May 18, 20247 min read

🏇🏻 Why the Long-Term is the Fastest path · The Bunker #85

Hi friend 👋🏻!

A Newsletter in which we talk about UX Design and the Freelance Journey, dedicated to those who are starting out in both worlds and who feel identified.

From The Bunker, we accompany you on the way.

Over the past few days, I have been reading Atomic Habits, it’s no surprise to anyone that I am really enjoying what I'm reading. The book talks to you in a very practical and simple way about how you can gradually improve your habits.

In the world of freelancing or entrepreneurship, we have all experienced the anxiety of wanting to achieve things.

It’s quite normal, and I think I am still quite anxious deep down.

One of the chapters of the book talks about why it is important to build small habits every day, and how these small habits can lead to a significant impact in the future. In other words: why it is better to establish small habits maintained over time rather than drastic changes or quick fixes.

So let’s connect the idea of why it's better to build habits slowly and steadily over a long period with why, when you are starting your own business or project, it is advisable to do exactly the same.

The book discusses how a habit is an automatic response to certain situations, which, through repetition, transitions from being a conscious effort to an unconscious one.

The book provides many examples to illustrate almost everything it mentions, so I will do the same:

Example: Every time I have breakfast, I heat the milk first and then add the coffee. Or sometimes I put the coffee first, then add the milk, and heat everything together. Whatever the sequence, you’ve been doing it for so long that you probably don’t even notice the order in which you do things.

Another example: You always use the same password, but if someone asks you what the password is, you don’t know it offhand; you just know how to type it.

This highlights that small actions repeated frequently become ingrained in us, and what starts as a conscious effort becomes subconscious without you even realizing it, you have automated that action.

With your career, you need to achieve the same:

In life, you will never achieve anything on the first try; you need many iterations to end up doing something reasonably interesting. This is just how it is.

This happens all the time with content creation; you need to create 50 posts before your account generates any significant interest.

When you work on a project, it is likely that you will try a few things first before you end up doing your best project. But why? Well, it’s not rocket science; you simply need life experience to understand what works and what doesn’t, to correct those mistakes even before you make them, because you already know the correct way to do things.

So, if we know that we need to do things over the long term because it is the only way to accumulate enough life experience to understand how to do things correctly → Something smart on your part is to prepare yourself for the long term.

So, how do you prepare for the long term?

Well, the book talks about two aspects:

Focus on who you want to become instead of focusing on what you want to achieve.
Focus on the systems you need to follow instead of the goal you want to reach.

The long path is followed by someone who:

Wants to achieve a physical change in their body → Becomes an athlete → Trains for at least 15 minutes a day for 300 days. Exercise becomes part of the routine.
Wants to achieve a physical change in their body → Plans their day to ensure those 15 minutes of daily exercise are achievable.

Another example: How to grow a successful newsletter:

Important to note: You will need to create 40 posts before the 104th one is good.
Pick a day of the week in your calendar, that day will be dedicated to writing the newsletter, and another day will be for preparing newsletter ideas.

After several weeks, you’ll automatically know that Tuesdays are for writing ideas, Fridays are for writing newsletters in bulk, and Saturdays are for publishing them… You will have automated this process so well that it becomes fully integrated into your routine.

This will also help relieve some pressure: Instead of thinking:

I still haven’t achieved my goals.
You’ll think: I’ve been super consistent for 32 weeks. And just like with Duolingo, after a long streak, it will bother you more to break the streak than to reach the goal.

In the end, not achieving that goal won’t bother you as much, because it doesn’t require a lot of energy to perform the action:

How long does it take you to come up with 20 ideas? 10 minutes?
How long does it take you to write the newsletter? 20 minutes?

These are small tasks and small efforts that will then allow you to have written a newsletter every week for the next 32 weeks.

Spoiler: It’s impossible for your newsletter not to grow after 32 weeks, but why?

You have a lot of content:
- A lot of junk.
- And within that junk, there will be value. It’s like taking photos: You need to take 100 on a trip to get 3 good ones.
You will have become an expert through repetition → The quality of your next newsletter will be infinitely better. If not, compare this article with the first one from The Bunker.

Additionally, it is something scientific, If you improve by 1% each day for a year, the cumulative improvement is calculated using the concept of compound interest.

Instead of adding 1% daily in a linear fashion, the daily growth is multiplied in a compounded manner.

The formula to calculate compound growth is:

Future Value=Initial Value×(1+growth rate)𝑛Future Value=Initial Value×(1+growth rate)n

In this case, the initial value is 1 (representing your current state), the daily growth rate is 1% (or 0.01 in decimal form), and 𝑛_n_ is the number of days in a year (365).

So, the formula is applied as follows:

Future Value=1×(1+0.01)365Future Value=1×(1+0.01)365

Calculating this:

Future Value=(1.01)365≈37.78Future Value=(1.01)365 ≈ 37.78

This means that by improving 1% each day for a year, you will have improved approximately 37.78 times your starting point.

The reason for this significant improvement is the effect of compound growth.

Each day you are not only improving 1% over your initial state, but also over the accumulated improvements of the previous days.

his leads to exponential growth, where small daily improvements add up and multiply with each other, resulting in a much greater improvement at the end of the period.

Cheers, Jordi Espinosa.

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