Small Improvements Look Useless Until They Compound

(Transcript edited for clarity.)

Hi, I'm Wes. Welcome to Small Improvements Look Useless Until They Compound. I also like to think of this as small wins add up.

If you've watched any of my episodes, a lot of times I'll talk about stacking wins, and this fits right into that. It fits right into my main system, which is the Small Wins Success System.

This fits right along with this because many times we make small improvements, or we get what I would call small wins, and in the large scheme of things, they don't look that important. But if you stack enough of them together, you start seeing real progress.

That's why you need to focus on every win you can get, whether it be big or small. And you also need to continuously work on being consistent in getting at least one small win, and then the next small win. Get at least one small win a day.

So here's the title again, and then the main question. Small improvements can look useless until they start to compound, or until you start seeing them compound.

Here's the main question I want you to keep in mind as you go through the episode today: What small improvement could you repeat enough times that it starts to matter?

In other words, if you could identify just one small improvement that you can make until it compounds to where you can start seeing the big influence that it has on whatever you're trying to do.

So I'll come back to that question, but think about that as I go through the topics for this episode, because we all focus, and I do this too, on: I want this big result, so I've got to make big progress and do big things to get to this big result.

But that's not always the case. It's good to shoot high. It's good to shoot for big things. I'd recommend big goals, bold goals, big plans, trying to accomplish big things.

But sometimes when we're shooting really high and we fall short, then we might beat ourselves up, or we might start feeling guilty, and it might have the opposite effect. It might start making it harder for us to keep making progress every day.

On the other hand, if you focus on getting enough small wins, making enough small improvements, eventually, if you stick with it, you'll look back and you'll see how all these small wins added up to something big.

That's also why I often talk about when you set your goal and you break it down, and you've got all these plans to reach whatever your goal is, you break it down into the smallest steps possible.

That way you can almost always look at the next step, and if you've broken it down small enough, it's like, I can do that. I can keep this momentum going. I can get this next small win.

And the opposite side of that is it doesn't matter if you've broken a step down to 20 different little steps to get to the next level, and let's say each of those 20 steps takes five minutes. That's actually a good thing.

If you have a bad day or a lot of other stuff going on, you can still make sure you get one five-minute win or maybe two of the five-minute wins.

There's nothing that says you can't do the 20 five-minute steps at one time when you have time. Twenty five-minute steps is 100 minutes. That's less than two hours if you go straight through, right? There are 120 minutes in two hours, so 20 five-minute steps is less than two hours.

That's less than two hours if you can work uninterrupted at it. But if you are interrupted, then you're working on your five minutes, then you can do the next five minutes, and you don't have to worry about it if you can't get all 20 of them done at one time. But if you can, you still get the benefit of that, right?

So don't be afraid to break any goal into the smallest possible steps. That's really one of the keys because it helps you feel like you're getting more done, because you are.

And when you start getting more done, then you start building momentum, and that helps you mentally to keep going. You get a little adrenaline pump or something, something in your brain, some chemical reaction when you complete a task, and that helps you feel good.

You want to get that feeling again, so you try to complete the next one.

Now, if each task is four hours, that's tough. I'm not saying you can't get a four-hour task done, but the thing is, you get one four-hour task done, and psychologically sometimes, you get the exact same feeling from the four-hour task as you would from completing a five- or ten- or fifteen-minute task.

I'm not saying you've got as much done, but I'm saying the little mental boost you get for completing a task, where if you break the four-hour task down to eight half-hour or sixteen fifteen-minute tasks, again, you can string those together.

Just because you break your goal or your system or your plan down to minuscule five-minute, fifteen-minute parts or whatever doesn't mean you can't stack them all at one time when you have time, when you have the mental energy to do it. So you can have the best of both worlds here.

So a tiny improvement can look meaningless when you judge it by just one tiny improvement, or just one tiny thing a day. But if you consistently do them and stack them together, then you're building momentum, but you're also getting closer to your goal every time you complete one.

