Still Letting Formulas Brainwash You? It Means You’re Still Standing Still

Still Letting Formulas Brainwash You? It Means You’re Still Standing Still

At the turn of every year, people inevitably repost mottos like, "Improve yourself a little every day, and your life will be completely different." As a form of self-encouragement or mutual encouragement, there is nothing inherently wrong with that attitude. Life is, after all, built from small accumulations; grains of sand make a tower. Making small but persistent efforts, and holding on to resilient hope for the future, is in itself admirable. But people often attach formulas like the following as proof:

If you improve by 0.01 every day, then after one year you will be 37.8 times better. If you decline by 0.01 every day, then after one year you will be reduced to just 0.03 of where you started. The power of effort is that enormous, so we should work all the harder! And if you increase that just a little more—from 0.01 to 0.02, which does not sound especially difficult—the result becomes even more staggering.

But are formulas like this actually credible? Is it really possible for a person to improve 37 times, or even 1,000 times, within a single year? And if someone spends a year doing nothing much—not even exactly doing nothing, just slipping backward by 0.01 to 0.02 a day—do they really become a complete idiot by year’s end? If their ability is supposedly only 3% or even 0.06% of what it was at the beginning of the year, then “idiot” would hardly be an exaggeration. In my limited life experience, I have seen neither type of person. If someone could improve by 1,000 times in any area within a year, then by adulthood they ought to be capable of absolutely anything. And if someone could regress to 3% of their original self in a year, then the world ought to be full of people reduced to vegetables.

The fact that such absurd formulas can be promoted, circulated, and even believed says at least one thing to me: it reveals just how scarce independent thinking really is in this world. If people had even the slightest desire to separate truth from falsehood, they would not buy into reasoning this ridiculous. And if someone spends year after year using this kind of pseudo-truth to motivate themselves, it probably only shows that their own capacity for thinking has remained stagnant.

In essence, this is a false proposition not even worth refuting. No one can become 1% more hardworking every single day relative to the day before. Basic common sense tells us growth in this context is linear, not exponential. Assuming a person’s innate and external conditions do not suddenly change, the relationship between time and effort invested and the gains achieved is bounded. So if on day one, a person needs one hour in order to improve by 0.01 over the previous day, then to keep improving by 0.01 over the previous day every single day, the time required must also increase proportionally. By day 100, they would need to put in 2.7 hours a day. By day 200, 7.3 hours a day. By day 300, 19.7 hours a day—just to maintain that rate of growth. Clearly impossible. And if the target were 1.02 instead, then by day 200 they would need to work 52.48 hours a day, which is even more obviously impossible.

Even if we ignore forgetting, diminishing marginal returns, and all the other real-world complications, and just think about the issue in simple terms, if daily improvement is proportional to effort, while daily effort remains stable, then 1 + 0.01 * 365 = 4.65 is a much more reasonable formula. And if we take the realities of life into account, perhaps estimating an improvement of one-thousandth per day on your current base would be more realistic.

Take English vocabulary as an example. Suppose you currently know 5,000 words. To sustain a 1% increase for a full year, you would have to memorize 50 new words a day, every day, and by the end of the year your vocabulary alone would reach 23,250. That sounds impressive, and not entirely impossible, but that kind of progress is more like a short-term sprint than something easily sustained. Because in the second year, if you still wanted to maintain 1% growth, you would have to memorize 232 words a day, which obviously lands you right back in the fallacy of exponential growth. But even if you memorized just 5 new words a day, after one year you would still exceed 6,800 words. Given enough time, that too can lead to substantial achievement.

So why are so many people willing to be brainwashed by absurd formulas like 37.8x? Beyond a lack of independent thinking, the deeper reason is probably impatience and the desire for quick results. Everyone wants their abilities, wealth, appearance, and status to rise quickly, and a number like 37.8x creates a kind of false sense of prosperity, like a fantasy of overnight transformation. That is what makes people flock to it. Meanwhile, the value of steady, grounded effort is easily overlooked. By comparison, numbers like 4.65 or 1.365 may seem plain and uninspiring, but they are realistic, measurable, and actionable for ordinary people. If at the start of the year you believe in the myth of 37.8x, and by the end of the year realize that nothing in your life has improved at anything close to that rate, the blow to your confidence may be severe: apparently, I could not even manage 1% improvement a day.

Instead of that, it is far better to firmly accept that there are no shortcuts to explosive growth in life. Calm down, work seriously, and perhaps after 1,000 or 10,000 hours, you may achieve something substantial in one area. That kind of attitude and perseverance—and those kinds of formulas and numbers—may be what are truly worth believing in.