1% better

Tiny daily changes, compounded over a year.

With JavaScript off, here are the two headline numbers. Start at 1 and change by a fixed amount every day for a year:

37.8× 1% better every day: 1.01³⁶⁵ ≈ 37.78
0.03× 1% worse every day: 0.99³⁶⁵ ≈ 0.026

What's going on

Compounding means each day's change is applied to today's total, not to where you started. A 1% gain on day one adds 0.01. By day 200 you are at about 7.3, so 1% of that adds 0.073 in a single day. The growth feeds itself, which is why the curve looks flat for months and then bends sharply upward: 1.01 multiplied by itself 365 times is about 37.8.

It works the same way going down. Lose 1% a day and every loss is taken from a smaller pile, so you never quite hit zero, but after a year you hold about 0.03 of what you started with. Switch to the log scale to see that shrinking curve properly; on a linear scale it just hugs the floor.

A frank caveat: real habits don't compound this neatly. Skills plateau, days off happen, and "1% better" is not something you can measure on a Tuesday. Treat this as a way to see why small, consistent changes matter, not as a forecast. The idea was popularized by James Clear in Atomic Habits.