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Why Doing Less Can Get Us More?
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear explains how we can adopt behaviours (or habits) that make us a little better every day, compounding over time and leading to massive results.
One of his most potent examples revolves around the British cycling team that implemented successive little improvements in all areas involved with their discipline (from the diet, equipment, schedule, and much more), rather than going for a radical transformation, which ultimately led them to win major competitions, back to back.
The idea could be summarised as trying every day to become 1% better than yesterday.
So, when discussing with team leaders about performance, this is a topic that is often brought up. In these conversations, I often hear:
“We want to become better every day” or “we are working on the systems to do better continuously”.
But as I dig a bit, I often find wishful thinking and botched execution.
One recurring reason for these issues is seeking marginal gains without making performance sustainable. Eager to do better, we fall for one of our cognitive biases — the additive bias, and instead of aiming at doing better, we end up pushing to do more.
Basically, in order to improve, we decide to add things.