1 in 1,000,000 Human
What actually makes you a one in a million human?
The concept of one in a million is an abstract, rom-com-y, sometimes cringe type of idea.
But what if we actually tried to relate this back to actual stats, and instead of seeing it as something abstract, we actually had it as a target to aim for or work towards as a human.
I always joke that every guy has the same goal; “rich, jacked and free”, there might be a few more nuances, but mainly it boils down to those.
Instead of that, we can use our target to become a one in a million human being as the goal.
Not in an egotistical way.
Just to see how close this actually could be for a lot of people. If one in a million seems too tough, start with 1 in 1,000 and grow from there.
How To Calculate?
To start we have to break down some specific areas of life to conceptualise this further.
Most things can be split into three core areas of life;
Health - Physical, mental, longevity, energy, aging.
Wealth - Money, career, work, freedom, purpose.
Relationships - Love, romantic partners, friendships, community.
Some people might argue that spirituality or religion needs to be in there as another pillar of life.
For the sake of this example we'll just say it's in the relationship part if that's something that's important to you.
In short, our goal is to be in the top 1% in ALL 3 of these areas.
And hence, a one in a million human. Because maths.
1% * 1% * 1% = 1 in a million exactly.
Easy to say, hard to do.
Let’s start with wealth as that might be the easiest to understand and quantify.
Wealth
Wealth has a lot more tangible metrics than the other 2 on this list.
Most people use money as the score of wealth, and whichever way you flip it, it does seem to be a key part to the wealth equation, but I’d argue it’s not the only part.
Other elements such as time to money, purpose, satisfaction, freedom etc are obviously also important.
Someone earning £50k a year “passively” working 3 hours a month is not the same as someone earning £150k/year working 100 hour weeks and commuting around London…
Luckily the other 2 segments of this post should help equalise some of the simplifications of the wealth segment. Working 100 hours a week physically leaves very little time for health and relationships for example.
There’s 2 main ways to look at wealth when just focusing just on money;
Yearly earnings / salary / income. AKA the money you receive each month or year.
Real Net worth - Assets - Liabilities. AKA cash, business values, stocks, property, pensions, savings etc minus debts and liabilities.
A nice wealth definition I like is by Scott Galloway;
Passive income that’s greater than your burn.
But for now we’ll stick with raw numbers of both yearly income and net worth to help simplify this section.
Another decision is whether we equate our wealth/health/relationships versus others similar to ourselves (location / age / demographics), or if we just take raw worldwide stats.
As worldwide stats can get a bit misleading and be quite a bit less relevant than who we interact with on a daily basis, I’ll just be using the UK stats for this article.
For the top 1% net worth stat in the UK, the number seems to be anywhere between £2.6-3.6M.
As the first note is related to households not just individuals, we’ll use a figure between the two options and just say £3 million net worth for now as our very broad baseline (before we narrow down and sharpen this number up massively below).
Another part that makes this difficult to sorting by age.
Unsurprisingly Net worth’s tend to increase with age;
Which is something you’d expect, so to make our figures a bit more relevant we have 2 options;
Do not adjust any of the 3 metrics for age (meaning if you are younger you are much more likely to rank higher in health, but lower in wealth metrics). Or;
Split the 1% rankings by age in each category. Meaning you’ll be far more likely to rank higher in wealth but health related metrics will seem a lot more difficult.
Both options work, but by age is probably more relevant to most people.
So that’s what we’ll go with.
Finding net worth UK splits by age proved really difficult.
There’s alot of data around median and averages split by age, such as the below;
But very little data on actual percentiles also split by age.
Anyway.
Using the above we can approximate what the 1% by age looks like on the net worth front by simply taking the “all persons” total of £162,711, and dividing this by your age, in my case the £56k figure.
56 / 162 = 35% roughly
So 35% of £3 Million (our original baseline figure) = £1.05 Million.
This sounds about right to me and is the metric we’ll roll with for this.
1 in 100 people aged between 30-35 have a million pound real net worth.
Yearly Income
The next question we’re trying to answer is around yearly salary/income/earnings.
This would be pre-tax earnings taken on a yearly timeline.
This one had a bit better grouping from data sources;
(£15,650 x 12) = £188k.
So it’s looking like between £160,000-£190,000 as our range.
We’ll use £180,000/year earnings as the baseline for any age.
To regress by age we’ll need to make similar adjustments to before, although the curves and differences are not as extreme as net worth (which makes sense).
This is the closest reference to the top 1% that I could find, which is still split by gender and all the way back in 2014-15.
So based on this, I think £130,000/year will be our figure for 2 reasons.
The first is the data above is 2014-15 and we should increase these by at least 10-20% because of inflation. Secondly, it’s better to over-estimate these things than under-estimate.
Baseline 1% wealth results for age 30-34:
Top 1% net worth: £1.05 Million.
Top 1% yearly income: £130k.
Asking People
Asking a few friends what they thought to the below questions
"For individuals in the UK, aged between 30-34, what would you say is the TOP 1% real net worth?"
"For individuals in the UK, aged between 30-34, what would you say is the TOP 1% yearly salary/earnings?”
Answers were interesting;
£450k, £500k, £500k, £550k, £450k — weirdly well-grouped answers.
Ranging from £60k-£200k — Less accurate but everyone was in the right sort of range.
So to achieve our wealth goals we need to hit (both ideally to make sure): £1 million net worth and £130k/year in earnings. Noted.
Health
For health it's a little bit more subjective.
On the surface its easier, you can simply look at someone and know in most cases whether you’d class those people as “healthy” or “unhealthy”.
But we need to measure specific things in “health” to create our own health metrics, things like VO2 max, strength, body-fat composition, resting heart rate, blood pressure, muscle mass, fasting insulin levels, blood work, hormones etc. And those are just starting points…
One of the big issues here is for specialists.
