When I think about my career best, teaching comes to mind first. The students at The Ateneo genuinely connected with my work, and that feedback told me something important—I was good at something that mattered. That’s my baseline. Now the question becomes: what does 1% better look like from here? Pat Riley on Career Best Effort and the Power of Getting 1% Better frames this perfectly—it’s not about reinvention, it’s about honoring what you’ve already done well and building from that foundation.
My design philosophy around working with Telegram bots taught me something about continuous improvement that most goal-setting frameworks miss. I send messages—little thoughts, almost like tweets—and then slowly they improve my writing and my work. It’s not a grand strategy; it’s repetition that compounds. The Fundamentals of Excellence isn’t about leaps; it’s about consistency in small things. Marginal Gains: This Coach Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent describes exactly this—the power of touching things incrementally, again and again.
The big shift for me came when I had kids. I couldn’t do deep work anymore, so I had to rethink what improvement even meant. I couldn’t block out eight hours. Instead, every time I feel overwhelmed, I focus on what’s the smallest action I can take right now. That’s when 1% started feeling achievable in a way bigger targets never did. Improving Micro Habits at the Point of Contact captures this—the power isn’t in the size of the change, it’s in making the change at a moment when you actually have capacity for it. Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results by … showed me that this isn’t settling; it’s the real architecture of how people actually change.
Right now, it’s writing. That’s the area where I want to do 1% more, and I can feel the difference it would make. Purpose-Driven Goal Setting- The ‘Why’ Behind Success matters here because I know why this matters—it’s how I think, how I communicate, how I contribute. A 1% improvement in writing compounds across everything else I do. It’s small enough to fit into the life I actually have, and meaningful enough to matter.