It’s a situation that most of us have been in, you feel like you have given a situation your all and just haven’t got anywhere. This could be in your personal life, it could be attempting to save money, or lose weight, or establish a better, healthier relationship with someone. Maybe it’s working to tame the garden or get a promotion.
So I thought it might be interesting to talk about incremental gains, or moving forwards step by step. Many of my clients might already know where I am going with this. They are familiar with the array of ideas, advice, rules or even audio tracks that I might give out, and they understood why I do that. It’s all about building positive habits. A bunch of tiny changes eventually add up to big results.
I think that a perfect example is the British Cycling team. Between 1908 and 2003 they were famous for their mediocrity. During an entire century they won a single gold at the Olympics and never won a Tour de France. In fact, when they approached a top bike manufacturer for team bikes they were turned down for fear that they would damage the company’s brand.
Then one day they hired Dave Brailsford as the new performance director. As a coach he did one thing differently, and that one thing was lots of different little things. “the aggregation of marginal gains,” looking for a tiny improvement in everything rather than any single sweeping change. The idea was that if you broke down every single part of bike riding and made a 1% improvement it would add up.
Dave’s team redesigned their bike seats to be a tiny bit more comfortable. They rubbed alcohol on the tyres for a slightly better grip. They gave their riders heated shorts to maintain slightly better blood flow in their legs. They used sensors to work out how each rider responded to the parts of their workouts. They hired a surgeon to teach them how to wash their hands to reduce catching colds. They tested pillows and mattresses for each individual rider to get a slightly better night’s sleep. They painted the inside of the team truck white so they could see dust that might affect the bike performance.
Within five years British Cycling dominated road and track events at the 2008 Beijing Olympics where they won 60% of the Gold medals! Four years later when the 2012 Olympics came to London they set nine Olympic records and seven world records. That same year Bradley Wiggens became the first Brit to ever win the Tour de France. Over the next five years his teammate Chris Froome won four more times.
The key thing is that they didn’t do anything that was particularly special. They just looked at how they could improve little things and there is an obvious life lesson here. If you do a bit of work each day to make your day a tiny bit more effective or pleasant then over time those results are going to snowball.
Little habits can make all the difference. By contrast it’s worth noting that the opposite is also true. When you allow little bad habits to start holding you back, no matter how small they are they can add up too.
