First place — the coveted goal of any race. With no history of ever being there, how do you get there? That’s what the British cycling team was asking themselves for decades. Enter Dave Brailsford. In 2010, he became the new General Manager and Performance Director of Great Britain’s professional cycling team. He applied a concept he called the “Aggregation of marginal gains.” If you make a one percent increase in as many areas as possible, the compounding results will make such a large difference. And that’s what it did. The application of his concept led to multiple Tour de France victories and even an Olympic gold for Great Britain.

You may have heard it referred to as the 1% rule:

If you improve 1% every day, you’ll be 37x better in a year.

The problem for most people lies in the fact that forming habits seems to be the biggest hurdle. So, how do we combat this? We take it one step at a time, one day at a time. Breaking it up into small chunks is less daunting than the thought of tackling the whole piece at once.

So begs the question: What do we want to improve on? We want to focus on small, high-impact habits. These are things that don’t require skill or any time to learn, but will have such a profound impact on your mind, body, and overall well-being. Think things like waking up 15 minutes earlier, read 5 pages daily, or cutting your screen time down by 15 minutes per day.

Waking up 15 minutes earlier every weekday adds 75 minutes to your week. Reading 5 pages daily adds up to 150 pages per month. Cutting down 15 minutes of screen time per day adds 7 ½ hours to your month. See how these things begin to compound?

Choose one habit to improve on by just 1% today. In a month’s time, email me and let me know how it’s going! I’ll respond!