Happy 2021

Happy New Year!

Are you feeling inundated with all the “New Year, New You” things?

I admit that I swing wildly from year to year when it comes to my own response.

Some years I feel totally into it, ready and downright stoked to embrace the fresh start offered by a blank calendar and clean slate.

Other years, I’m still very much in “deep winter” mode, still craving the profound rest and recovery that feels aligned with these dark, cold months.

Like so much of what has come out of 2020, this year feels like a really bizarre mix of both.

And like so much of 2020, a new approach feels warranted as we shift into 2021.

I was recently listening to an interview that Sam Harris did with James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) and they were talking about the compounded power of making incremental 1% changes in our lives.

I absolutely love this.

So of course, I dug deeper.

British cycling coach, Dave Brailsford, called this the “aggregate of marginal gains.”

The idea is that big change happens via the compilation of a bunch of tiny, incremental tweaks over a wide area.

For example, he had his cyclists test all sorts of pillows to see which helped them sleep a tiny bit better. He shaved mere milligrams off of their uniforms by changing the fabric they wore.

And at the end of the day, those micro-changes added up to several Tour de France wins and Olympic gold medals.

That’s what I’m talking about.

What I love about this is that it doesn’t ask us to overhaul our lives.

It asks us if there are tiny, tiny 1% tweaks we might take that, compounded over time and broad areas of our lives, might allow us to create the changes we’ve been craving.

Sam Harris commented during the interview that we often feel the distance between our "moment to moment experience and the experience we imagine we want in life” and how that’s related to the fact that we are “quite obviously inheriting the consequences of our habits."

That distance is the gap between the life we’re living and the life we want to be living.

And it’s likely not as big a gap as you think.

1% change.

Where can you find these “marginal gains” in your life?

Maybe it’s in saying “no” to one small obligation or commitment or energy suck that you’re feeling pressured to say yes to because it’s “really not that much.”

Maybe it’s in getting up when your alarm goes off tomorrow without hitting snooze (or, if you’re like me, maybe cutting back to only a single snooze!).

Maybe it’s in reaching out to encourage one person today who is struggling or working their butts off or just accomplished something they’re proud of.

I’m going to dig into this more deeply for the rest of January.

I’m going to be looking at ways to implement tiny, incremental changes into a few specific areas of our lives.

I don’t know about you, but I’m still processing a lot of the big changes of 2020.

This doesn’t feel like the time for me to implement massive overhauls to my habits and life (though, if you are someone who is feeling like riding that massive wave of change and it’s working for you, ride on, friend, ride on!).

But there are a ton of places I can find small tweaks that I know will add up to big value for me, and I’d bet that if you looked, you’d find the same.

I’d love to hear about it— tell me one tiny, tiny thing you can do today that might feel like a drop in the bucket, but can be one of your “marginal gains.”

Happy 2021!