How Tiny Changes Lead To Massive Progress

Here’s 3 simple things you can do to guarantee growth in your life

3 min readJan 20, 2023

If you’re a gym-goer, you’re probably familiar with the concept of progressive overload:

Gradually increasing the workload placed on your body over time.

It’s the most crucial principle to grow your muscles, gain strength, and achieve peak physical performance.

Progressive overload is about getting 1% better each day.

“If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.” — Fred DeVito

If we perform an activity the same way all the time, we adapt to the challenge and stop growing.

A gradual increase in demand is the only measurable way to improve our skills and progress in our journey.

If we keep this up long enough, minor improvements will lead to massive growth over time.

As James Clear puts it:

“If you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.” — James Clear

Here’s 3 ways we can apply progressive overload outside the gym to achieve compounding growth in other areas of our lives.

“Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.” — Zig Ziglar

The more often we perform an activity, the faster we can gain feedback on our abilities and improve our craft.

Increasing the frequency of the activity over time is the easiest way to ensure we’re getting 1% better daily.

For example, if you spend one day a week pursuing a goal, raise it to two. You’ll double your output and increase the speed of your progress.

“The ability to concentrate for extended periods of time is a superpower in the age of constant distractions.” — Cal Newport

Like frequency, how long you can focus on an activity without interruption directly impacts your progress.

The longer you can engage in a task, the deeper connection you can make with your curiosity and creativity, resulting in improved outputs over time.

Try adding 2 extra minutes to your working sessions to increase your focus time gradually.

If we’re constantly learning, we’re evolving.

The more high-quality information we absorb daily, the more insights we can apply to our craft and produce higher-quality work.

Learning is an ongoing journey. If we feel like we’ve learned all there is, that’s when we need to question how much we truly know.

“The more that you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know.” — Socrates

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