A Different Kind of 1%

I started the summer with big plans (organize all the things! write all the things! plan all the things! do all the things!)—and I’m ending it trying not to dig my claws in and hold on for dear life.

I blinked, and it was gone.

We had stuff on the schedule—some of it happened and some of it didn’t. My parents came to visit. The boys got Covid again. My energy level blipped up, down, and back again. But the three big goals I was hoping to achieve this summer are what I keep rolling over and over in my mind.

Did I do enough? Was progress made where it needed to be made? Was the work done well or was it just checked off haphazardly? Should I have focused on other things? These aren’t always easy questions to ask or answer.

We start school tomorrow, and what I keep coming back to are three words that a friend shared that have been bopping around her squadron thanks to her deep love of James Clear’s “The Power of Tiny Gains.” Those three words are: one percent better.

Every work day, she’s challenging those she works with to stop freaking out about all the things they have to do (and they have a lot of things) and instead ask themselves: how can they leave things one percent better? Because she knows that progress is cumulative. She knows that that one percent will add up.

I’m looking back at my summer now, and I see that while I may not have all the check marks on all the lists the way I want, there has been forward progress in a lot of areas. I may not have made things one percent better each and every day, but the growth curve is far past the one percent mark.

I’m running more than one percent of what I was running back in May.

I’m 87% more prepared for the school year than I was last year. (Don’t ask if that is an exact number.)

I may not have finished my novel, but I’m 22% farther on it than I was two months ago. (That one really is exact—I did the math and everything.)

And these are just a few examples of tangible progress that have come to mind. Other things—relationships, soul growth, rest—are not quite so easy to quantify, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see forward movement there too.

I admit that my impatient, perfectionist self wants things to be 100% better all the time. I want all the things done. I want all the growth. I want to look back and see not a moment of wavering or procrastination or laziness. But that’s never going to happen.

So I can look back and see all the times that I chose to read a dumb novel instead of write—or sleep in instead of dragging myself out of bed for a run—or scroll through Facebook mindlessly instead of flipping through a school book—or I can look back and celebrate the one percent.

So today, at the end of a summer that went by far too quickly, I’m choosing celebration.

I’m choosing to see soul growth, relational growth, professional growth, physical growth (just not when we’re talking about my height, for once), and say—yes—every little bit counts.

And tomorrow, as we head out of the summer with its slower paced days and hours at the pool and looser routines and into the school year with its book lists and scholastic challenges and tighter schedule…I’m hoping to take with me those three words.

For today: just one percent better. For tomorrow: another one percent. For the next day…

And see where that leaves us in May of next year.