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- This Coach Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent and Here’s What Happened
This year let's all dedicate to making small changes in our lives, taking baby steps and getting 1% better everyday. The conventional approach of setting new year's resolution is to set a large, ambitious, maybe not so unattainable goal but we all know how it ends, oftentimes in burnout, frustration and failure.
That's why this year we should focus on continuous improvement by making slightly better decisions on a daily basis.
The Story
- Since 1908, British riders had won just a single gold medal at the Olympics Games. In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France.
- They were so bad that one of the top manufacturers in Europe refused to sell bikes to them.
- But all of that would change after Dave Brilsford join on board in 2003 and he introduced a strategy called "the aggregation of marginal gains".
- He began by making small adjustments, redesigning better bike seats, asking riders to wear electrically heated overshorts. He even hired a surgeon to teach each rider the best way to wash their hands to reduce the chances of catching a cold.
- All these small improvements accumulated and the results have been astonishing. During the ten-year span from 2007 to 2017, the Brits have won 178 world championships and 66 Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and captured 5 Tour de France victories.
The Aggregation of Marginal Gains
- If you can get 1% better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1% worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero.
- In the beginning, there is probably no difference between making a choice that is 1% better or 1% worse. But as time goes on, these improvement or decline compound and you suddenly find a very big gap between yourself and people who make slightly better choices on a daily basis.
Life is not stand-alone events, but rather the sum of all the moments when we chose to do things 1% better or 1% worse. Aggregating these marginal gains makes a difference.
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