The Amazing Power of Small Gains

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

The desire for progress is innate in humans.

If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have went from swinging out of trees in africa to dominating the world.

Dopamine is the molecule of more, to quote Daniel Lieberman. The hunt for progress is part of who we are.

But how does progress actually happen?

Nobody really knows. I certainly didn’t.

Not Understanding How Progress Works

If you think I’m patient with progress now, it’s because I have trained myself to be.

I was naturally very impatient. I wanted progress instantly like we all do.

The earliest memory of not understanding how progress worked was in my early teens.

I was at the desk in my room trying to build a little toy car, but it just wasn’t happening.

Nothing I tried was working.

I could feel tension rising in myself. I felt uneasy. I didn’t like it.

Soccer came naturally to me, but this didn’t.

I tried again – nope. I tried another way – nope.

The frustration started to boil over inside me now.

After a few more dead ends, I picked up the tool and hurled it towards the floor in a rage! I cut a big line into the floorboard.

I still see that cut on the floorboard when I am working from my family home.

It reminds me of who I used to be. How little control I had over myself. How little I knew about how progress worked.

Skip forward to now where I have patiently chased down my life goals over months, years & decades.

Enjoying the journey and my own evolution. The difference is night and day.

And one of the most pivotal concepts that helped me get there was the power of small gains.

It’s no exaggeration to say it completely changed my life.

It can do the same for you.

The Amazing Power of Small Gains

I will bring you through the timeline & process of how I learned about the small gains, and implemented it in my life.

1) Evolution

“You are living proof of the amazing power of small gains”

When I started to become obsessed with the human body to overcome my chronic pain & injury, I stumbled upon evolutionary biology.

This led me to realise the story of the human body: why chronic pain was inevitable in this modern environment, and how to finally overcome it.

But it also led me to stumble across this concept which I coined ‘small gains’ for myself.

Which was the understanding that there literally is no such thing as massive jumps in progress. With nature, with our bodies, with anything in life. It’s all small gains.

I realised a fundamental truth that changed how I viewed progress forever:

“Big gains are an illusion. Any big gain, is just an accumulation of small gains over time”.

But we don’t understand this. We think there are big gains.

So when the big progress doesn’t happen quickly from our misguided expectations, we naturally lose motivation and drop off.

Now we subscribe to the idea that ‘it didn’t work for us’ or ‘there is something wrong with my body’ etc. Pick your poison.

This is not the truth. It’s a narrative, a story you tell yourself.

But it doesn’t matter. Because if you believe this, then it will become your truth. It will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Even just think of the word ‘evolution’. It means ‘to evolve’.

And what does ‘evolve’ mean? To ‘develop gradually’.

Develop gradually.

This is the only way change can happen. In humans. In nature. In the world.

With mobility, strength, skills, sports, business, relationships, life.

Progress happens gradually and slowly. Progress happens in small gains.

Any big gain you see, is just an accumulation of small gains over time.

The bigger the gain appears -> the more small gains that are stacked up.

There is a tipping point when all the small gains start to appear like a big gain.

But there is nothing special or miraculous about it at all. It’s just small gains.

Think of it like an iceberg:

You only see the tip of the iceberg (the achievements/accomplishments of others)
You don’t see the 95% of the iceberg under the water. (All the small gains it took to achieve the ‘big gain’)
Now your perception of progress is distorted

The evolution of the human species is a perfect example of small gains in action.

6 million years ago, humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor and went on different evolutionary paths.

On the human path: 200,000 years ago, after many species of humans, homo-sapiens emerged (the species of human we are today).

We are born into this modern world and think nothing of it. It’s all we know.

But in reality, it’s been millions of years of small gains that has led to you being alive today. To be the species of human that you are.

The truth is that you are living proof of the amazing power of small gains.

When I understood this empowering truth of small gains, more research led me to find out that this concept already existed.

It was called the power of tiny gains. And was already popularised by the book “Atomic Habits”.

2) Science

As you know by now, small gains are incremental bits of progress.

But most people don’t realise the amazing power it has over time:

If you get 1% better each day, you are 37% better each year.

The ironic thing is that you probably already use the power of small gains in other areas of your life without realising.

Your pension is a great example.

A few hundred euro each month is useless in terms of sustaining your lifestyle when you retire.

But compound that over 40 years of work & compound interest, and now all the small gains have turned into a massive gain that will sustain you.

