The Manual #15 - Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results
I was recently reading Atomic Habits by James Clear and the intro to that book really struck me and it’s something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
In that intro, James shares the story of the Great Britain professional cycling team. The team wasn’t that great, British cyclists weren’t winning much and were performing poorly. They were so bad that a bike manufacturer refused to sell bikes to them because they were afraid it would hurt sales.
In 2003 they hired a performance director named Dave Brailsford. He had a strategy he called the “aggregation of marginal gains”, where he believed that making small improvements in everything you do can lead to huge results.
So he started making small 1 percent improvements to the cycling team. They did things like:
Redesign the bike seats to make them more comfortable
Rubbed alcohol on the tires for better grip
Make the bikers were heated overshorts to maintain ideal muscle temps
Tried different pillow and mattresses for the team so they could get a better night of sleep
As all of these improvements accumulate, they result in remarkable results. The team won 60 percent of the gold medals at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. And in 2012 at the Olympics in London, the British riders set nine Olympic records and seven world records. They were absolutely dominating the sport.
I see a lot of successful people do something similar. Elon Musk does it himself at Tesla. The reason he’s at the frontline in the factories where they make the cars is that he’s trying to figure out where any improvements can be made to produce cars faster and more efficiently.
I’m asked quite often “how I get so much done” and I realised without knowing it that I would just reliably turn up and make improvements and add to my projects. I would spend 30-60mins a day on a project, then move on to the next one. Over time, spending this time consistently adds up and has resulted in some pretty remarkable results.
So next time you think something feels too big to tackle or too out of reach. Start small. Take that first step and don’t think about the future ones. As you keep training, learning, or adding to your next project every day, a year later you’ll be blown away by how much progress you’ve made.
Design, Tech and Business with Ali Abdaal
Ignore the poor thumbnail, Ali did me dirty here 😂. But we talk about design, tech ad business over some food. Very casual conversation and it was great to chat with him.
New Office and Warehouse!
I have a new office/warehouse space for my business. Check it out if you’re into that thing. Been really excited for this place and it’s going to change a lot over the coming months.
Link Lowdown
A collection of links to stuff I think are worth sharing.
The Most Popular Posts on Facebook are Plagiarized — An interesting dive into how much is plagiarized on Facebook. It’s a shame Facebook doesn’t do anything about it as I still think Facebook could be a great hub for content, like YouTube, but they’re not even close.
Her (2013) Rendered — One of my favourite movies but a bunch of designers have made rendered scenes of Theodore’s apartment, it’s freaking beautiful.
Poet.so — Create beautiful images of your favourite tweets.
Informant — A Mac app that can show you more info about any selected file.
Fontshare — Really good free-to-use fonts. Can be used for commercial purposes too. They’re very high quality.
Nomod — Take card payments from your phone.
Framework Laptop — A laptop that’s designed to be upgradable and fixable. Very neat idea. Only US and Canada for now but looking forward to it coming to the rest of the world.
Rainbow — Super nice crypto wallet that I’ve been using recently.