Today I’m affirmed, reassured, buoyed, and inspired by James Clear’s (Atomic Habits) advice to just aim to get ONE PERCENT BETTER every day. That it’s the trajectory over the long run that counts, and the small improvements that add up … and are more likely to be sustained (and therefore more likely to actually get you where you want to be).

A couple big example of how this one percent guideline is affirming, reassuring, and buoying to me: making small improvements to websites every day, and creating and publishing written and/or photographic content every day on my own domains. WITHOUT any of those fixes or posts necessarily being the exactly perfect next-logical thing to do on the exactly perfect next-right site to build up and publish to.

Now that I have more than a year under my belt of practicing the second part of this (yes: I published something new every single day on our sites for a whole entire year PLUS), hearing from someone outside myself that this was a productive practice employed by successful people and gurus who’ve researched it adds A LOT OF WEIGHT AND SIGNIFICANCE AND CONFIDENCE to what I am observing and experiencing myself: shit is falling into place. It is coming together. What I have amassed and continue to build on IS VALUABLE. Without being a single perfectly-polished launch-worthy site or new product.

My trajectory is better than it’s ever been and I am so excited to see where I’ll be by my next birthday … and even more excited about where I’m headed in the next three years.

I am grateful for hearing and receiving these (and lots more) big boosts of clarity and reinforcement this morning from outside myself, delivered via The Daily Stoic (Ryan Holiday) as I’m a couple weeks into year two, and so READY to add 1% daily website improvements to the practice. The amount of freedom it gives me as a perfectionist to just calmly PIDDLE with the sites … to enjoy that game without everything having to be PERFECT overnight. To be allowed and affirmed to work REALISTICALLY instead of aiming for everything to be done NOW and done EXACTLY RIGHT or it’s not worth doing at all.

These guys alleviate so much shame about doing things in a way that works for me — designing “my” way” — instead of how everybody else tells you it should be done. And I don’t need to have medal-worthy results to show anybody else tomorrow or in a week or a month or even a year. This is training for winning years down the road and for LIFE (and the ONLY WAY to not burn out).