The 1% Rule: How to Fall in Love with the Process and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams

by Tommy Baker

If you stay with anything long enough, it will get hard and you’ll want to stop. Understanding that your desire to do anything in life will vary minute to minute, day to day, and hour to hour allows you to step away from your feelings. Many times, experiencing doubt and resistance means we’re growing, stretching, or in the process of becoming. When they come up, smile—and learn to love them.

Feelings are important, but if we let them control our ability to execute and follow through on our goals, we are held hostage and lose our own self-reliance. The moment you learn to execute regardless of how you’re feeling, everything changes.

“What is it you want from me?”

Seconds passed, and Plato squirmed

Maximum growth happens at the intersection of support and challenge.

While we may fight it, avoid it, and resist it, deep down we want challenge because it tells us who we are and provides meaning.

If you find yourself lacking enthusiasm for anything in life, pay attention. It’s telling you bluntly that something is missing, and you’ve gotten too comfortable with the status quo.

it’s important to recognize that persistence is a muscle that can and must be worked on daily and that how you do one thing is how you do everything.

If you can’t build the muscle of persistence during low-stakes situations, it’ll become incredibly difficult to show up when the stakes are high.

Endurance is what separates the master from the masses and the amateur from the professional. It separates those who stay focused and persistent on a long enough timeline to watch all their dreams come true.

Endurance is not sexy, it’s not flashy. It will include countless moments of doubt and wanting to stop.

Behind every overnight success are years of focused effort, struggle, challenge, and rejection. The myth of overnight success plays well in a highlight-reel culture, yet when one pulls back the curtain, it’s easy to see the 1% Rule in effect.

When I read these stories of rejection, struggle, and adversity, I’m empowered. If overnight success was real, you’d have tremendous pressure. Instead, you can focus on taking today’s step, understanding that you’re building a rock-solid foundation. Understand that at every moment you’re crafting your unique story and journey. One day, if you endure long enough, others will call you an overnight success.

Remember: your mountain is yours. Your journey is one-of-a-kind and will never happen again. Your exact mix of background, environment, family, brain chemicals, and way of viewing the world is 100% unique.

Sure, there are countless benefits you and I experience every day with the ease and availability of apps, smartphones, and the digital ecosphere. However, because this has become the status quo, we run from delayed gratification in nearly every life circumstance.

Cultivating endurance is a choice and starts with one born out of commitment. In today’s society everyone has high expectations.

You can be the next success story, but you’ve got to choose it. In a world telling you to choose others, remember your worth and choose yourself.

As humans, we are natural inspectors. Whether we realize this consciously or not, we are always collecting data. If, after committing to a goal, outcome, or vision, we don’t see progress or perceived progress, we’ll quit.

“What can I execute on right now that will prove that my outcome and vision are not only possible, but coming true?” Using this question on a daily basis will prove priceless to you—if used with intention and clarity after you’ve done the work required to know where you’re going.

If you don’t fill your day with high-priority items, others will fill your day with low-priority items.

As a culture, we’re trained to do the busy work that makes us feel productive yet doesn’t truly move us forward.

The 1% Rule and framework is going to shift your priorities by starting your day off with intention and purpose. Instead of starting out with high urgency/low importance or high urgency and importance, you’re going to start out with an action step associated with what really moves the needle in your life and business.

For the 1% Rule to truly work, you’re going to have to create space in your life. This requires you to take inventory, or do an audit, and delete what’s not serving you. Once you’ve done this, you can strategically insert what’s aligned with your vision—and things become simple.

Right now, over 50% of what is in your life is not serving your vision. You’ve allowed relationships to stay around because they’re comfortable—you grew up together or went to the same college. You visit environments that used to serve you but now hold you back. In the context of business, you’re doing countless tasks yet 20% of them drive 80% of your income, impact, and results.

On your quest to incorporate the 1% Rule and answer the daily question, you’re going to experience resistance. Resistance is simply the voices inside your head telling you not to do it. Resistance is the fear-driven, comfort-zone-loving version of yourself that identifies with the current you. Change those circumstances, create a new reality, and it freaks out, bringing you back down. It’s in love with the known and sees the unknown as a threat.

When you experience resistance, laugh at it. Smile at it. See it for what it is—a sign you’re growing.

The moment you can detail a day in your future life with everything you’ve created and accomplished, down to the seemingly insignificant moments, you’ve achieved clarity.

