Small improvements are the secret to long-term success

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Mr. Beast is a YouTuber with more than 200 million subscribers to his channel. He makes a living out of creating entertaining video content.

In an interview, he was asked how he makes a video go viral. What’s his secret for his enormous success? He gave a great answer. Such a great answer. He said:

“Every time I make a new video, I’m just trying to make it a little bit better than my last video. I’m not trying to go viral – I’m just trying to improve.”

So for example, he might improve the thumbnail image for the video, or he might use a better resolution camera, or he might make his voice clearer, or he might use a new editing style, or he might make the video shorter… the list of tiny, incremental improvements is endless.

The concept of marginal gains

This is such a great lesson in how to drive success. Not just for YouTubers, but for us in internal communication. Imagine that every time you create a piece of content that you’re trying to make it a tiny bit better than the last piece of content?

If you did that every day for a year, your content would improve enormously and man alive you would learn a lot.

This idea of marginal gains or tiny improvements is one that I’m really taken with and I believe can help us a lot in the industry we work in. We hear a lot about massive digital transformations or what can be achieved with big budgets, but we hear less about the tiny, incremental improvements made by communication teams every day which have a compounding effect on the impact we make in organisations.

The concept of continuous small improvements was popularised by the British cycling team when they went from a fairly average team with mediocre results to an absolute powerhouse of a team winning multiple Olympic gold medals. They didn’t do a massive overhaul of their team or make a single groundbreaking discovery that led to this change. What did was develop a deep commitment to making small, incremental improvements in a variety of aspects of their training, equipment and strategy. You may know this concept as the ‘marginal gains’ philosophy, which holds that the cumulative impact of tiny improvements will contribute to long-term success.

You may also be familiar with this idea if you’ve read “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. In this book, he talks about making small changes to get 1% better every day. Clear says that success isn’t about dramatic changes but is rather about consistent, incremental progress over time which yields significant and lasting results.

Applying this to internal communications

Internal communicators can adopt this philosophy to cultivate a mindset of continuous improvement. You don’t need a huge budget and the latest tech tools to succeed in internal communication. You need to regularly and consistently identify and implement small manageable changes to your daily practices. This will yield results.

Here's a few practical suggestions for ways you can try to make marginal gains in your work as an internal communicator:

Try some measurable experiments

Instead of feeling like you have a launch a whole new strategy or a massive campaign, why not try some tiny experiments to test out ideas for improvements? You can test, analyse, iterate and repeat. For example, if you work in an organisation that has a very stiff, formal internal communication style then you could experiment with some conversational storytelling in your newsletter or blog. Analyse it – what worked? What didn’t? Then identify a way to improve it. Publish another storytelling article. Repeat the process and make another tiny improvement. It’s a non-stop cycle of testing, measuring and improving.

Make progress towards your career goals

Think about your career goals. Maybe you want to be the most sought-after internal comms creator in your city. Maybe you want to move up the ranks to a senior leadership position. Whatever your career goals are, you can make progress towards them now. What are the gaps in your knowledge and experience that you need to fill before achieving your goal? And what tiny steps can you start taking right now to move you towards that goal? For example, maybe you need to work on making yourself more visible to recruiters on LinkedIn. You could make small changes to your LinkedIn profile and commit to adding 10 new connections every week. Over a year, that’s potentially 520 new sets of eyeballs on your posts and an increased chance of getting noticed by a hiring manager.

Listen to your employees regularly

You’d be amazed at what people will tell you when they know you’re really listening. When’s the last time you did a focus group that wasn’t related to the annual employee engagement survey or a big transformation project? Listening to employees regularly is a great way to identify tiny incremental improvements to your system of internal communication. Soliciting feedback, acting on it and using the feedback to make small but meaningful changes will reap tons of benefits.

Learn something new each week

It’s easy to get wrapped up in being busy with tasks and feel like we don’t have time for learning. But we can all scrape together 20 minutes a week to learn, if we choose to make it a priority. Online content makes it so easy to learn quickly, with information easily available and some great newsletters available to give you practical tips quickly and easily. This newsletter you’re reading right now is deliberately designed to be easy to understand with practical advice you can implement straight away, and it takes just a few minutes to read.

My advice here is to block out 20 – 30 minutes in your diary each week for learning. Read a newsletter, read LinkedIn posts from smart influencers, listen to a podcast… whatever way you like to learn, do it. Just make it a priority. This will help you stay up to date with industry trends, new ways of thinking and help you to make tiny improvements in your role that will compound over time.

If you commit to making tiny, consistent and sustainable changes regularly then you're on the path to success.

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna

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