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

by Tommy Baker

Without starting and jumping into the cold water, you’ll never clearly see the pivot and the opportunity in front of you, no matter what area of life you’re in.

The feeling of being stuck and spiraling out of control are a direct reflection of this mentality.

The Dip, as he conceives it, is what stands between starting out and hitting the peak of the mountain. It represents most of the time we spend in any project or endeavor, full of countless challenges. Those who persist break through to the other side. Godin defines the Dip as: “The long slog between starting and mastery.”

committed you are to your goals.

We will experience challenges, adversity, and chaos at least once every single day.

Progress—even the perception of it.

When we feel we’re moving the needle forward in life, even a seemingly insignificant amount, we stay motivated. Progress keeps us inspired and on track.

the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

The 1% Rule stems from this principle and combines it with the Japanese philosophy of kaizen. This philosophy is about continuous improvement over the long haul.

These two come together to create undeniable daily micro-progress.

1% progress + daily application (consistency) + persistence (focus) + time (endurance) = success.

When I focused on small daily actions tied to the larger vision, I felt invigorated and inspired, and I moved the needle.

When I focused on the end result and the massive vision I’d created, I felt depleted and uninspired, and suffered from paralysis by analysis.

real-world results based on daily progress, or micro-wins.

Integration is one of my areas of focus and why my clients come back to me time and time again. Defined on my top-rated podcast, Resist Average Academy, integration is the process of going from knowing to doing and, ultimately, to being.

Integration is the missing link in most personal development, success, and mindset texts. Without it, we stay stuck in a world of intellectually knowing—but nothing else.

The big leaps will never happen if we don’t get used to taking the small ones. Faith is a muscle that must be built and developing any kind of muscle requires repetition. The 1% Rule was designed to help you build this faith every single day with micro-leaps and commitments, so when the high-stakes moments in life appear, you’ll be ready.

Bushido.

The 1% Rule has its own code, one rooted in the principles to be followed and reminded by when the chaos and stress hit.

You and I will experience endless amounts of human emotion, stress, uncertainty, and chaos as we set about to achieve our goals and targets.

The 1% Rule operates with the understanding these things will happen. Having a code grounds us in certainty and clarity around why we’re here in the first place, while ensuring we’re going to last the test of time.

The code is your guiding light, it’s the beacon to keep you grounded throughout the challenges.

Living the code is a reminder of where your intention, focus, and limited energy go on a daily basis, and it’s designed to withstand even the most brutal of storms.

Living by a code ensures simplicity along your path. You’ll always know what your foundation is and what to rely on. Ultimately, it serves several purposes, one of the most powerful being the ability to cure a behavior pattern we’re all guilty of: indecision.

Indecision costs us more than we can ever imagine. This alarming cost includes time, energy, resources, stress, and the constant wasted bandwidth of overthinking. As we move forward with our dreams, we’re already overwhelmed with logic, reasoning, and trying to figure out “how.”

“Unfortunately, the proliferation of choice in our lives robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is.”

1: FALL IN LOVE WITH THE PROCESS

We’ve already identified how this has hurt us individually and as a collective, which is why the first part of the 1% Rule is all about embracing every part of the process.

Furthermore, it’s about falling in love with the process. Once we do, we’re able to put our limited physical, mental, and emotional energy into it with everything we’ve got.

The process is the metamorphosis of who you’ve been to wh...

2: DO IT EVERY SINGLE DAY

The second part of the code is simple: do it every single day—no

It’s less about the size and duration of the progress and more about the fact that we’re m...

After years of watching people set outcomes, I’ve noticed the number one thing standing in their way

It was themselves. They would get in their own way.

We don’t live conditionally, waiting to feel inspired, excited, and ready. We simply move forward every single day,

Then one day, after enough reps, it simply becomes who we are.

3: CELEBRATE YOUR COMMITMENT

Celebrating your wins gives you jet fuel to keep going and extends a token of appreciation for how far you’ve come, instead of focusing on what’s missing.

Every single day, we celebrate a win we experienced as we use the 1% Rule.

These micro-wins create the momentum and clarity required to get us to the more expansive wins...

They force us to open up our awareness, and we feed our inner hero instea...

They remind us to not judg...

and instead appreciate our growth. 4: TRACK YOU...

The fourth pillar of the code is to track your metrics and use da...

Without tracking, we live in a fantasy,

If we don’t have accurate data, our emotions and feelings start to take over, and we base our decisions off those.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”