This is no time to play small. Unlocking your possibility requires you to give yourself permission. Yes, only you can honor yourself to think bold and big. If it makes you uncomfortable, fantastic. Your vision should make you uncomfortable, otherwise it’s corporate, incremental, and vanilla.

At the end of the exercise, if you’ve done the above and communicated your vision, it must pull on your heart. If you don’t get emotional through the process, start over. Your vision is not created out of logic and reasoning, it comes from deep within.

If you stay open to possibility, you may find an alternative vision that you currently can’t imagine and will absolutely blow you away.

Attempting to control others for the sake of our freedom is a fruitless endeavor. This is where surrender comes in. Surrender does not mean giving up or giving in—it’s quite the opposite. Surrender means being “all in” to a point where you let go of the clenching grip you have on life and open up to the depths of what can happen.

We go from being high off the possibility to depressed about the logistics. Without a doubt, the “how” is the gap’s favorite weapon of mass procrastination and, ultimately, destruction, designed to keep you swirling in a world of confusion until you give up.

The more time you spend analyzing, dissecting, or thinking about the how, the less likely it is that your goals, outcomes, and vision will come to fruition.

In order for you to feel your vision is not only possible but coming true at a faster pace than you even imagined: What would have to happen in the next 90 days?

There’s no number of Instagram quotes or YouTube videos that can get you as motivated and inspired as the proof of your vision coming true.

For your big rocks, we’re going to break it down to ensure your success in the core pillars of your life. The four pillars will include your Business & Purpose, Health & Fitness, Spirituality, and Relationships.

For each of the four pillars, we will: Identify core outcome. The core outcome is the end result you’re looking to achieve for that pillar in life during the next 90 days. It is deeply connected to the vision you set earlier. Identify core process. Every outcome has a process associated with it that is the keystone action step designed to ensure the outcome is a success, or has a high probability of achievement and follow-through. Identify 1% process. We further break down the core process using the 1% Rule—a measurable, daily way of moving forward. This is designed to simplify the game and give you clarity every day.

Now, to be clear, you will need to do more tasks than only the 1% process. However, the purpose of this process is to identify the nonnegotiable focus you must have every day before moving on to the other tasks.

For each of your big rocks, you’re going to make a list of everything that you believe needs to be done to complete the outcome. Don’t overthink it—simply write them down.

Step 1: Deletion Look at everything you wrote down and delete what doesn’t serve your big rock. There’s always a handful of activities we simply need to delete, and here’s your chance. Step 2: Automation Identify which things on your list can be automated. What are you doing right now that can be done using software or systems? Step 3: Delegation What initiatives, tasks, or projects are important yet can be delegated? Whether or not you have a team, we now have 5 billion people online. Finding cheap resources to clear things off your plate is easy. Identify what can be delegated right now. Step 4: Weekly Rocks If you’ve done the above correctly, you should be left with the core essentials. This is the high-level, zone-of-genius type work only you can do. If that’s not the case and you still have fluff here, go back through Steps 1, 2, and 3 one more time. Now you’re going to look at what’s left and rank them in order of importance, with 1 being the highest, and 3 being the lowest. Work your way down. You may have multiple 1s, and that’s totally fine.

Remember: you don’t have to hit a home run every single day—you simply have to get in the game.

Little hinges swing big doors, and all your efforts will pay off—but you’ve got to stay consistent.

overplanning can lead to distraction, as we’ve mentioned, and we’re here to keep you focused and on fire.

What’s simple is powerful, although never easy. In life, we should all be chasing simple. Anything else is noise and distraction, something we have way too much of these days.

If things are complex and require endless planning, blueprints, and meetings, then we can avoid the work today and put if off until tomorrow, next week, or next quarter.

If you want the big results and your own third-and-nine opportunity, double down on the process and work behind what you’ve put to paper. It’s not as easy as you think or else everyone would be in the game with an opportunity to get the first down.

Talking ourselves out of our dreams simply because of the season of life we’re in or because of a calendar digit is a bulletproof way to get and stay stuck.

perfect timing is an illusion. It lets us off the hook, so we don’t have to summon the courage to make a decision and execute it.

the how is the graveyard to your dreams—where they go to die, buried once and for all. The how is where people stay stuck in a never-ending loop of research and analysis and an inability to execute. Without a doubt, if there’s one place where we lose our initial excitement and enthusiasm over anything, it’s here.

The truth is, you don’t need to figure out the how, at least not yet.