The 1% Rule by Tommy Baker

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DIGEST THIS! THE ESSENTIAL IDEA:

“Most men lead live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them”. Endless time, complacency and distraction are the Silent Snatchers of our dreams. Wake up! Seize the certainty of death to live – use the 1% Rule to thrive.

THE SILENT DREAM SNATCHERS

• Curb Time – Create Urgency
• Curb Choice – Choose
• End Vanilla – Captivate Yourself
• Curb Complacency – Choose Growth
• Curb Dreaming – Start Doing
• End Sometimes – Do It Daily
• End Instant – Delay Gratification
• End Solo – Get Support
• Curb Distraction – Say No and Focus
• Curb How – Adopt the 1% Rule

CURB TIME – CREATE URGENCY

• Your time is now. Stop acting like you have all the time in the world.
• If you keep waiting to get started, you’ll wake up one day and wonder where your life went.
• Manufacture urgency – urgency is not natural – it has to be created and recreated e.g. cut your target completion date in half and start now.
• The amateur sits around waiting to be inspired – the pro creates inspiration.

CURB CHOICE – CHOOSE

• Indecision is a big dream killer.
• Too much choice means you don’t get to focus on what is really valuable, on what is really important.
• Kill thinking you can have everything, kill thinking you don’t have to make a choice.
• Instead of opting for choice, choose. Instead of allowing yourself options, decide what’s most meaningful to you – CHOOSE.

END VANILLA – CAPTIVATE YOURSELF

• A lack of vision and clarity means you end up serving the dreams of others.
• Create a vision so big and bold you feel electrified and uneasy.  No vanilla allowed! Captivate yourself, captivate your emotions. It should resonate deeply and move you – you should be able to touch it, smell it, live it – it should bring you to tears. You should feel an energetic shift as you think and talk about, like experiencing your dream holiday, like testing your dream car.
• How badly do you want it? This passion is ‘your why’. It must pull at your heartstrings – it will keep you going in the face of extraordinary challenges.
• Remember – YOU WILL die. Focus your attention on what you really want, stop thinking you have something to lose, follow your heart.

CURB COMPLACENCY – CHOOSE GROWTH

• Complacency is a killer.
• Growth requires constant challenge, something that stretches you, that pushes you to the edge of your perceived limits.
• Without challenge we wither away, we fade. We become complacent, stuck, bored, apathetic. Our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual capacity – no longer being tested – start to suck the life force out of us.
• How do you know if you have joined the one-way track to complacency? You no longer feel challenged. Your enthusiasm wanes. The status quo has become your comfort blanket. You lose your spark.
• Fear can seduce us into the dangerous comforting arms of complacency. We start to accept less. Resistance wants to keep you small, to keep you imprisoned from your dreams. Learn to love the resistance and the courage it takes to live a life on your own terms.
• The greater the fear, the greater its importance to the growth of our soul.

Growth – Becoming Someone Different

• Your vision is about achieving something you haven’t done before – you will have to become someone different to achieve it. You will have to change, and change is uncomfortable.
• When you truly love who you’re becoming, you will become unstoppable.
• In order to grow, you need to be in the game, feeling the pressure, intensity, high stakes, and sleepless nights. Sitting on the side-lines watching the game, analysing, criticising – sees you remain a spectator, merely pretending at the game of life.
• Change and growth require different inputs to generate different outputs. Doing the same thing and expecting change is madness. 

CURB DREAMING – START DOING

• The amateur lives in a world of insights and “aha” moments, stopping there. The pro uses these by executing on them. Don’t allow your potential to be wasted – take action, implement what you read and learn.
• Motivational conferences and reading alone won’t make it happen. Move from KNOWING (the insight, spark, concept – the starting point) to DOING (the endless reps, practice, challenge – this is when it starts to get hard – and where most people quit –) to BEING (where the magic happens – the integration – you become more than just the concept and the practice – it’s who you are).
• The greatest way to influence is not directly – it is by becoming a beacon and allowing others the space to do the same.

There’s power in adversity

• Expect challenges, adversity and chaos at least once every single day. This knowledge can excite you, and stop you becoming disheartened when obstacles arise.
• Reframe challenges as opportunities to grow.
• Use negativity as fuel – insults and opposition can be used as motivation to prove others wrong. Positivity is great, but sometimes you need to harness the creative power found in those darker emotions.
• Pain is your power – it contains a gift – it can drive you to do exceed your wildest dreams, to move so far away from the circumstances that would bring you to experience that pain again e.g. homelessness to millionaire.

