Musings from the CU Suite

Written by Anthony Demangone

I love a good tweak. Trying to tinker with a process to eek out a little more efficiency gives me untold joy.

Just how powerful is a tweak? Even a small one? 

Very. Just look at this article from Buffer. (It includes a killer story about how small gains helped a team win the Tour de France.

It’s so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making better decisions on a daily basis.

Almost every habit that you have — good or bad — is the result of many small decisions over time.

And yet, how easily we forget this when we want to make a change.

So often we convince ourselves that change is only meaningful if there is some large, visible outcome associated with it. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, traveling the world or any other goal, we often put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.

Meanwhile, improving by just 1 percent isn’t notable (and sometimes it isn’t even noticeable). But it can be just as meaningful, especially in the long run.

And from what I can tell, this pattern works the same way in reverse. (An aggregation of marginal losses, in other words.) If you find yourself stuck with bad habits or poor results, it’s usually not because something happened overnight. It’s the sum of many small choices — a 1 percent decline here and there — that eventually leads to a problem.

Need some visual help? Check out this graph that shows the effect of continuous small gains in efficiency. 

So here's to the tinkerers out there.  So, does anyone have an example of how a small tweak led to wonderful changes? 

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