After encountering a book like “Good Energy,” it’s tempting to try pitching every ounce of processed food in the trash, rid your home of every piece of plastic, and start walking around barefoot to feel more connected to the Earth. In the right circumstances, I wholeheartedly support the last. The other items are dramatic outbursts unlikely to yield sustained improvement in health.
I once heard a French woman say, “The body does not like drama.” Indeed, no part of us likes drama. Drastic transformations are often only surface level, ignoring the ingrained habits and routines that make up our lives. How, then, do you make real and lasting change?
In the niche of business development there is a frequently mentioned example of the British professional cycling team. What has cycling got to do with business? And, for that matter, what do cycling and business have to do with plasticware? Well, Sir Dave Brailsford applied marginal gains and the principles of compounding to the British Cycling team, an organization that had won one single medal in its 76-year history. The strategy is one that can be applied to many areas of life, from an old house to general health and well-being.
In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Sir Dave, as he is known, explains that by breaking down all the component parts of the physical and psychological conditions that go into cycling, he focused on how if they “improved each element by 1%, they would achieve a significant aggregated increase in performance.”
From fine-tuning aerodynamics to getting better mattresses (and traveling with those mattresses), improving handwashing and foregoing handshakes to reduce germ transmission, adjusting diet, and ridding the team of B+ cyclists, all these incremental adjustments in different areas led to outsize results. In the 2008 Olympics, the British cycling team won 7 out of the 10 possible gold medals in cycling.
How does the 1% improvement plan work? Sir Dave explained to the interviewer that at the beginning of the experiment, “the top of the Olympic podium seemed like a very long way away” and, he added, “Aiming for gold was too daunting.”
What’s especially interesting about the plan initially is, as Sir Dave describes it, “we weren’t even thinking of cycling, but more about behavioral psychology and how to create an environment for optimum performance.”
If we take this insight to the pantry, we realize that people who never eat Doritos are not necessarily those who have an iron will but rather those who have set up their pantry to be full of other, objectively superior, foods. We also discover the alternatively to feverishly throwing out large quantities of food and serviceable containers. Over time, we can tweak the incoming items: swap packaged snacks for homemade goods and vegetables.
To her credit, Means does point to this approach. I was particularly taken with her strategy for adding more fermented foods throughout your day: perhaps some kimchi with your breakfast, a little miso with your lunch, and some yogurt with your dinner.
Everything does not need to change all at once, and usually it will not. Incrementally altering different components can drastically change the end point of your course. Like Sir Dave’s bicycle experiment, the elements of living work together with compounding results. Better food leads to better sleep which improves the results of exercise which reinforces sleep which leads to craving less crap.
The help-rejecting complainer will always find reason for sadness and dismay, but for most of us, there are any number of low-hanging fruit that could put us on the path to feeling and being better. Not in a moral sense, mind you, just in a practical, functional, “I feel fully alive” and capable of making it through a day without excessive napping or mysterious, mood-altering substances. That seems a reasonable bar!
