WHY LITTLE CHANGES MATTER
The basic premise of the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear is that small changes can lead to big impacts. Let’s explore this.
Consider the Winter Olympics, where athletes around the world have been training for their shot at an Olympic Gold Medal. They understand that fractions of a second are all that stands between a Gold Medal, national fame, lucrative endorsement deals and a lifetime of happy memories – or being labeled as “also ran”.
Those that are likely to be successful share a common trait - they understand the aggregation of marginal gains. These athletes are seeking to improve their performance with the understanding that a collection of incrementally small improvements will lead to a large performance increase. Moreover, they understand that even a slight 1% increase repeated multiple times over multiple instances will lead to significant improvements in overall performance when everything is eventually put together.
As an example, take Olympic skier Mikaela Shiffrin. If she improves her start time by 1%, by having 1% faster skis, and her helmet being 1% lighter, her time down the mountain improves considerably. These small incremental improvements add up and can affect her total time to put her in contention to win a Gold Medal.
WHY DO SMALL IMPROVEMENTS LEAD TO BIG RESULTS
The difference tiny improvements can make over time is remarkable. Smaller, 1% improvements compound, similar to interest earned on money in a bank. As a stylized example, if you set out to improve on something 1% a day for every day of the year, you would end up 37 times better. Pretty impressive, no?
WHY DON'T MORE PEOPLE DO THIS?
In a society where quick hits matter (like TikTok videos, hot Twitter takes and 24h news channels create new headlines daily), some find it hard to pursue a long-term plan. For some, sticking with making changes if they do not experience immediate results can be challenging, and so they quickly abandon these changes. The book Atomic Change shares an example of an incrementally small change that ultimately has a large impact:
Picture an airplane departing Los Angeles heading to New York City.
If the pilot adjusts the heading 3.5 degrees south after takeoff.
The plane will land in Washington D.C. rather than NYC. Such small
changes are barely noticeable initially, but as you travel across the
United States you end up 100s of miles apart.
HABITS
Success is the product of your daily habits. What is a habit? A habit is a routine or practice performed regularly; an automatic response to a specific situation. Habits – notably past and ongoing habits – define us, and we are “trailing indicators” of our habits. For example, weight is a trailing indicator of eating habits. Net worth is a trailing indicator of financial spending habits. Clutter is a trailing indicator of cleaning habits. As Warren Buffet once said: "You know who is wearing swim trunks when the tide goes out." Time is no different with habits. Time magnifies the margin between good and bad habits.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: THERE ARE NO OVER NIGHT SUCCESSES
We have all read about tech unicorns where founders became instant billionaires. But success does not come overnight. To be successful, or to make a meaningful difference, habits need to be maintained, and individuals needs to break through what James Clear calls the "Plateau of Latent Potential". Lamenting about lack of tangible and immediate success, despite having taken small steps to positively adjust yourself, is likely lamenting that an ice cube is not melting at 25 degrees - only when the temperature rises to 32 degrees the chemistry begins and melting starts. This is the hallmark of any compounding process; the most powerful changes are delayed. Said another way, it’s the work that you did a long time ago that allows for your success today.
WHY SYSTEMS MATTER – AND GOALS SUCK
It is common to set goals, but according to James Clear, goals are not the key to success. That’s because goals are about results one wants to achieve, but there’s not necessarily a path to get there. In contrast, systems are about the processes that lead to these results, and the key to success is not to have goals, but start creating processes and ways to get there. Achieving a goal only changes your like for a moment, you have successfully solved a temporary issue. In order, to have a lasting positive outcome you should focus on fixing the inputs to achieve the desired outcome. By doing this, you will have lasting tangible change and the corresponding outputs will handle themselves.
A good example of this is the Super Bowl Champions and future Hall of Fame duo of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. Under Bill Belichick, the New England Patriots often fielded teams with little star power beyond Tom Brady. Instead, these teams relied on the "Patriot Way". The Patriot Way focused on preparation and details. he other teams star players were scouted and their strengths and weakness were identified. The Patriot's coaches under Belichick's supervision would craft game plans designed to eliminate the star players impact on game. Additionally, for the Patriot Way to be successful, Belichick needed to find the players that would believe in the process, recruit the assistant coaches who would assist in the game plan and choreograph practices until the game plan was second nature for the players. In order for the players to perform at the optimal level, diets, strength training and stretching's plans were administered.
All this to say, the Patriot Way was focused on improving individual tasks that would have an impact on the scoreboard, rather than just believing they could win because they were professional football players. Bill Walsh, himself a 3x Super Bowl winning Head Coach, said that if you practice and have systems in place to reach desired outcomes, "the score takes care of itself”. This is a different way of saying that by implementing a system of continuously small improvements you will begin to achieve different outcomes.
One last argument for focusing on processes or “paths to success”, instead of goals, is that goals put happiness off until the next milestone. Because goals are binary, you either achieve them or you do not. In contrast, if you implement a process that allows you to start on a path to an objective, you are now stacking the cards in your favor and tangible improvements are likely following eventually.
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