Repeated improvements accumulate in skills, health, money, relationships, and systems. And I do this also.

I'll look at a system, or I'll be creating a system, and I think, well, this is going to be a big system, and it's going to have all these parts. And sometimes I focus too much on the big instead of focusing on improving one small thing at a time.

Sometimes improving just one thing can change everything about a goal. Sometimes improving one simple little thing can improve your entire life.

Not always, but a lot of times it can. So the key here, I'll read the beginning, it says repeated improvements accumulate.

So what little improvement, what small improvement can you make today in your life, in your health, in your business, in your handling of money, in one of your systems?

What's one small improvement you can make today that's going to compound because it's going to make it better every day from now on, or every time you use it from now on? If you can just identify one, it can make huge changes.

Now, this takes some practice, but most systems and most goal plans can be improved.

Sometimes we have to take action to start getting some feedback to see how they can be improved. But most can be improved if you're focusing on finding small improvements, and once you train yourself to look for these small improvements, they become easier to find.

So let's say you can find one small improvement to make today, and let's say that you get busy, you're implementing that small improvement, you do it every day this week, and then let's say a week from today you find one more small improvement to make.

Again, they don't have to be huge. Just focus on finding one small thing to improve.

So you improve one small thing this week, one small thing next week, and let's say there are 52 weeks in a year, but there are only 12 months.

If you figure four weeks a month, that's 48 weeks. So let's say you only improve four small things a month.

Instead of one a week, you're doing four a month. So you can miss up to four weeks throughout the year. The point is, if you can find one small thing four times a month, then at the end of the year you've improved 48 small things.

Now, hopefully each small improvement you've made has continued to accumulate throughout the rest of the year. And then by the end of the year, not only have you improved 48 small things, you've also had 48 things that are accumulating every week as improvements.

Just imagine how much better you could accomplish things, how much better you could make systems, or how much better you can improve every area of your life.

Let's say you break your life into professional goals, wealth goals, health goals, and family goals, and let's say you just do one small improvement to each of those four things each month. By the end of the year, you've made 12 small improvements to each of those four areas of your life.

I'll guarantee you that if you do that, just focus on finding small improvements, that you'll see a tremendous advancement, a tremendous improvement within a year.

You'll see it much quicker than that, but just imagine how big your improvement is going to be within a year. Consistency matters because compounding needs time and repetition.

Some improvements you'll make to a system or something in your goal system in your life will have a one-time positive effect, and it'll help, but it's not going to compound. Those are good too. You need to look for those too.

But mostly here I'm talking about the small improvements that you can consistently do to get the compounding effect. And as I said, the compounding often needs a little bit of time, and it's got to have repetition for you to get the full effect of it.

Choose changes small enough to survive ordinary days, not only highly motivated ones.

You focus on these small changes, small improvements, so that they can fit in naturally on any type of day you're having, because we're not all highly motivated every day. It's almost impossible.

I can't do it. I don't know anybody that can stay highly motivated every day. That's why I talk about systems so much.

So when you make a small improvement to a system or goal plan or workflow or whatever, you make it small enough that you don't have to get motivated to do it again.

So small wins become powerful when they start to stack. And back to the question: What small improvement can you make right now that, if you repeat it long enough, it's going to make a huge difference?

Focus on that. If you can answer that question, I think you're going to improve something in your life.

And then you do the same thing next week, and you have two things compounded.

I'm Wes. This is Your Life Systems. Please subscribe, like. Have a great week.

What's Next?

·        Choose one area of life or work where you want steady improvement.

·        Identify one small change you can repeat without needing unusual motivation.

·        Break the next step down until it can fit into an ordinary day.

·        Repeat the improvement long enough to see whether it creates momentum or reduces friction.

·        Add another small improvement after the first one becomes part of the system.

·        Review the accumulated changes monthly instead of judging each small win in isolation.

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