11:11 Waves Blog 47: Improvement

Every Monday, I share 1 question for you to contemplate, 1 idea from me, 1 quote from others, and 1 inspiration for us.

This week’s topic is: Improvement

I am child of the 90s and grew up surrounded by kids who played videogames. Despite living in the golden age of gaming, I’ve never owned nor played videogames… until last week. My partner and I decided that it would be fun to try out the Nintendo Switch and, so far, we are having a lot of fun playing Super Mario. Up to now, I must admit, I am pretty bad at it. However, the more I practice and finish new levels, the more I am learning new skills and getting better at using the controller. These gradual improvements made me think about continuous improvement in every day life and how our dedication to making small changes and improvements daily can add up to something significant.

One Question for you

If you always do what you have always done, you’ll always get what you have always got.

Discuss the question here.

One Idea from me

Usually applied within organizations, bringing amazing results to companies that introduce it into their culture and strategy, the continuous improvement philosophy (aka Kaizen) can also be adopted in one’s own personal life. This week, I share two simple, but powerful practices to help you to continuously improve.

The 1% Factor: So often we convince ourselves that change (e.g. losing weight, learning a new skill, building a business, travelling the world etc.) is only worth it if there is some large and visible outcome associated with it.  Meanwhile, improving just 1% is not even noticeable. However, this approach can be very meaningful especially over the long term. Research says that if you get 1% better each day, you’ll end up 37 times better in a year. This week I invite you to pick something in your life that you would like to improve and try to do it 1% better than the day before. Experiment with this for a month and I guarantee that you will make significant traction. Don’t rush or become impatient: the secret is to take it slow and be consistent on doing things a little bit better than you did the day before.

Attack waste: One of Kaizen’s core principles is waste reduction and it comes into play in more scenarios that you might think. This week I invite you to pick one day and track every task you perform and the time involved. Once you have the data, assess whether each task is truly needed or if you are just operating in autopilot. Take few minutes and reflect on the following questions: What activities are a waste of your time and energy? What can you stop doing? If an activity is critical, how can you improve it or make it better? This exercise can be a great eye opener and might help to liberate yourself from activities that are not producing any tangible result beyond draining you.

Finally, one philosophical consideration. Writing this article made me reflect on how the word improvement can suggest that something has gotten or will get better. Better is a perspective dependent on comparison. How can one determine whether something is better or not? And who for? This questioning can bring one closer to knowing whether it is right for you to change something about yourself or whether it is right for you to start embracing yourself the way you are and not change. If you decide that the improvement is embracing yourself the way you are, without changing, then that IS change and that is improvement in itself.

One Quote from others

“Improvement begins with I”. Anonymous

One Inspiration for us

This week I share a short videoclip that features the story of Dave Brailsford and British Cycling. Dave was hired by the British governing body for professional cycling in 2003 as its new performance director. At the time, the performance of British riders was so low that one of the top bike manufactures refused to sell their bikes to the team because they were worried that it would hurt their sales if spectators saw the Brits using their equipment. Dave managed to put British Cycling on a new trajectory using a strategy which he called “the aggregation of marginal gains”. Through this approach, the British Team went on to dominating the road and track cycling events for more than a decade, winning Olympics, several Tour de France and capturing many world records. Enjoy!