One percent better

There is a graph that gets shared a lot online. If you improve by 1% every day for a year, you end up 37.78 times better than where you started. The math is real. 1.01 raised to the power of 365.

But the graph does not show you what it feels like to live inside that curve.

The first 30 days? You are only at 1.35x. After three months, barely 2.5x. The growth is so flat it looks like nothing is happening.

That is where most people quit.

I think about this with my job search. I have done mock interviews. I have prepped case studies. I have refined my pitch dozens of times. Some days it feels like I am rehearsing the same lines into a wall. No offer. No callback. No visible proof that any of the reps are doing anything.

To be honest, it is inundatingly* exhausting. That is, if there is a word like that.

But I have been here before. During my PhD, I spent months troubleshooting an imaging system that did not work. The alignment was off. The signal was weak. Every adjustment felt pointless. Then one afternoon, the image came through clean with high signal to noise ratio.

Nothing dramatic changed that day. It was just the day all the previous adjustments finally stacked up.

That is the part nobody talks about. There is a valley between starting and seeing results where the work is invisible. You are putting in effort but the scoreboard has not moved. The temptation is to assume it is not working and try something else.

But the math does not lie.

The reason most people never hit 37.78x is not because the formula is broken. It is because they stop at 1.35x and walk away thinking it failed.

Most of the gain is back loaded. Which means most of the faith is front loaded.

I do not know which day I am on. I just know I have not hit the curve yet.