END SOMETIMES –DO IT DAILY

• When choosing a goal, realise this is not a one-off choice. You are choosing to make the same choice day after day after day.
• In fact, when you choose a goal, you don’t really have a choice. If you want to lose weight you MUST exercise, you MUST eat healthily. There is no choice.
• And you must choose it consistently – doing exercise once or as you feel will not see you lose the weight.
• You won’t be spirituality on fire after 3 mediation sessions. You won’t have a 6-pack after hitting the gym twice. 
• If you don’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want will become the sacrifice. Everything costs something. Everything.

Keep persisting

• Keep heading towards your goal no matter the obstacles and rejections. JK Rowling persisted through numerous rejections.
• Persistence kicks in when that initial high of doing something new wears off. People fail because they don’t stick with the process after the good feeling fades, and through the hard times.
• It involves choosing the path again, and again, and again, and again, no matter what.
• Know that you will face obstacles, sleepless nights, existential crises and moments that bring you to your knees – that’s part of the path.
• Behind every overnight success are years of effort, struggle, and rejection and consistent action.
• Don’t compare yourself to someone’s end result, go back to their first iteration.
• Use comparison to spur you on – you can compare yourself to others and use it to stay stuck, disempowered, excusing yourself from even attempting change OR you can see their success as your own greatness reflected back to you and step up to the plate.

Keep Moving Forward

• Always just focus on the next step – right here, right now. This is especially true in moments of pain, resistance and exhaustion.
• Ask “What can I do RIGHT NOW that can prove that my vision is not only possible, but is coming true?” This is especially important when you are not seeing any results, or experience chaos.
• Even on days, months, years when you feel low in energy or depressed, just do one purposeful activity to start your day – every day. It can be as simple as making your bed – the important thing isn’t what you do, rather that you just keep doing it. Keep it small, almost laughably so. You will notice an upgrade in your energy, even if only slight. This will start to have a snowball effect.
• Progress isn’t linear – we go through different seasons e.g. a season of rest and recharge, a season of intense action, a season of rewards reaped from our efforts – and we may spend months or even years in any season.
• If we are doing something daily, we are creating a habit. We always revert back to our level of training, not our expectations i.e. our habits are who we are.
• Be productive – notice when you are just being busy (e.g. reading a motivational book) versus being productive towards your goals (highlighting and implementing the learning in your life).
• Be productive rather than busy – 20% of your actions drive 80% of your results.
• Be just as intentional (‘productive’) with your downtime as your work activity. If you are going to rest then really rest – recharge and disconnect e.g. get up and go for a walk to refresh yourself, instead of sitting at your desk idly checking your phone.

END INSTANT – DELAY GRATIFICATION

• Fall in love with delayed gratification.
• A farmer doesn’t plant seeds and wake up yelling in frustration the next day that the crop hasn’t bloomed. Instead they trust the process – with sunshine, water, and patience the crops will bear fruit.
• Why do some people fail to reach their goals? They expect too much too early and give up at the first sign of struggle – overnight success is a decade in the making.
• Remember, “the first iteration of your goals is never the end result – the magic is in the pivot e.g. YouTube started as a video dating site, and noticed people wanted to share content rather than look for dates and pivoted. Instagram started as a digital check-in app and discovered people were taking pictures of places they’d checked in at and pivoted.

END SOLO – GET SUPPORT

• Maximum Urgency + Maximum Accountability = Maximum Results
• The more successful you are, the higher you get, the more accountability and urgency forms part of your experience e.g. a person becoming a CEO becomes accountable to shareholders, employees, executive team etc.
• Create systems, structures and people to ensure you follow through – this will ensure consistent productivity over the long term.
• Accountability is uncomfortable – it sounds great on paper, until you are being challenged on why you didn’t complete a crucial task on 2 hours sleep.
• How to choose an accountability group? 1. Do these people have the results you want? 2. Do they challenge and push you to new levels of execution? 
• Accountability comes in different forms e.g. coach, mentor, events, mastermind groups – but a core trait is that it involves a healthy dose of being challenged.
• We often surround ourselves with enablers, people who don’t respect us enough to challenge our behaviour. If someone truly respects and appreciates you, they will push you past your excuses. That’s a powerful relationship – one to nurture and keep hold of.

