How a 1% improvement will lead to success

Picture this: you’re trying to lose weight, but your current diet is shocking. Far too much processed food, takeaways, high sugar, high salt – all the things. You need to make changes, but the idea of turning your whole diet around seems intimidating. You’ve tried going cold turkey before but didn’t feel that it worked for you. It was too drastic a change. Too radical a shift.

What can you do?

The theory of ‘marginal gains’ suggests focusing on making small but regular improvements - think of a 1% improvement rather than 100.

Initially, it seems too small of an action to gain any kind of result. How can a 1% change improve anything?

The secret lies in consistency. Any action applied consistently can lead to dramatic changes. Those things we consider ‘habits’ are just the actions that we take on such a regular basis that they become ingrained in our everyday life. But they all have to start somewhere. For this reason, it’s far better to adopt 1% of a healthier lifestyle and build up from there than not change anything at all.

This theory, famously instigated by Sir Dave Brailsford, helped the British cycling team scoop 7 out of 10 available gold medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics after an embarrassingly long history of, frankly, sucking at cycling. The Harvard Business Review published an excellent article where Sir Dave explained his take on marginal gains, which you can see here.

The cool thing about making a positive change in your life is that any slight improvement can feel like a massive victory.

It doesn’t matter if a 1% improvement to your fitness routine wouldn’t make any kind of long-term impact – psychologically you feel better just for having taken the step. You are therefore much more likely to build on these foundations.

In this way, you are more likely to make another 1% improvement. That’s easy enough – you’ve done it before so now you just repeat the process. But what’s just happened? You’ve built a 1% improvement on an existing 1% improvement. So now you’ve progressed even further.

As time goes on and you continue to make these minor improvements, you start making marginal gains, which slowly but steadily grow in significance. This is identical to the compounding effect that we see in economics. An interest rate of 1% feels like nothing initially, but after marginal gains on top of marginal gains, you begin to see an accelerated rate of return which will eventually result in a drastic upward curve. This is why annoying finance experts always advise us to start saving at an early age, because the longer our investments are left to marinate, the more they will grow. It’s just a case of consistent action over time, and the more time, the better.

‘But Alice, isn’t this all very tedious and long-winded?’

Umm… yes. Sorry about that. But, here’s a disclaimer; if you’re trying to make big changes in your life, you probably need to stick at it for a fair while. It probably took you a long time to get to the position you are in at the moment, so it’s realistic to assume it will take you a decent time to get somewhere else.

I know that’s not a fun answer, and as a stereotypically impatient millennial, I feel your pain. But part of being a grown up is facing up to the fact that not everything in life will be easy, comfortable, enjoyable or immediate. Nowhere has this been truer for me than in improving my mental health, shifting my mindset from suicidal to satisfied over a period of five years. As you can imagine, there were no quick fixes involved. Just good old-fashioned hard work, trial and error and lovely mistakes, mistakes, mistakes. A lot of the lessons I’ve picked up along the way will surface in upcoming articles, so if self-indulgent self-reflection is your preferred flavour of article, do visit again!  

One thing I know from experience is that the sense of achievement you’ll feel from persevering with a positive lifestyle change is epic. In fact, it gets better over time when you look back over all the marginal gains you’ve not only made but sustained.

If you don’t know where to start, the beauty of marginal gains is that you can pretty much start anywhere.

Any action will be an improvement. But you have to take it.  

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Alice Lyons runs the Dark Coffee wellbeing company. Her aim is to help people have a better relationship with their mental health and start curious, compassionate and courageous conversations about the things that scare us.

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