Legendary Lakers coach Pat Riley wrote about it in his book “The Winner Within”.

Cycling coach Dave Brailsford led the British cycling “Team Sky” to win the Tour De France using this method.  

Many others have espoused similar philosophies in books like The Slight Edge or The Compound Effect.

So what is this secret method that many have used successfully?

The idea that the way to get better at something is to do it in very small increments. Baby steps.

 

Sounds reasonable. Why don’t we do it?

We tend to always look at the end result we want, and it is often a large leap from where we are. The problem lies in getting there. When a goal or achievement target is too far off, it can discourage us from even starting on a path to get there. We end up defeated before we even start!

Our brains tell us we need a BIG solution. We need to go from 0 to 60 mph in 1 second! We don’t want to have to save pennies a day, we would rather just win the lottery. That is how we are wired up – we want the big score all at once – and all RIGHT NOW. But rarely do big things come all at once. The “Overnight Sensation” only exists in the movies. Most real life overnight successes take years.

So what should we do? Just make small goals? Never “shoot for the moon”? Keep our plans conservative? As with almost everything you will find me talking about when it comes to getting better at anything… The key is having a system. In this case the answer is not to shrink your goals, but rather to keep your focus on small improvements across a wide range of elements that will then add up to a huge leap.

Over the years I have worked with and interviewed people who have achieved massive success in a variety of fields, and the one common thread is that they have all put together a long string of little steps to get there!

The Lakers

Coach Riley talked about how the Lakers had stumbled in the 1986 season, mostly due to complacency after having beat their nemesis the Celtics in 1985. As Riley puts it “Even Kareem who was our team captain said ‘How can we top that’? That was when I knew we had a problem”.

So for the ‘87 season, Riley came up with a plan. He would just ask players to improve 1% in each of 5 selected areas. Seems simple. “The players took a look at this one percent and said, `Oh, I can improve one percent in anything.’” So if a player was averaging 8 rebounds a game, now they just needed to average 8.08. But, when you put all of those gains together spread across 12 players – that is a huge leap forward. And that was what they did.

Riley says they tracked these numbers without fail. “We had it computerized and we’d spit out the numbers every day. So, they knew exactly where they were and that it wasn’t just lip service. It allowed them to see where they stood and how they were doing. We did it every single day until we achieved a change.”

And achieve a change they did. Now back on track, they not only won the ‘87 championship, but went on to win it in ‘88 as well, making them the first team in 19 years to win back to back championships. All from tiny little improvements.

No wins in 97 years? No problem.

Coach Dave Brailsford  from the British cycling team “Team Sky” was up against a challenge. No British rider had ever won the Tour De France. Heck they had only recently won their first really big event in the last 97 years! Yeah, that’s a challenge. “OK guys, I know it’s been 97 years, but I think we have a chance”…. Probably wouldn’t have went over too well as a pep talk. But Coach Dave had a different plan. In his words: “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together”.

Ah, it’s that pesky 1% thing again. Sure seems easy when you look at it that way. Dave called this principle “The aggregation of marginal gains”. I would imagine that other teams would come to know this as “The aggravation of marginal gains” because it worked so well.

It was downright science!

Team Sky looked into each element of the rider’s life – hired nutritionists to look at each person’s dietary needs – broke down each part of a bicycle per each rider’s specific needs and exact size – researched which pillow was the best for sleeping and then not only brought those for each rider, but brought the riders own bed into each hotel room they stayed at for better sleep. They basically went through every miniscule detail of each rider’s life and asked “how can we make it 1% better”?

Of course with all of these 1% targets, sometimes you overshoot, and get better by 2, or 5, or 20% thereby making huge gains when you put it all together.

It worked. The British won the Tour De France in 2012, 2013 and 2015. Dave’s system has been adopted by most everyone else as well. If you think that just getting on a bike and riding will get you to the top now – sorry, those days are over thanks to the aggregation of marginal gains.

Could this work elsewhere? Could this work for YOU?

I know for a fact that this will work for anything you want to get better at in your life.

What if you took any skill you want to get better at and broke it down into small sections, and then just looked at getting 1% better in each of those areas? Now that could work. 1% improvement is easy, very reachable . The very effort to just get a little better at one small thing is bound to also inspire you to work hard at it since it seems like something that can really happen. Unlike some goals that seem out of reach, the 1% concept should help build confidence in what you can achieve.

Let’s take the game of the average weekend tennis player. What if they decided to improve their 1st serve percentage by 1%, their return percentage by 1%, serve speed by 1%, footwork consistency by 1% – backhand power by 1%, well you get the idea. There would be a lot of individual things just in the actual playing that could improve by those slight margins. Then compound it all by diving into tiny improvements in shoes, rackets, sunglasses, diet, sleep, workouts, and the list goes on. Now if you add all of those things up, you get an amazing increase in the overall skill level. Even if you fail to improve some areas at all, you will most likely improve others by quite a bit. The numbers don’t lie. Looking at getting just a little better in several areas is not as trivial as it sounds!

Put this to the test!

Try it out on yourself. The important thing is to just get started! Pick a skill, break it into 5 to 7 areas that you could improve upon independently, and then tackle getting just 1% better in each of those areas. I guarantee you will find it easier to succeed than you thought, and once you add it all up, you just might be surprised at the magical big leap you will have taken!