If you were asked where you are in life right now, on what parameters would you base your answer? Perhaps the numbers in your bank balance, your current job, your fitness, or the quality of your relationships. But that, says James Clear, is a terrible mistake. Because what truly matters isn’t your current results, but your trajectory.
In our society we tend to underestimate acts of continuous improvement. “We convince ourselves that a huge success requires actions of equal significance,” explains Clear in Atomic Habits. With this, we focus too much on immediate results, on what we can achieve quickly, and forget that, in reality, we have a wide margin for improvement, which translates into small 1 per cent improvements.
Results aren’t everything
The proposed exercise is simple. Who do you think has greater financial success: a person with millions in their bank account, or one who earns the minimum wage each month? If we think of immediate results, the answer is clear: the millionaire.
But what James Clear asks us to do is expand our view, gain perspective and reflect on the trajectory. What if that millionaire spends far more than they earn each month? And what if the minimum-wage worker saves a little each month?
“It doesn’t matter how successful you are at this very moment. What matters is determining whether your habits are taking you down the path to success,” explains Clear. “You should care more about the trajectory you’re following in the present than the results you’ve achieved so far.”
Thus, the millionaire who spends more than they earn is following a poor trajectory, and the 1,000-euro-a-month worker who saves a little each month is on a path that will lead to success. “If you’re broke, but you manage to save a little each month, you’re on a road that will lead you to financial freedom, even if achieving it takes longer than you’d like,” says Clear.
The compound interest of personal growth
To explain his theory, James Clear relies on the idea of compound interest. In finance, this is the interest that accrues when you reinvest the money earned as a return from a prior investment. You start with £25, you earn £5, and you reinvest £30. The profit from those £5 is compound interest, because you haven’t had to take it from your own pocket, and it is the true key to financial freedom, according to leading experts.
In any case, the same logic applies to personal growth according to the 1% improvement model. “If you manage to be 1% better every day for a year, you’ll end up 37 times better at the end of the period. Conversely, if you deteriorate your behaviour by 1% each day, by the end of the year you’ll have almost fallen to zero. What starts as a small gain or a negligible loss accumulates over time and becomes something large,” explains Clear in his book.
The 1% improvement
That is why, from his perspective, “habits are the compound interest of personal improvement.” Taking the stairs instead of the lift might seem insignificant when we talk about improving your physical state.
But if you make that same decision every day for a year, your physical strength will have improved by the end of it, certainly. If you repeat the habit the following year, your form will continue to improve on what you’ve already achieved, creating this sort of personal compound interest.
“Deciding to be 1 per cent better or 1 per cent worse may not seem important at the moment, but over the course of all the moments that make up a life, these decisions determine the difference between the person you are and the person you could be,” Clear asserts.
Your habits define you
We cannot gauge our level of success by our results alone, explains Clear, because “your results are the reactive indicators of your habits.” That is, the amount of money you have is a reactive indicator of your financial habits, your weight reflects your eating habits, your knowledge of your study habits, the state of your home reflects your habits of order and cleanliness. “In the end,” the author concludes, “you get what you repeat.”
The secret, therefore, lies in focusing on the curve of daily small gains and losses, and projecting how those daily choices play out over ten or twenty years. “Time magnifies the margin between success and failure,” adds Clear, “and it will multiply what you repeat most often.”
The expert’s reflection, which opens his book Atomic Habits, is an excellent way to grasp the weight of our habits. And it doesn’t matter where we are in life, but rather where we’re headed.
