1 Day or Every Day

In the game of life time is a finite resource. This is not a new topic, nor is it a new idea. We cannot control how many days we have on Earth, we can only control how we use the time we do have. When embarking on a quest for personal self-improvement you have committed to a path and understanding that you must do uncomfortable things to get comfortable outcomes. Every day when you work on self-improvement you consciously place a marble in a bucket that one day you hope to fill. Every day where you do not work is another day where the bucket of marbles stays the same. This is the crux of the idea. How many days you work on improvement or how many days you work towards a goal matters. Every day compounds and over the long run, using more days will only benefit your push to achieve.

Imagine you are trying to learn a new skill and you work on this skill one day a week. Over the course of the year, you will have worked on this skill 52 times. This is 52 more times than if you had not made a conscious effort to work on this goal. This is 52 times where you have committed to compounding success and finding progress. With this mindset, 52 times is a solid achievement. This is the 1 day approach. 1 day a week leads to the black-and-white outcome of 52 times over the course of a year.

Now, instead of 1 day a week, you set a goal to work every day. This is by no means a contract that you have to work 365 days a year with no breaks. But it is a commitment to work more than 1 day a week. Even if you work 5 days a week, that is still 5 times as many days than if you only committed 1 day a week. In a perfect world, you could work 365 days a year and that will serve as the basis of this argument.

In comparing the two situations you could find yourself in, there is a clear difference. In working every day, you have 313 extra opportunities to scale and compound your efforts. They are opportunities because each day, each hour, and each chance to improve is a gift. It is also important to note that these days do not lead to linear improvement. Since progress compounds based on the amount of effort, you will probably achieve far more than the singular results of 313 extra days. There is no telling how much more you can achieve by committing to extra days of work. By compounding, one month of chipping away has the potential to lead to an explosion of results. By granting yourself extra opportunities, you are gifting yourself extra chances to rapidly improve. There is no shame in working 1 day a week, you are still progressing. Just choose to think about how many more results you could find if you committed to spending more time pursuing your goals.