Tom ONeil - The 1% Principle

Most business and self-development books make a promise of secret wisdom on the cover, yet only reveal their key points a couple of hundred pages into the book. The 1% Principle is different. This book will immediately give you the key to massively increasing your business and personal success, then spend the rest of the book explaining how to implement these principles in a real-world way.

Unfortunately, most people think self-improvement and life planning is something only people who own Ferraris do. The vast majority of people spend far more time planning their wedding day or buying a second-hand car than they do planning their life and their career.

This is why fewer than one in 30 people invest in motivational books and programmes and actively plan their lives through formal goal setting. On a positive note, you are probably one of these people as you are reading these words right now!

The 1% Principle focuses on making the transition to a better and more productive life a lot easier. Achieving lots of mini-goals over a short to medium period, you can quickly transform what you achieve and how you want to live.

The entire philosophy is very simple. It is based around asking the following questions:

Me The 1% Principle What is one thing I can do today to improve my life by 1%?

My community The 1% Principle What is one thing I can do today to improve the life of someone near me by 1%?

Unlike a formal goal programme, the 1% Principle is more of a life philosophy, rather than a tool or resource you draw upon during a set time. As you become more successful using this principle, you will start to reflect on it more and more as you begin to see positive changes in key areas of your life. Over time, it will become an inbuilt and automatic way of thinking, helping you to reach further in your life, without being fully conscious of the effort required.

In 1961, American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz was using a numerical formula to assess a weather model, when, as a short cut, he entered the decimal 0.506 instead of 0.506127. The result was a completely unexpected and quite different weather scenario from what was initially predicted.

From this experience Lorenz coined the term butterfly effect, whereby small changes in an environment (such as the flap of a butterflys wings) can have major consequences (a tornado in Texas).

The butterfly effect has its roots in chaos theory and is very similar to the 1% Principle, as it reinforces the fact that small initial changes of seemingly minor significance can set the scene for major transformation.

For example, a decision I personally made to get fit and lose some excess weight a number of years ago led me to start jogging. Six months later, this led to my first competitive (albeit slow) run. This in turn saw me one year later complete the Oxfam Trailwalker, successfully walking 100 kilometres in under 24 hours.

Little initial decisions and challenges successfully overcome build a foundation to let you go to the next stage. At that next stage, new and potentially unforeseen opportunities open up, which help you to rise even further in your personal development very quickly.