American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn said it best: Success is a few simple disciplines, practised every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.
It’s a philosophy adopted by personal development expert Jeff Olson. He calls it ‘the slight edge’ and believes in applying good practices, consistently, over time. Cultivation, he says, is what works. One example he mentions is the simple act of reading ten pages a day.
That won’t change your life. But imagine reading ten pages a day for a year – that’s 3 650 pages, which amounts to around ten books. Imagine reading ten books in a year on topics that are of interest to you and your business or career? That, says Olson, is how you start to change your life.
The 1% margin
In 2010, Britain’s cycling team coach Dave Brailsford faced a tough job. No British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France, and he wanted to change that.
His approach was simple. Brailsford believed in the ‘aggregation of marginal gains.’ He explained it as ‘the 1% margin for improvement in everything you do.’ His belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1%, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.
He optimised the nutrition of riders, their weekly training programme, the ergonomics of the bike seat, and the weight of the tyres. Then he and his team searched for 1% improvements in areas that were overlooked by almost everyone else: the best pillow, the most effective massage gel.
They searched for 1% improvements everywhere. His goal was to have his team win in five years – they did it in three.
The aggregation of marginal gains
Almost every habit that you have – good or bad – is the result of many small decisions over time. Yet, we convince ourselves that change is only meaningful if there is some large, visible outcome associated with it.
In the beginning, there is little difference between making a choice that is 1% better or 1% worse. But as time goes on, small improvements or declines compound and you suddenly find a big gap between people who make slightly better decisions daily, and those who don’t. This is why small choices don’t make much of a difference at the time, but add up over the long term.
Most people love to talk about success as an event. But most of the significant things in life aren’t standalone events. Instead they are the sum of all the moments we chose to do things 1% better or 1% worse.
