My friend Nat gave me some advice the other day.
Before I tell you what that advice was, let me tell you a little bit about Nat. Because I think when you know a bit more about her, you’ll understand why her advice is worth a try. And I really, really, want you to try her advice.
Nat is a warrior, with the scars to prove it. She is an incredible athlete, who performed on the Las Vegas strip. When Nat tore her calf muscle, she performed in a show that required her to dance, in heels, for 5 consecutive nights after the injury before she sought medical treatment.
When I tore my calf during a pickup basketball game, I was wheeled into the hospital the same night and put into a full leg cast. When the orthopedist unwrapped it two days later, he called it a mild strain and said I could keep using crutches if I wanted. I did, for the next 2 weeks.
Nat won the lead role in an international circus production auditioning with a torn labrum.
When Nat was a teenager she moved halfway across the world the fulfill her dream of becoming a circus performer, a process that saw her lose everything, be deported to a country where she didn’t speak the language and spend several days with no money, no means of communication, completely homeless.
When the injuries of circus performing caught up with her, she found top 1% level success as a dancer in Las Vegas. Of the exotic variety. For the uninitiated, dancing in a hyper competitive Vegas club, is a test of confidence, emotional resilience and sales skill. Rejection is deeply personal. Your co-workers are also your direct competitors, some of whom are desperate and willing to do anything to beat you. The clients are actively trying to get your services without paying. Customers are likely to be drunk or angry or both. And you pay management for the right to work there. Success is not guaranteed. Or even likely.
But she succeeded. Wildly. Within two years, she bought a house in a beautiful suburban neighborhood. She accumulated a higher net worth than 95% of Americans, while taking care of her family and her friends.
And the thing about Nat is, she’ll tell you these stories with a smile and a laugh. She will genuinely and emotionally cheer on your success, even if the annual pay increase you just received is less than 10% of what she can earn in a good night. She will deeply empathize with your mild calf strain, with her arm in a sling and the direction of her life suddenly thrown into disarray.
Oh, and Nat has had to deal with capital T level trauma. She blames absolutely no one for it, and confronts the long term after effects of anxiety and emotional volatility without letting it interrupt the things she wants to do which is often just making the world a better place for the people she loves.
She’s David Goggins without the anger. If she were a tech bro from San Francisco who got involved with PayPal in the mid-90’s, she’d be a guru with a podcast and a Ted Talk. She would command 6 figure speaking fees and have written several best selling books with titles like “It IS Your Circus and Your Monkeys” or “Resilience: Lessons from the Bounce Board and the Boardroom.”
Or “1% Better: The Answer to Every Question”. That one is a real one I hope she writes. That one would be about the advice she gave me.
The other day, we were having a conversation and she shared that she had an epiphany on acid. If you’ve never taken acid, reality distorts in ways that seem magical and amazing in one moment and in ways that are terrifying in the next. Panic and anxiety set in, as reality bends around you and you struggle to find any emotional or mental stability without the ability to follow the chain of your thoughts, with time so incredibly distorted that 30 seconds can feel like 30 minutes. Or 30 hours. Or 30 years. (Milage may vary).
Once you take one of those dark turns, it can feel like you are suddenly tumbling down a bottomless pit, simultaneously wishing it would stop and being terrified of what awaits you when it does. It’s as if your thoughts are randomly generating out of the darkest areas of your mind. You can feel powerless and overwhelmed and the part of you that remembers you are on an acid trip will simultaneously remind you that you still have 10 hours to go and that it’s only been about 2 minutes since this all started.
So, Nat was telling me that she had taken one of these turns but quickly applied some things that she knew. She stopped her thoughts and focused on her body. She asked herself, “Where are your feet?” She felt her feet. “What do you feel?” She felt her heart racing and the anxiety swelling, but just focused on the physical sensations.
And then she asked the critical question: “How can I make this 1% better?” She decided on a hoodie, to make her feel more comfortable. Then she decided to change the temperature of the room. Then to get some water. Then to sit on her very comfortable couch.
And just like that, she wasn’t tumbling down a hole, she was climbing up a hill. She spent the evening making things one percent better, over and over again, until she was back to enjoying the experience.
