The Fastest (and easiest) Progress Ever
I’m going to teach you something that will feel like magic, but I promise it’s just basic math and common sense…
Here is the idea in a nutshell: the best way to make progress isn’t trying to do better than you’ve ever done, it’s just not being as bad as you’ve been at your worst.
In an even smaller nutshell: just suck less.
If you do that consistently you’ll make faster progress and it will feel so easy you’ll feel like you’re getting gains on sale.
Here’s How It Works:
The graph below is a typical week of dieting for someone trying to lose weight.
You can apply this to anything else and it works the same but diet is one of my favorite applications.
As you can see below the “person” in this example starts the week off hard, fades a bit, has a little burst of motivation and then fades into the weekend promising to kill it when the coming week starts.
(This is just a hypothetical but it’s a fairly normal trend)
The daily average for this person is 65% adherence to their diet… not great.
In an effort to improve, and start seeing some results, what people typically say to themselves is something like this: “Damn, I was so close to perfect at the start of the week - I’m going to really push myself and nail it Monday!”
This idea is fine but if you think back to being in school, imagine you had a 90% average in math and wanted to push it to 100. How much extra work is that?
It’s a lot.
Going from almost perfect to perfect is a huge amount of effort. It’s like world class sprinters improving their times, they can work for months or years to shave 10ths of a second off.
But that’s what we do anyway, and let’s pretend in this example that it works.
Monday and Tuesday go to 100% and nothing else changes. (Which is unlikely after all the extra energy spent on the first two days of the way but whatever.)
Guess what that brings our weekly average to.
It brings it to 68%… a measly 3% improvement.
Not awesome.
So what’s better?
I’m glad you asked!
What’s better is sucking less.
It’s just not doing as bad as we did the previous week on our worst days.
Remember your math grade?
What if you had a 30% in biology? How hard would it be to bring that up to a 50%?
Not that hard.
Here’s what that looks like for comparison:
Very clearly all we’re doing is not falling off so hard at the end of the week, and we’re by no means perfect - we’re just not completely messing up.
So… what does this do to our weekly average?
It brings it up to 71% - which is 2x the improvement.
And it’s so much easier.
All we did was suck less than we did on our worst days and got twice as much progress, without having to push our current best any higher.
Crazy, right?
This is THE KEY to making progress consistently, quickly and easily because we’re not trying to reach for a new peak. We’re just staying above the previous week’s rock bottom.
The other cool thing?
We know it’s possible to do because it’s still so much less than our best. We’re not even chasing our best with this mindset, we’re just avoiding our worst.
Hopefully all of this makes sense to you.
This is something you can use in any area where you’re trying to make progress but regardless of where you apply it, you’ll make progress faster and easier by switching from the normal “beat your best” mindset into a “suck less” mindset and you’ll wonder why you we’re doing it sooner.
Suck less this week,
Craig
