The 1% marginal gains rule is a philosophy founded by Dave Brailsford which focuses on breaking down everything that goes into something such as riding a bicycle and then making continuous small improvements in all the small areas that goes into riding a bicycle, that compounds to create a massive change and an optimal performance when riding a bicycle.
What is the 1% marginal gains rule
Dave Brailsford the founder of the marginal gains rule, focuses on making small improvements in all areas, that compound to create massive changes.
Dave Brailsford was appointed full-time as the performance director of British cycling in 2003, prior to this the British cycling team did not have many records of success and had only won a single gold medal in its 76 years history. After applying the marginal gains rule the British cycling team went on to win the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and 2012 Olympics in London and also won several tour de France victories, this period of domination by the British cycling team is regarded as the most successful run in the history of the sport.
Dave stated the following in an article published on the British Cycling website:
“If you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by one percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together”
Dave’s philosophy of the marginal gains rule is to think small about how to continuously improve the smallest improvements and focus on progression and compound the improvements to create massive change.
Some of the improvements that Dave made to the British cycling team using the marginal gains rule included:
- Brought mattresses and pillows so the athletes could sleep in the same posture every night for optimal sleep
- Hired a surgeon to teach the athletes how to wash their hands to avoid illnesses, going as far as to not even shake hands during the Olympics
- Precise food preparation
- Painted the floor white to spot any impurities so that dust could not undermine bike maintenance by accumulating on the floor
In Reverse
The inverse of the marginal gains rule compounding is also true; it can work both ways. If we neglect to improve ourselves and begin to make bad decisions no matter how small, it will compound and create a massive negative impact on our performance.
How the 1% marginal gains rule works with examples
If you can continuously improve an area of your life no matter how small the improvement is, if you consistently keep improving yourself in that area it will compound to create a massive change in your life.
Dave highlighted that the most powerful benefit that the marginal gains rule creates is a contagious enthusiasm because it creates a mindset of wanting to continuously improve yourself and by identifying improvements and continuously improving yourself it is inherently rewarding because as humans beings we have a need for progression, so this makes us feel good about ourselves and leads us to be happy, positive and wanting to continuously improve ourselves which creates a positive feedback loop.
An example of how the marginal gains rule works is if your objective is to create a better environment to increase your productivity and performance whilst working from home or in an office, break everything in your environment apart from the desk you are sitting on, oxygen quality, amount of sunlight, humidity, temperature, etc and then focus on how you can make small improvements in each area, which will compound to yield a massive change in those areas to increase your performance and productivity significantly whilst working from home or in an office by optimizing your environment; it is a notion and mindset that every improvement no matter how small will compound to create a massive change in your life.
An excellent example of the marginal gains rule in business is how Google continuously improves and makes changes to its algorithms to ensure that they are providing its users with the highest quality and best search result for any given search query.
Below we have put together an infographic to show how the 1% marginal gains rule works:
How you can apply the 1% marginal gains rule to improve yourself
If you are trying to optimize your own performance in your life to achieve optimal productivity, you can focus on all the different areas of your life including mindset, efficiency, habits, environment, etc and break every area down and work on making small improvements in each area, and then the small improvements will compound to create massive changes in all areas of your life to help you to achieve optimal performance and productivity.
Dave Brailsford stated the following at the London Business Forum’s event:
“When we started out the top of the mountain for us seemed so far away, if you just stopped for a minute and you say is there any way you could progress a little bit from where you are now”
If you have a challenging goal that you want to achieve, that may seem like it will require too much time or will be too difficult to achieve, rather than thinking about the end goal, if you apply the marginal gains rule and focus on small improvements that you can make right now each and every day, it will allow you to take action consistently and continuously until you achieve that goal by focusing on improving 1% each and every day because it is much easier to take small steps than it is to take big steps, because climbing to the peak of a mountain will sometimes seem impossible in comparison to just taking the first step and if you keep taking those small steps eventually you will reach the peak of the mountain.
Applying the marginal gains rule, if you want to make a change in your life in a specific area, start with breaking into something small and focus on making small improvements, as an example:
If you want to eat healthier, start with replacing an unhealthy food you eat once a week with healthy food instead
If you want to drink more water drink one extra glass of water a day
If you want to start exercising get in 15 minutes of exercise, to begin with once a week or a day
It is the notion that everything has an impact on a goal that you are trying to achieve whether you are trying to read more, be healthier, increase your productivity, achieve a financial goal, etc so if you create a mindset to focus on making continuous small improvements to all the small areas that have a correlation to the input of that goal even if that small improvement is only a 1% improvement, all those small improvements will compound to create a massive change towards achieving that goal.
Conclusion
The 1% marginal gains rule can be applied to help you to achieve an optimal level of performance to help you to achieve a goal such as maximizing your productivity, by focusing on making small improvements or taking small steps towards your goal; it is a mindset of identifying how to continuously improve the small areas, as well as applying those changes in your life that will compound to create a massive positive change.