It was one of a dozen incredible insights that always seem to emerge from one of Nat’s stories. But this one stuck with me. The next morning, when I looked at a disorganized collection of tasks, all of which I had some vague idea of how to tackle, but lacked the emotional fortitude to do any of them, I sat with the butterflies swirling in my stomach as the doubts started to creep into the corners of my mind.
I knew it. You can’t do this. You are a failure. Admit it. Oh right, you already did. And it didn’t matter. You kept being a failure because you like to be a failure. Because you’re broken in ways that can’t be fixed.
Deep breath.
Where are your feet? I flexed my feet.
What do you feel? My stomach is churning and my heart is racing.
How can you make this 1% better? I can make my bed.
So I made my bed. And then I picked up the clothes off the floor. And then I put away some papers I had scattered on my desk. Then I put on some lo-fi music. Then I opened my email and responded to the ones I knew I could. Then I wrote the copy I needed to write. Then reviewed the finances I needed to review.
And suddenly I wasn’t tumbling down a hole, I was climbing a hill. And I couldn’t help it.
A week later we went to dinner with her friends and as we were walking out, Free Fallin’ by Tom Petty was playing. She stopped the group and led the 4 of us in loudly singing the hook in the middle of the casino floor. I don’t sing. I don’t sing around people. I don’t sing around people in public. And yet, I sang, “I’m Free!” loudly right along with them.
She pulled me aside as we got on the elevators to go to our cars and said, “See Lucas. That’s the one percent.” It was more like 10% for me, but you get the idea.
The thing about 1% is that you can do it right now. You don’t have to wait until you have more discipline or you’ve been sober for a while. You don’t have to wait until you get that job, or until your baby can sleep through the night. You don’t have to save up for it, or make sure you get a good night’s sleep. You don’t have to get smarter or stronger or better looking first. You don’t have to get permission from anyone. You don’t even have to finish reading this article. You can just sing Free Fallin’ in the middle of a casino with your 3 coolest friends if it makes your life one percent better. And if you don’t have any friends, you can make the bed. And if you don’t have a bed, you can clip your fingernails. Or brush your teeth. Or smile. You can start making your life better by 1% right now, with exactly what you have, no matter how you got here.
And the moment you do, you’ll stop tumbling down the hole and you’ll start climbing up the hill. And if you do it a few times, pretty soon, you won’t be able to help it.
Here’s the kicker: percentages are exponential. If I make my life 1% better and then make it 1% better again, my life isn’t 2% better, it’s 2.01% better. After the next one it’s 3.03% better. If you do it 76 times, your life is twice as good as when you started. If you can do 1% a second, that’s less than a minute and half to double your quality of life.
What if every time you didn’t know what to do, you made your life 1% better? What if you asked yourself before you did anything if it contributed to your next percent? What if you spent a day doing that? Or a week? Or a month? Or a year? How far could you go? You would probably have an amazing life.
But that’s not the reason I’m writing this. Don’t get me wrong, I want you have an amazing life. But my reasons are much less altruistic.
As Nat has shared this with her friends, we’ve all begun reflecting it back to her, telling her stories about how we’ve used the 1% to do the next thing, or to get out of the unexpected rut. It’s contributed back to her next percent, which she reflects back out contributing to ours. So, it’s not just exponential sequentially, it’s exponential in parallel. My 1% and her 1% add up to more than 2%.
So, I want you to imagine a world, where everyone all at once decides to try it. 1% is an attainable goal for absolutely every single person on earth. So, the success rate would be pretty high. I won’t do the math, because it’s too many zeroes, but 1.01^7,00,000,000 is a lot. That’s how much better the world would be. Can you imagine a world that’s more than 7 billion percent better? I am trying to.
See, if we are focused on our 1%, we aren’t focused on our differences. Because our differences don’t make us feel better. We will focus on our own feelings, our desires, our dreams. Our bed being made. Our teeth being brushed. Putting on the hoodie that makes us feel safe. The people that make us want to keep going.
And once we start we won’t want to stop.
That means the world will get a lot more than 7 billion percent better. That’s a world I want to live in.
And we can all start.
Right now.
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