📈 The Compound Effect of Small Gains

British Cycling hadn't won the Tour de France in 110 years. Then one coach made a radical bet: improve everything by just 1%. Bike seats. Pillows. Hand-washing technique. Five Tour wins followed in six years.

When Dave Brailsford took over British Cycling in 2003, the team was a joke. They hadn't won the Tour de France in over a century. His strategy seemed almost absurd: find every tiny thing that touches performance, and improve each by just 1%. They redesigned bike seats for comfort. They tested massage gels for faster muscle recovery. They even painted the team truck's floor white to spot dust that might affect bike maintenance. Individually, these changes were barely noticeable. Together, they were unstoppable.

The math works for you too. Improving 1% daily compounds to 37x improvement over a year. But it cuts both ways — getting 1% worse daily leaves you at 0.03x. So here's your move: identify one small improvement you can make today in your core skill or business. Not a big change. Something almost embarrassingly small. A slightly better email template. A five-minute process tweak. Then stack these daily. The gains compound invisibly at first — then all at once.

The hardest part isn't knowing this. It's maintaining the patience to let compounding work. We overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. The compound effect rewards those who keep showing up when progress feels invisible.