I’m a sucker for get rich quick schemes. 6-pack shortcuts? I’m in. Buy PEPE coin before it moons? Yes. Take a tech sales bootcamp and maybe, probably land a 6-figure job? Take my money.
I’m not exactly the “trust the process” type. I want results fast. I guess you could say I’m kind of a degenerate. One Sunday night, I was scrolling Reddit when I stumbled on a book rec: Atomic Habits by James Clear.
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The cover sold me: “An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones.”
I was hoping for a shortcut. A 5-minute hack to fix my bad habits and build great ones. Well, turns out, it is easy… just not the kind of easy I was thinking.
Here’s the main thing that stuck with me: “If you master continuous improvement and get 1% better each day for one year, you’ll end up 37 times better by the time you’re done.”
That sounded painfully slow. But also… doable. Even for someone with my ape brain. I gave it a shot. The gym was my first test. I used to go all in for a week or two, then burn out and quit.
This time, I kept it stupid simple: just show up. No pressure to hit a personal best. Just get there. Stay for 15 minutes. Do a few sets. Go home.
That tiny shift made all the difference. I stopped dreading it. The sessions got longer. The weights got heavier. For the first time, it stuck.
Same thing with writing. I used to aim for 2,000-word posts and ended up doing nothing. So I dropped the bar. Just write three sentences. That’s it. Eventually, three became ten. Then full drafts. That’s how GradSimple started.
Looking back, aiming to be 1% better felt so low lift, it was hard not to do.
Small wins add up. Fast.
So if you’ve got the attention span of a goldfish and the patience of a degenerate, Atomic Habits can give you a real path to improving.
