TJL #29: It doesn’t matter where you take it from, what matters is where you take it to (Daily productivity #4)
Simple tips & tricks to be more productive
Welcome back to Today Jan Learned (TJL) #29. This newsletter is dedicated to sharing the best of what others have figured out already.
This is edition #4 of Daily Productivity, an ongoing series of daily productivity tips. To get these delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe here:
Today’s lesson: It doesn’t matter where you take it from, what matters is where you take it to.
I found the same self-help story in two different books!
On the left hand side we see Atomic Habits (2018), which is a great book. On the right-hand side we see Copy, Copy, Copy (2015), which is another good book but much less known. Both of these books use the same story, to illustrate different points.
The story in Atomic Habits
Here’s the story as it appears in Atomic Habits, edited for brevity:
The fate of British Cycling changed one day in 2003. The organization, which was the governing body for professional cycling in Great Britain, had recently hired Dave Brailsford as its new performance director. At the time, professional cyclists in Great Britain had endured nearly one hundred years of mediocrity. Since 1908, British riders had won just a single gold medal at the Olympic Games, and they had fared even worse in cycling’s biggest race, the Tour de France. In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the event.
(…)
Brailsford had been hired to put British Cycling on a new trajectory. What made him different from previous coaches was his relentless commitment to a strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. Brailsford 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 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
(…)
How does this happen? How does a team of previously ordinary athletes transform into world champions with tiny changes that, at first glance, would seem to make a modest difference at best? Why do small improvements accumulate into such remarkable results, and how can you replicate this approach in your own life?
Atomic Habits uses the story as an example of how a series of small changes can lead to big change.
The same story in Copy, Copy, Copy
And here’s how it appears in Copy, copy, copy, also edited for brevity:
Five years ago, few would have imagined that Britain would ever become the dominant force in competitive cycling – not France, not Italy, not Spain, not Germany, not the USA but Team GB – and do so both on the road and on the track.
(…)
When Dave Brailsford took over as Team Sky performance coach, he and the team leadersh-ip set very clear goals for themselves and developed a very simple strategy (which Brailsford himself has credited to his MBA studies at Sheffield Hallam University): ‘the aggregation of marginal gains'. Put simply, this is a version of ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves' – focus on creating a host of very small advantages which together add up to a big one. First at Team Sky and then at the British Olympic cycling team.
(…)
Brailsford's ‘aggregation of marginal gains' is an incredibly powerful overall strategy but it depends on learning from – copying – the specialist expertise that studies those margins. Copying wins cycle races.
Copy, Copy, Copy uses the same story to illustrate a different point: How copying can help you in achieving your goals!
What does this mean for me?
Same story, different points.
No story gets told without an insight. And whatever that insight may be, the story stays the same. So don’t be afraid of retelling a story (perhaps even copying it) to make your point.
It doesn’t matter where you take it from, what matters is where you take it to.
Previous TJLs
Read my previous TJLs by following on the links down below: