The power of 1%

One of the reasons the headline of this website is 'Just a Little Better', is because sometimes making positive changes can feel overwhelming. We might be overweight, unfit, eat too much sugar, have poor social skills, drink too much alcohol etc., and the idea of becoming who we want to be, or more like someone we admire, can feel so far away that we think it's too much. Too far. Why even bother?

It can certainly feel this way. However, I want to highlight a concept that can make these changes seem possible.

As the header suggests, today we're going to look at a concept known as 'The Aggregation of Marginal Gains', coined by the Olympic cycling coach Dave Brailsford.

It's easy to imagine that to improve an Olympic team, you'd have to do something pretty monumental. Maybe a new training regime, a diet transformation, a lighter, more aerodynamic bike etc. But for the most part, in Olympic sport especially, all the low hanging fruit has already been picked. Everyone is fit, everyone eats well, and olympic bikes are already pretty awesome.

So what's the solution?

How do you set yourself apart when the margins are already so small?

Brailsford's theory was simple, and incredibly effective. His idea was to break down every small component into individual pieces, and improve them by 1%. Nothing dramatic. Just, a little bit.

Examples:

• Cyclists bringing in their own pillows and duvets for a better sleep
• Improved hand-washing technique to reduce the chance of illness
• Experimentation with different massage oils for slightly better recovery

Fundamentally, taking every tiny, seemingly insignificant piece and just make it a little better.

So what were the results of this?

Well, good. 8 gold medals at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, another 8 during London 2012, 7 world records, and 9 Olympic records. If that wasn't quite enough, British riders also won 5 of the next 6 Tour De France events.

Team GB cycling was a revolution.

This story is obviously highlighting a concept at the pinnacle of elite sport, however we can use these concepts in our own lives.

If we take the example of improving our overall health and fitness, we might think that we need to join a gym, change our diet, change our wardrobe, change how we socialise, we might feel that we need to completely revolutionise our habits and who were are. We might feel like we have to do this all at once. We think that to achieve significant results, we need to do grand, significant things. This can seem overwhelming and make us feel that it's just too much. We don't have the time, the gym is too expensive, we can't afford a personal trainer, we weave a narrative of why we can't. We may also have some experiences that 'prove' to us that trying just doesn't kind of, work. We joined a gym for a month and nothing happened, we tried running but after a couple of weeks we felt the same way. We give up, we feel bad, rinse and repeat.

Coupled with this is that we have a sense of self in our current form. To go from the 'you' as you are to the 'you' you want to be is such a big change that maybe we just can't 'see' it.

When we view this challenge through the lens of 'The Aggregation of Marginal Gains', things seem a little more manageable. If we can take a big goal, and make a seemingly insignificant change towards it, big things happen.

'Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn't, pays it.' - Albert Einstein

Let's take a goal of wanting to run 5k - what small steps can we take? What will 1% better look like?

• Eating a piece of fruit with breakfast
• Drinking 1 glass of water (if all we drink is fizzy drinks)
• Parking a little further away when we go to the supermarket so we have to walk a little more
• Using the stairs instead of a lift
• Taking a 15 minute walk
• Doing 1 push up every morning

The list almost doesn't matter. If we only do one of these things, we have moved ever so slightly in the direction we want to go in. What does that small change look like over a year?

What this graph shows is thus:

• Dotted line: we make no change (1.00), and we multiply that by 365 (days in a year), and the result = 1.00. We stay where we are.
• Red line: we make a negative change (0.99), and multiply this by 365, and the result = 0.03. We have become 'worse' over that year. An example of this is, 'well I'm already unfit so what will one beer a night hurt?'.
• Blue line: we make a 1% positive improvement daily (1.01), and when we multiply this by 365, the result is 37.78. We have become significantly better than when we started. That one small change compounded to achieve dramatic changes.

We don't have to train like an Olympic athlete, we don't have to do all of these things at once (unless you just absolutely want to), we just pick one tiny thing, and do that. If we can do one thing each day, we've now shifted the balance in a positive direction.

'All I drink is fizzy drinks, but my 1% is to drink one glass of water per day.'

That.

Just that.

Then maybe after few days we drink two glasses of water. Then maybe the majority is water. And all of a sudden you don't even want fizzy drinks because you noticed you just feel better and have more energy when you skip it.

Our destination is now marginally different than it was before, the future more likely to be what we want it to be. We now feel a tiny bit better, we now have a new habit. The true power of this isn't just that we move the compass to a more favourable direction, our sense of self is different, the next change feels a little easier.

We achieve a small, almost imperceptible win.

We gain momentum.

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