Making Small Improvements

Hi, I’m David and my mission in life is to prepare people for the future of work.?

In this week’s edition of the newsletter the theme revolves around continuous improvement. Most people love to talk about success as an event. We talk about losing 20 kilograms or building a successful business as if they are events. But the truth is that most of the significant things in life aren’t stand-alone events, but rather the sum of all the moments when we chose to do things 1 percent better. There is power in small improvements and slow gains, and aggregating these marginal gains makes a difference over time. This is why average speed yields above average results. This is why the system is greater than the goal. This is why mastering your habits is more important than achieving a certain outcome in life. This is why the majority of the rewards in a given field will accumulate to the people that maintain a 1 percent advantage over their competitors. You do not need to be twice as good to get twice the results. You just need to be slightly better. Below are some insights and thoughts that will help you make small improvements both at work and in your daily life.

Timeless Insight

“Success is a few simple disciplines, practised every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.” – Jim Rohn?

It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is gaining muscle, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about. But seldom do we take into account the simple, yet profound, insight that small differences in performance can lead to very unequal distributions when repeated over long periods of time. In other words, you only need to be slightly better than your competition (e.g. by 1 percent), but if you are able to maintain a slight edge today and tomorrow and the day after that for years on end, then you can stay ahead of the game and keep your competition guessing. While improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable, sometimes it isn’t even noticeable, but as those percentages add up they can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding, and thus, the people that can do the right things more consistently over time are more likely to maintain an edge. What are the 1 percent improvements you’re planning to make in your life?

Food for Thought

Peter Drucker, who was a renowned Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author, once said that “People often overestimate what they can accomplish in one year. But they greatly underestimate what they could accomplish in five years.” In other words, when we want to improve ourselves, we often pursue dramatic changes with little success.?

If we’re night owls, we seek to become early risers. If we’re procrastinators, we look to become doers. If we’re always late to meetings, we look to be early to meetings. We want to eliminate our weaknesses and become a little better. But we end up running into a rather familiar issue: We don’t actually follow through on the things we know will make us better.

The culprit is the thought that any important change happens quickly. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to get up early or become a doer. Anything important happens slowly. Therefore, a better idea is to go for small, incremental improvements that add up over time. Thanks to the power of compounding, tiny improvements add up to massive differences.

But meaningful change is quite hard. Our lives are homeostatic systems or, in other words, they want to come back in alignment with what is comfortable. We also live in a culture that tends to believe that bigger is better. We think that big steps or big dramatic changes will produce big results, only to eventually come to terms with the fact that that’s very rare.

So, how can we remove roadblocks to the behaviour we are seeking, or to add roadblocks to the behaviour we are trying to discourage? By using small steps to accomplish large goals. Smaller steps are more doable both for our minds and for our bodies. And to bring about the change we seek in our lives a little easier, we just need to focus on the very first step.

Lao Tzu or Laozi, who is remembered as the first writer and philosopher of Taoism, said that “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with the first step.” It almost seems too simple, right? So simple that you might think that you are effecting little to no change. However, taking one step today and another tomorrow and the day after that will start to add up.

The first step you choose to take should be something relatively easy to accomplish, something that takes little time and effort, and that will help you to register a small win. What’s key is to choose only one thing and do that one thing until it becomes habitual. Experts say that it takes, on average, two months before a behaviour becomes automatic.

After you’ve built a new behaviour you can focus on building another, and so on and so forth. Changes may come about slowly (depending on the behaviour, the person, and the circumstances, they may take longer than two months), but the key is to keep going, because as long as the direction of flight is right, your effort will be rewarded in the end.

Just imagine if you could make slightly better decisions every year. Whether it’s 1 percent better consideration of all of your decisions, or making 1 percent of your decisions differently, or some combination between the two, it doesn’t really matter, as long as you improve. Every year when you’ll look back at your old self you’ll marvel at how far you’ve come.

There’s an interesting short book by Robert Maurer called One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, in which he uses his experiences as a clinical psychologist and leverages the Japanese business concept called Kaizen, meaning continuous improvement, to help people bring about the changes they want to see in their lives and at work.

In the book, Maurer walks readers through some of the common resolutions he’s seen and the small steps that his clients have used with success in the past. Here are a few extracts I resonated with the most, and which, as you start to think about your New Year Resolutions, should help you set resolutions that you’ll actually stick to by using the Kaizen way.

Article of the Week?

Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead

Caricature of the Week

Source: Condé Nast

Thank you for reading and keep on growing!

David

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