If you are a specialist, it will dramatically decrease your stats in other areas, although in some areas you will be elite.
In wealth that’s not really the case, all things equal, £100k is better than £10k.
But health metrics can have pretty big variations.
For example, a professional 120kg powerlifter, is not going to have great blood pressure or VO2 max stats compared with your average jogger.
Whereas a marathon runner will have elite resting heart rate but probably very weak strength stats, especially raw strength stats (not related against bodyweight).
As a result, below are just rough baseline ideas I would recommend that act as proxies to other (broader) health related outcomes. I’ve also explained why I choose these stats;
Resting heart rate - This is a good overall proxy for cardiovascular health.
Bodyfat Percentage - Another great proxy for overall health which relates back to diet and nutrition without having to analyse nutrition at all.
Raw & Bodyweight related strength metrics - Strength is massively linked to longevity and health. Raw weights/sets/reps and weights vs bodyweight are 2 good metrics to look into for this.
Muscle Mass - Generally the more muscle you have the better (up to a certain point).
Blood work - Didn’t know how else to phrase this but this is kind of the “everything else you can’t see” part. If all your stats above look great, but your blood work or blood pressure show you are on death’s door, then how much you can bench or how fast you can run a 5k probably aren’t that important.
Before we move onto the exact health metrics, I think most people can be in the top 50% just by NOT doing certain things. Some of the obvious ones; 1.) Binge drinking, 2.) Sleeping sh*t, 3.) Smoking. 4.) Super high stress all the time. Etc.
Just being somewhat aware or these, going to the gym occasionally or running once a week probably puts you in the top 25% by default, but we’re aiming to be top 1% so let’s get to the actual metrics.
These are the health metrics that I’ve outlined that in most cases will put you in the top 10-20% of MEN aged between 30-35. I’m interested to hear whether you think some are too easy or too difficult. In short, based on everyone you know/see, only 1/2 of 10 should have each of these (and 1 in 100 for all).
Resting heart rate: under 55 BPM.
Bodyfat percentage: less than 16%.
Strength standards:
Bodyweight bench press: 3 reps.
Pull Ups: 8 reps.
Bodyweight barbell squat: 8 reps.
“General Checklist” - The “Everything else” / “Everything in range” checks:
Blood work.
Blood pressure.
In short; a lean, healthy, strong body.
On the mental health side, I think each other part (physical health, wealth and relationships) play into having good mental health anyway.
Some interesting health stats from Puregym’s yearly survey below.
A quick point about health - In general I think people over-estimate the difficulty of how hard it would be to get in the top 10% in their age segment. This is usually judged by how you “rate” yourself vs others in the gym. For example if I’m the health-averaged gym guy for my age in my gym, that still puts me in the top 10%, potentially top 5% as the majority of people still do not exercise;
So just by turning up your in the top third already….
Relationships
Relationships is the toughest of these criteria to get an idea about.
How does one judge their romantic relationship and friendships?
Aside from the really obvious negative ones (just look at people you know/bad break-up/divorces/suing friends etc) how do you judge relationship quality?
It’s not far off trying to judge overall happiness (if we strip out health + wealth).
A tough thing to do.
After digging into some of the advice online about how to judge quality of relationships, I did not get very far. Disagreeing with quite a few of the takes from “experts”.
Mainly due to the use of “length of relationships” as the best proxy metric for success.
Unlike wealth (more net worth is generally better) and health (stronger/fitter generally better), relationships don’t follow this linear(ish) trend.
Also, some of people who have great romantic relationships (top 10%) seem to have no friends or social skills (bottom 50%), so potentially being in the top 1% there, doesn’t transfer over to non-romantic relationships.
Self qualifying metrics may work for this section, but obviously have flaws.
Quantity & quality metrics also may work, such as “how many friends do you have” “what are the depth of those friendships” but again have flaws as they are self-qualifying in many ways, “how do you define a friend” - everyone has a different definition.
That’s before we even get to the idea of romantic relationships.
According to Office National Stats, 19 in 20 adults are NOT extremely unhappy… Great start, and “86.6% are fairly or very satisfied with their social relationships”.
Trust seems to be the best proxy for relationship connections, both romantic and friends.
How many people could you trust to do an important task, by a set date, without giving them complete information?
For most people, probably only a handful, maybe none.
Let’s try relate this back to some stats and baselines for both romantic relationships and friendships;
Self qualifying metrics - questions to ask yourself:
Do you feel you have people in your life to rely on? [similar to the question above]
Do you feel lonely?
Do you feel satisfied with the relationships in your life?
Do you truly believe you have a top 1% romantic relationship?
Do you describe your romantic partner as supportive & reliable?
Some interesting stats based on the questions above;
Again, this is all related back to age 30-35, so many people may not be happy with their relationships yet or at this current time, but may have been in the past, or may be in the future.
This is simply a snapshot in time.
It seems that like wealth/health, relationship metrics can change extremely quickly.
For example if someone was happily married for 20 years but then divorced, does that make them in the bottom 50% of relationships? Or if someone was a grumpy man hating cat lady for 30 years but then changed and become a loving wife in their 50’s? Or even as simple as someone being single right now?
In short, it’s impossible to create baselines or stats around relationships, everyone is different and what people want even varies.
I think a couple of points are fairly obvious, and although may not equate to the top 1% and might be over-simplifying things, answering yes definitely puts you near the top 10% of relationships;
Are you excited to tell your partner / friends about your successes?
Will they react positively when you do tell them?
Would you describe your partner / friends as kind and generous?
Do you consider yourself lucky in these relationships?
Cheers.