The Pursuit Of Better

As we pursue our self-improvement and think about the positive changes we want to make to our lives, it’s natural to gravitate toward the extreme. We feel inspired to replace your unmotivated mornings with 5am daily workouts, an unhealthy diet to being fully gluten-free, or producing a lot of waste as a consumer to getting rid of all plastics in your life. We think to make major life-changes because those are the most significant, but that kind of radical approach often fails because it’s too disruptive to be sustainable.

I call this the ‘Strain and recovery’ cycle. You can choose to pursue personal transformation in a way that asks you to do thing that are radically different from how you’re doing them now… But it requires that you put in an effortful push to establish a new standard. Maybe you can stick with it in the short term, but it’s an unsustainable amount to take on and when you tire out, or life circumstances change, the follow through fades away.

The more manageable approach is the ‘Elevate and sustain cycle’, and what this does is it considers all of the milestones between where you’re at and where you want to be. By achieving micro-goals and locking in smaller changes, you don’t fatigue in the same way. This enables you to make consistent progress so that piece by piece, things get better. It’s a process of systematically raising your baseline one detail at a time in the direction of the ideal you have in mind. 

And this is how it plays out: Start waking up at 7am and going for a short walk in the morning before you attempt 5am workouts at the gym. First limit your midday snacking on crackers and chips before you make every meal gluten-free. You replace your personal hygiene products with brands that have compostable containers before you have a house that is rid of all plastics.

Rather than trying to create the ideal situation from the very beginning, ask yourself what ‘better’ looks like. What’s one thing you can do to have a better workout routine? What’s one thing you can do to incorporate a better diet? What’s one thing you can swap to be more environmentally conscious?

Fight that natural inclination to pursue the extreme, ideal, perfect version of improvement because it sets you up for failure and disappointment. Instead focus on doing one thing better, time and again, as you build up the life you see for yourself. 

This is what it means to get better every day. Small, meaningful, consistent improvements. And as the growth stacks on top of itself, you’ll find that you’ll reach new heights and have a strong foundation to support you the entire way. 

My process for getting better every day is I have a daily habit of completing my Self Improvement Scorecard. Check it out!