433: The 1% Improvement Myth

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Boots of Honor. Let's add another one to this series of entrepreneurial advice that really just irritates me. Today, I'm going after the improve 1% every day one. You know, the meme or mantra about making tiny little improvements every day because you supposedly compound these into something massive over time. I think it's infuriating. It's one of the more infuriating ones, and I'll tell you why. Because it's not that you don't get compound results over time. It's just that it's impossible to measure and stick to. And I get the sentiment behind that, like, make micro improvements every day and ultimately, they'll up to bigger ones in the future. But here's what actually happens when people follow this kind of advice. And before we get to that, word from our sponsor, paddle.com. I'm using paddle as my merchant of record for all my software projects. I have plenty of those, and I use paddle with all of them. They take care of taxes, currencies, decline transactions, and credit card updates so that I don't have to deal with this, and I don't have to deal with banks and financial regulators. If you think you would rather just build your product, check out paddle.com as your payment provider. Now 1% every day. First off, it gets people to do irrelevant stuff. That's probably a big issue here. They feel like they're making these micro improvements when they're really just treading water. They're doing something for the sake of doing something, not for the sake of actually improving. You can change the color of a button, you tweak a landing page headline for the third time this week, reorganize your task management system again, and you call it your 1% improvement for the day. But did any of that actually move the needle? Can you even measure if it did? And that's the problem. Right? You can't really. It's really, really hard with these tiny things to see if they have kind of a downstream effect. And it also lacks focus. That's the second thing. It's, I think, the big one. Because here's what I've learned from years of building businesses myself, particularly in the early stages of starting or running a business. The actual improvements that happen when they happen, they're quite colossal, But they happen at times when you don't expect them. They're kind of these outsized outlier events. They are the moments when you have a conversation with a customer that just throws everything else into disarray because you figure something out that you haven't for the last couple weeks. You say, oh, you realize that, well, I've been doing this wrong internally for half a year. I've just been thinking about this wrong. Everything needs to change. And I thought the process was this. But now I actually talk to one of my customers and this process has to change significantly to map to what their job to be …