As another here said, “this is a powerful call to action.”
However, I would argue that you’ve pushed the mathematical aspect far beyond what it would bear.
In reality, I doubt very much anyone can improve by 1% over and over again to the point that they get a billion times better than they were, unless they started at so close to zero, that even a billion times is less than the best any human had ever reached.
To justify my argument, consider the 100-meter dash. Here, a 1% improvement would be if you cut your personal record (PR) by 1%. Let’s assume that you start at the point where you’re a baby and can crawl about 10 cm per second. If you had the motivation and stamina to keep crawling 100 meters at that speed, it would take you 1000 seconds, or 16 minutes and 40 seconds.
The first time you cut your PR time by 1%, you’d reduce your time to 990 seconds. The second time, to 980 seconds and change. The 10th time, to 905 seconds and a bit. The 100th time, to just shy of 370 seconds. The 467th time, you’d cross the finish line after 9.59 seconds, a smidge slower than Usain Bolt’s world record of 9.58 seconds.
At this point, I’m sure you have a sense of where this is going. When you try to cut your PR by 1% for the 468th time, you’d need to run faster than the fastest human in the history of mankind. That’s extremely unlikely, by any measure.
However, if you try to argue that if you train long and hard enough you could one day become faster than Bolt, I’d push back by saying that to improve a billion-fold over your original 1000-second time, you’d need to cross those 100 meters in a millionth of a second, requiring you to exceed the speed of light in vacuum by a factor of 3.
Somehow, I don’t think any of us will ever go that fast on our own two feet (even if we come up with a Star-Trek-style warp drive).
Having had this fun with math, I still like the general gist of your thought — it’s important to commit to continuous improvement in anything you’re passionate about. You may not be able to always improve by 1%, or even at all, though sometimes you might find that you’ve improved by a lot more. However, as long as you keep trying to improve, you’re on a good path.
