The easiest way to do big things is by focusing on the small things.
That sounds rather oxymoron. But that’s precisely what we should be doing.
We might have often come across situations in which people’s ideas or suggestions being disregarded, claiming it to be inconsequential or immaterial. And then we run behind the big things – trying to make earth-shattering changes – sometimes for a prolonged time, in the hope that eventually we will make that big change and things will flow afterwards.
But such a big change – that, suddenly, everything falls into a smooth flow state and we achieve big success– rarely happens, if at all.
Instead, if we are to do big things, we should be concerned about the things that most people overlook, ignore, or don’t care about.
Here are a couple of examples:
Kaizen
For 77 years, General Motors was at the top of the annual car sales chart, globally. Then came Toyota, who dethroned GM to take the top spot with a unique approach.
Japan was facing a shortage of capital and equipment and was undergoing reconstruction, post the Second World War. To overcome these challenges, Toyota came up with something called ‘Kaizen’, which means ‘continuous improvement’. It insists that innovation and improvement have to be an everyday task and a concern of all the employees. The kaizen philosophy is not about making big jumps forward, it’s about making small things better, continuously, in all areas. Innovation is, essentially, seen as an incremental process.
Toyota has implemented a staggering number of ideas over the years, the majority of them suggested by the factory floor workers and has become one of the most successful automotive companies in the world, essentially proving that it is the smallest of improvements that will cumulatively push the business forward.
The Aggregation of Marginal Gains
Here is another example from British Cycling, the governing body for professional cycling in Britain, to break the notion that massive success requires massive action.
In 2003, British Cycling appointed David Brailsford as their performance director in an effort to put an end to the mediocre performance that lasted for almost a century. Since 1908, British riders had won just a single gold medal at the Olympic Games.
Five years after Brailsford took over, at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, British Cycling won 57 per cent of all road and track cycling gold medals. They fared even better at the 2012 London Olympics, setting seven world records and nine Olympic records. From 2007 to 2017, British cyclists won 178 world championships, 66 Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and Five Tour de France victories.
So, what had changed in the five years since Brailsford came in that they couldn’t do for almost a century?
Brailsford and his team began by obsessing over the tiny details: they rubbed alcohol on the tires for better grip, started using antibacterial hand gel to cut down infections, redesigned the seats to make them more comfortable, wind tunnel testing of bikes and racing suites, changed pillows so that the athletes get better sleep, and so on.
These tiny details, when put together, aggregated into a significant performance gain.
Brailsford referred to his strategy as “the aggregation of marginal gains”. He said, “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 improve it by 1 per cent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
1 Percent Better Every Day
We often disregard small things as just small things. But the thing that we overlook is – a large number of small things is a large thing. Likewise, small, continuous improvements in performance can lead to unfair advantages when repeated over time.
You might want to form a new habit, say, reading. And you picked up a book that is 300 pages long. What if you start by reading 10 pages a day? That didn’t seem like it would do much to a 300-page book.
But it does.
10 pages a day for a year is 3650 pages. That’s about one million words per year. That’s about 12 books a year. Reading this much for a prolonged time will allow you to be at the top of your field.
Here’s how the math works. If you can get 1 per cent better every day for a year, you will end up becoming 37 times better than when you started. On the other hand, if you get one per cent worse each day for the same period, you will go nearly down to zero.
Small things that are easy to do are also easy not to do. Do not overlook them.
