Atomic Habits

The  fate  of  British  cycling  changed  one  day  in  2003.  The  organization,  which  was  the  governing  body  for  professional  cycling  in  Great  Britain,  had  recently  hired  Dave  Brailsford  as  its  new  performance  director.  At  the  time,  professional  cyclists  in  Great  Britain  had  endured  nearly  100  years  of  mediocrity.  Since  19,  eight  British  riders  had  won  just  a  single  gold  medal  at  the  Olympic  Games.  And  they  had  fared  even  worse  in  cycling's  biggest  race,  the  Tour  de  France.

In  110  years,  no  British  cyclist  had  ever  won  the  event.  In  fact,  the  performance  of  British  riders  had  been  so  underwhelming  that  one  of  the  top  bike  manufacturers  in  Europe  refused  to  sell  bikes  to  the  team  because  they  were  afraid  that  it  would  hurt  sales  if  other  professionals  saw  the  Brits  using  their  gear.  Braillesford  had  been  hired  to  put  British  cycling  on  a  new  trajectory.  What  made  him  different  from  previous  coaches  was  his  relentless  commitment  to  a  strategy  that  he  referred  to  as  the  aggregation  of  marginal  gains,  which  was  the  philosophy  of  searching  for  a  tiny  margin  of  improvement  in  everything  you  do.  Braillesford  said  the  whole  principle  came  from  the  idea  that  if  you  broke  down  everything  you  could  think  of  that  goes  into  riding  a  bike  and  then  improve  it  by  1%,  you  will  get  a  significant  increase  when  you  put  them  all  together.