How Small Improvements Can Do Wonders?

Today, I want to share with you something about Dave Brailsford. He was the performance director and the general manager of Team Sky, the cycling team of Great Britain. In 2010, he was hired to prepare a team for Tour de France. Tour de France is a cycling race that happens once a year in different parts of France. It’s multi stage France tour. Basically, it was created in 1903.

So why did they hire Dave? Because for over 100 years, Great Britain could not win that race, so he came to make a difference. When he came, he believed in small changes, one percent changes, insignificant changes around the cycling arena that would make a difference. Obviously, some of the changes, everyone would expect, like in nutrition and their training program, but he came with another perspective where making some improvements that no one would expect. For example, figuring out what are the best pillows, and they would travel with those pillows whenever they would go from hotel to hotel. Figure out about the massage gels: What are the best ones out there for cyclist riders, bicycle riders, and so on.

So when he was trying to improve all those, he predicted that they will win the race within five years. That was the goal.

What happened is three years later they started in 2010, so in 2012, 10, 11, 12 Bradley Wiggins was number one in the race, and Great Britain won the championship. In 2013, another bicycle rider, Chris Froome, he won 2013 race, and actually recently in 2015, he won again. So you see his changes actually made amazing impact for UK. Instead of winning just once within five years, they actually won three times.

Now, how can we apply this to us? If we would take small improvements around anything that we want to achieve in life, whether it’s career, family, relationships, friendships, and if we would start to improve one percent, making the experience better it could be even applied for your day, for your mornings, for your lunch time, for your dinner, and so on. If you would improve just one percent everywhere, we should not underestimate the impact that it would make.