Work is a big part of our daily routine, if you can reduce stress from it, it automatically improves business performance.
Optimize your system around pebbles' unique needs. Your business needs are your people's needs. They execute your operation every single day.
When you find the painpoints automate them. Some pain points are unavoidable. When you find the ones you cannot change, use AI, use automation. This is where technology comes in. Use it for that.
Over the last decade my clients have felt many noticeable improvements in their daily lives. But these did not come suddenly or immediately, because I implemented AI and automations into their routines. Why would you ever automate something that brings people joy or meaning?
If we reduce that which makes us feel stressed, 1% a day, we will experience large scale improvements over time. But it all starts with people. I always say that business optimization is 85% people and 15% technology. The AI is the easy part. But knowing what the AI should do is the hard part.