It makes complete sense to use there, but unfortunately that logic & understanding usually doesn’t transfer over to other areas of our life.

We expect the quick fix and fast progress due to our many human biases that distort our thinking.

Another example that stuck with me:

A penny doubled every day for just 30 days ends up being over 5 million.

Don’t underestimate the compounding effect of small gains.

3) Perspective Change -> Behaviour Change

“Perspective change leads to behaviour change”

Perspective change is so important, because it leads to behaviour change.

And you behave your way to success or failure over time.

Once my perspective changed from distorted views of progress, to the actual truth of small gains, I was empowered.

Instead of settling and giving up on my athletic career after I was told I had no choice, I knew it wasn’t over for me.

I knew I could come back to some capacity if I got the right training and followed the process of just aiming for small gains each session, each day, each week, each month.

It was time to not settle and start making deposits in the mobility bank. I now realised it would add up like a pension over time.

I knew I was onto something, but I honestly couldn’t have comprehended what would happen:

1 year later: I returned to Jiu-Jitsu & the gym
2 years after that: I hit the front splits which I was told was impossible for my hips
1 year after that: I hit the pancake and had access to nearly all movements possible for the human body again

It blew me away.

I was the one that people were calling the ‘flexible’ guy, thinking these ‘big gains’ came naturally to me?!

Now I could see why so many people settle and think they can’t get progress with mobility or anything else in life:

Because they just don’t understand how progress works.

4) Progress Is Inevitable In Time

When I had cultivated the don’t settle attitude, and paired this with the understanding of the amazing power of small gains:

I was a force to be reckoned with.

I used to think I couldn’t change, that I was the way I was.

I didn’t make it in soccer and I thought that talent was set in stone. That you either have it or you don’t.

I was weak, skinny, shy, unconfident, and many other things. I thought that’s the way I would be forever.

But now for the first time in my life: I knew any progress that I wanted was inevitable in time. The small gain train will take me there.

I started chasing down all my goals like our hunter-gatherer ancestors did their prey: endurance hunting.

I picked out all my goals like a kid in a sweet shop, knowing they are all inevitable in time if I don’t settle and keep chasing the small gains.

Nearly a decade later and I have:

regained my physical freedom and taken it to elite levels
became stronger physically & mentally than I ever thought possible
turned my passion to my career
came out from behind the mask, lived true to myself, and became who I knew I could be

I behaved my way to success, one small gain at a time.

All from a perspective change, which came from taking ownership & educating myself.

Which shattered the idea of big gains and showed me the truth of how progress worked.

Big Gains Are An Illusion

“Big gains are an illusion, it’s just an accumulation of small gains over time”

Humans are wired to want instant gratification, so we are naturally blind to the power of small gains.

But when you train yourself to see the truth, you can’t unsee it.

Big gains are an illusion. There is no such thing.

With our body, with our mindset, with business/career, with relationships, with nature, with anything.

Now you’ll go back out into the world and see others trapped in their limiting beliefs.

“I could never”, “why bother”, “you won’t be able”, “it’s impossible”, “how does he do that?”.

Settling protects your ego, but it’s the graveyard for dreams and the fertile land for regret.

Stay there at your peril.

When I look back to that moment where I felt like the tin man and was told by 5 experts in a row that it’s over for me, time to settle. Tha is where my initial drive came from.

I know what it’s like to hit rock bottom with your body and many other areas of life, and I know it doesn’t have to be the end for you.

Settling is a choice, not a pre-determined destiny.

You can choose to not settle.

You can choose to chase the small gains.

So many people give up on themselves because they don’t understand the amazing power of small gains.

But now you do. You have the secret of progress.

You know more about how progress works than 99% of the world.

Go wield this superpower to wage war on your goals. To make them inevitable in time.

It’s time to get on the small gain train.

All Aboard The Small Gain Train

The small gains are all I’ve ever got.

The small gains are all I ever need.

They are all you need.

So many clients and people on Instagram have thanked me for the concept of small gains. Telling me how it has changed their life.

I teach all my clients about the amazing power of small gains, and this is what arms them on their journey of progress from the start!

It’s tools like this that make you so much more likely to get progress than the average person.

Michael’s journey is a great example. Read this snippet around small gains, then read the full review. You can see how the understanding of small gains has been one of the main catalysts for his amazing progress.