How Lever-Moving Tasks Can Make You 1% Better
Actionable advice for actionable people.
‘‘If you can get 1% better each day for one year, you’ll end up 37 times better by the time you’re done.’’ — James Clear
This quote is synonymous with improvement.
Sports people especially like to cite ‘1% better’ as being a key differentiator when it comes to success.
This never worked for me.
But, I get why people write like this. I learned that, in copywriting, numbers and statistics grab eyeballs. People instinctively want to know what the number relates to.
But is it really quantifiable much less practical?
I mean, what is 1%? Is it one more push-up or stretching your hamstrings just a tiny centimeter further? Reading one more page or one more book? Writing one more word or one more paragraph.
One percent more isn’t very useful owing to its subjectiveness.
So, what can we use instead?
Well, this week I was thinking about lever-moving tasks. This is how you can action that ‘one percent’.
This is the practical and noticeable movement towards the achievement of your goals.
And thankfully, lever-moving tasks are usually very small, and very tiny, so they actually do feel like 1%.
I liken them to the opening of a dam. When the lever is pulled, water gushes through. One tiny, simple action, allows you to speed up and jump right back into a flow state. It’s the stopping at a red light, moving the lever turns you green, and away you go again.
I’ve realised that people who are successful at building a brand and writing, build a following on X. Yet, I didn’t know the best way to go about scheduling tweets, or whether I needed to buy and subscribe to a tool for this.
This morning, my simple lever-moving task was asking the X community how you schedule them, and I got my answer. The app itself facilitates the scheduling of tweets.
This is my lever-moving task today. It’s simple, banal, and utterly basic.
But it works.
Now, the dam is open, the lights are green, and I can write and begin to build a steady bank of tweets to grow a following, which should result in more followers.
I write down 3 lever moving tasks every day. My goal is to complete them before 10 am. If I do this, the day is a win (and I can do more if I want) I don’t have to worry the rest of the day wondering if I was “productive” enough. — Dan Koe
I often reach the end of the day worrying if I was productive enough. Completing small, lever-moving tasks, has considerably lessened this fear.
Your goals determine the lever-moving tasks you need to complete. Suppose you want to get fitter, your current workout plan feels insufficient. Forget one-percent. A lever-moving task is writing out a new, more challenging program.
If your aim is to get promoted, a guaranteed lever-moving task would be to write out the exact competencies you need to achieve. If you don’t know, break it down again. This time, the lever-moving task could be scheduling a meeting with your manager to help you figure it out.
The idea is that there isn’t a single goal that can’t be broken down into a lever-moving task. And lever-moving tasks bring you closer to your goal.
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