"Change is the law of life"

My wife and I were driving around yesterday and passed a store with a large sign out front saying, "Family Video Store."  We were both surprised at first, until we noticed that the store was empty and looked like it had been abandoned long ago.  It's amazing how the entertainment industry has changed in the last several years.  Video stores are a thing of the past.  I can't even remember the last time I watched a movie or show using a video cassette it was so long ago.  I do remember watching a couple of episodes of "Game of Thrones" last year on my daughter's old portable DVD player, but that was out of desperation during the middle of the pandemic when I didn't have a television (long story).  

I am starting to wonder if I will ever watch cable television again.  We've become so used to binge watching shows or movies on Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu.  The pandemic has certainly accelerated some of these changes, but having witnessed the relatively rapid ascent and decline of the home video rental industry, I suspect that these changes would have happened anway.  

President John F. Kennedy once said that "Change is the law of life."  He was right.  We are surrounded by constant, perpetual change.  If there is any fundamental law to the universe, Kennedy perhaps stated it best.

The home video industry is a really good example of the power of incremental change.  We rarely notice small, incremental changes, but they compound over time in such a way that, before you even know it, you can no longer recognize the world around you.  But here is the key point.  We can use this power of incremental change to our own advantage.  The cosmic power of the universe is within our grasp!

Leverage the power of incremental change to achieve your personal and professional goals.  For example, let's say that you've always wanted to run a marathon.  Even if you've never really been a runner, you can still achieve that goal.  The trick is to start small - maybe go out and run a half mile or mile as a start.  Every week, add a little more distance.  The key is to keep changing the mileage every week.  

Think about it this way - what if we tried to be just 1% better every week?  It really doesn't matter what we are trying to be better at, but we have to be just a little better each week.  Compounded over time, if we improve by just a little every week, at the end of the year we will have made significant progress.  Don't believe me?  Check out the math below.

The law of percentages tells us that if we increase something by 1%, we need to multiply that something by 1.01, right?  So for example, say we have 10 dollars in our wallet.  If we wanted to know what a 1% increase in our money would be, we multiple:  10 x 1.01 = 10.10.  Got it?

So, back to our original example of improving something by just 1% every week.  If we do that every week for a year, we multiply by 1.01 52 times to find out how much we've improved over the course of the whole year:  1.01^52 = 1.68.  In other words, by improving by just 1% every week, we will have improved by 168% over the course of the whole year!

Cameron Readman, writing on "The Power of Incremental Change" also warns us that the opposite is also true.  If we get worse by just 1% every week, the difference at the end of the year will be huge!  Again, remembering our math from middle school, in order to calculate a 1% decrease in something, we multiply it by 0.99.  So again, getting worse by 1% every week means that we multiply by 0.99 52 times:  0.99^52 = 0.59, or 59%.  Small changes compounded over time lead to really large, dramatic changes.

Change is the law of life.  We can take advantage of the power of incremental change, or we can let it be our master.  The choice is ours in the end.