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The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits
HE 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.
In fact, the performance of British riders had been so underwhelming
that one of the top bike manufacturers in Europe refused to sell bikes to the
team because they were afraid that it would hurt sales if other professionals
saw the Brits using their gear.
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.”
Brailsford and his coaches began by
making small adjustments you
might expect from a professional cycling team. They redesigned the bike
seats to make them more comfortable and rubbed alcohol on the tires for a
better grip. They asked riders to wear electrically heated overshorts to
maintain ideal muscle temperature while riding and used biofeedback
sensors to monitor how each athlete responded to a particular workout. The
team tested various fabrics in a wind tunnel and had their outdoor riders
switch to indoor racing suits, which proved to be lighter and more
aerodynamic.
But they didn’t stop there. Brailsford and his team continued to find 1
percent improvements in overlooked and unexpected areas.
They tested
different types of massage gels to see which one led to the fastest muscle
recovery. They hired a surgeon to teach each rider the best way to wash
their hands to reduce the chances of catching a cold. They determined the
type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night’s sleep for each rider.
They even painted the inside of the team truck white, which helped them
spot little bits of dust that would normally
slip by unnoticed but could
degrade the performance of the finely tuned bikes.
As these and hundreds of other small improvements accumulated, the
results came faster than anyone could have imagined.
Just five years after Brailsford took over, the British Cycling team
dominated the road and track cycling events at the 2008 Olympic Games in
Beijing, where they won an astounding 60 percent of the gold medals
available.
Four years later, when the Olympic Games came to London, the
Brits raised the bar as they set nine Olympic records and seven world
records.
That same year, Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist to win
the Tour de France. The next year, his teammate Chris Froome won the
race, and he would go on to win again in 2015, 2016, and 2017,
giving the
British team five Tour de France victories in six years.
During the ten-year span from 2007 to 2017, British cyclists won 178
world championships and sixty-six Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and
captured five Tour de France victories in what is widely regarded as the
most successful run in cycling history.
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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?