CURB DISTRACTION – SAY NO AND FOCUS

• Lack of focus is the number 1 obstacle standing between people and their dreams.
• Reaching our goals involves self-control, delayed gratification and ignoring distractions and temptations that can divert us from our path.
• Emails and social media are dream killers – putting you in the driver’s seat for someone else’s vision.
• In a world telling you to choose others, choose yourself. You need to be selfish to achieve success.
• If you don’t fill your day with high-priority items, others will fill your day with low-priority items.
• Questions to ask yourself daily: Did I really move the needle forward in my life and business (today)? Which activities truly mattered, and which could be deleted? Was I moving myself forward or just other people’s agendas?
• “A warrior is an average man with laser like focus” (Bruce Lee).

Double your rate of Saying No

• Execute non-negotiable ruthless boundaries e.g. stop checking emails all day – set regular hours for checking e.g. at 10am, at 1pm, at 4pm.
• You don’t have to say no to things that are truly important – think WIN-WIN. Instead of thinking you need to give up one part of your life in order to progress another, think about how you can better integrate the different facets of your life and how they can feed each other e.g. you could exercise with your partner and therefore complete 2 goals at once.

Delete what’s not serving you

• “Your mental real estate is priceless”. Your mind is like a house – why do you so willingly fill it with junk? We let people and things of little importance take residence within our minds, rent – free. Your mind is not a rundown home in the slums – it’s a spectacular beachfront home of incredible value – everyone wants it! Start recognising that fact – cut back the weeds and delete what doesn’t serve.
• To create space in your life to achieve what you want you need to delete anything and everything that doesn’t serve your path.
• Every time you grow and expand into a new experience, audit your surroundings. Every time you achieve a breakthrough, audit your circle.
• To change who we are, we need to change our environment – our environment reminds us of who we have been and can subconsciously induce the same state of mind we are trying to get away from. To stop this, we need to interrupt our reality: 1. Physical Interrupt – change our physical state e.g. by doing 10 star jumps – anything to get us breathing hard; 2. Spiritual Interrupt – mediate for a minute; 3. Emotional interrupt – a silent 1 minute scream to release built up emotions; 4. Mental Interrupt – e.g. journal, listen to music.
• Over 50% of what is in your life is not serving your vision – you allow things to stay in your life out of comfort.  Do a life audit. Delete what’s not serving you to create space for the 1% Rule to Work.

CURB HOW – ADOPT THE 1% RULE

• ‘The How’ is where dreams go to die.
• Why do some people fail? They focus on ‘how’ more than their passionate ‘why’. They focus on the big end result which overwhelms and paralyses, instead of inspiring to action.
• The gap between that great idea and reality leads to doubt, procrastination, confusion and the crushing of a dream.
• The 1% RULE is the solution – allowing you to dream big but start small, through reverse engineering.

Reverse Engineering

• At the core of the 1% Rule is the use of reverse engineering to breakdown any large vision into its smallest common denominator, so tiny that it’s impossible for you to fail to make progress each and every day.
• Process over end result – when you focus on small daily actions tied to a larger vision – you feel inspired rather than overwhelmed.
• Dream big but start small.
• Break your vision down into CORE OUTCOME, CORE PROCESS and 1% (DAILY) PROCESS.
• Example – BUSINESS: CORE OUTCOME =generate $35,000 within the next 90 days,  CORE PROCESS = reach out to 2,500 leads within the next 90 days, 1% PROCESS = generate 27 prospect calls every single day.
• Example: SPIRITUALITY: CORE OUTCOME = create more inner peace and reduce stress, CORE PROCESS = wake up 15 minutes earlier to allow the time, 1% PROCESS = minimum of 7 minutes meditation every day.

The Equation

THE 1% RULE:

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

• 1% progress – make progress and move forward daily, no matter how small.
• Consistency – do the action daily – each and every day – and see your effort compound over time.
• Persistence – stick with it beyond the initial high and choose it again and again, despite challenges, obstacles and distractions.
• Endurance – stay with the process for long enough to see your dreams come true. Have patience.

The 1% Rule core question: If I moved the needle forward 1% in every area of my life, every single day, what would my life look like in one year?

• It would actually be more than 1%+1%+1%…= a 365% upgrade across a year – due to compounding, we have the potential of advancing by 3700% over a year. That’s a huge upgrade in terms of our health, relationships, finances etc, all by enacting a small 1% daily action, and doing it with consistency, persistence and patience.
• Design a process you love – you will spend more time carrying out the process than in the achievement of the end result so ensure you enjoy it.
• Track your progress – reflection is just as important as action – assess where you are with your goals, and if you are heading in the right direction.
• Celebrate small wins – this will keep you inspired and on track – progress no matter how small is motivating.