Marginal Gains: From Worst to Olympic Gold

Where small improvements make all the difference.

Dec 18, 2025

I’m about to share one of the most inspiring success stories I’ve heard recently:

It’s 2003, and the British cycling team is at their absolute worst. They haven’t won anything in years. Sir Dave Brailsford just started his journey as performance director to introduce change. Instead of presenting them with the big goal of winning the upcoming Olympics, he did something different.

He shifted perspective to focus on small improvements. Small sprints of improving something each week. This week: optimise seat position. Next week: refine diet. The following week: improve tyre performance. The team started slightly improving in everything they focused on, step by step, week by week.

All these marginal gains compounded into something unimaginable. To everyone’s surprise, they started winning. They even brought their own mattresses to hotels during competitions, because sleep quality was part of their 1%.

Within five years, British cycling teams won 57% of all road and track cycling gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. At the 2012 London Olympics, they set seven world records and nine Olympic records. For 10 years, from 2007 to 2017, British cyclists were the most decorated nation in the sport.

So why did this approach work when an “aim for gold” call would have failed?

Why it worked

The coach could have presented them with a big goal: “Let’s win Olympic gold!” But the team was so far from their best that no one would have believed it anyway. It wouldn’t have motivated them.

Aiming for gold when you can barely qualify kills motivation immediately.

It’s quite rare that you can make a major change and make it sustainable but it’s quite easy to make small incremental changes to make them stick.

And it’s the stickability over time, I think, which makes the big difference.

We never ever thought about the podiums, or the finish line, or trophies — we didn’t talk about that — we thought about the smallest things we could do today to make progress.

— Sir Dave Brailsford (quoted from The Diary of a CEO, by Steven Bartlett)

Small improvements that they had achieved day by day and week by week fueled the motivation. They have seen that progress is possible, that they are moving forward.

Using it yourself

Do you want to get better at decision-making?

Pick one technique each week and use it for the decisions you make:

Week 1: Practice “inversion”: Invert the problem, e.g., how to fail instead of win.
Week 2: Use the 10-10-10 rule: Consider the outcomes of your decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.
Week 3: Document your decisions and outcomes: Start a decision log and document as many decisions as you can this week.

Focus on one thing each week. Make it achievable. It feels good to deliver small wins.

Tiny progress means a lot to people, and they feel it, they realise they can do it again tomorrow.

— Sir Dave Brailsford (quoted from The Diary of a CEO, by Steven Bartlett)

Grandiose resolutions may not bring enough motivation. Instead, try to improve or get better at something through small time periods. The psychological aspect of pushing forward and seeing short-term improvements is equally important as discipline and consistency.

Critique

I’ve seen marginal gains work in my own marathon training. But it’s not a guarantee.

Teams in other sports, like football, sailing, or even Formula 1, tried copying British Cycling’s playbook but couldn’t replicate the results. Critics argue that massive funding and world-class athletes (who were already there before Brailsford joined) were the major contributors to success.

The British Cycling story later became controversial, but the psychological insight is still valid. Marginal gains work, but only on the right foundation.

Multiplying by zero

Marginal gains only work if you’re improving the right thing.

A 1% improvement on a skill you’ll never use is still zero progress toward your goal. If your goal is to learn a new programming language, optimising your morning routine won’t help.

Does working on this bring me closer to my goal, or is it just keeping me busy?

Optimise the right things, not just the easy things.

The compounding 1%

Purely from a mathematical perspective, getting 1% better every day makes you 37.8 times better at the end of the year

\(1.01^{365} = 37.783\)

Real life isn’t this simple, and 1% is quite abstract. We have our ups and downs, and there is a regression to the mean. But even if you only improve by 1% per week (not daily), that’s still 67.8% better in a year. The math works in favour.

\(1.01^{52} = 1.6776\)

Give yourself the gift of witnessing your progress more often. It’ll help you achieve your goals.

What’s one skill you want to improve in 2026?

Take it and break it into one tiny improvement you can make starting now. Not next month. This week. Start and see how marginal gains work.

Thanks for reading!
— Michał

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