📈 The 1% Rule: Why I Keep Re-Reading Atomic Habits

Every time I feel like I need to reset my life, I always start by reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.

This man has single handedly rewired my brain to achieve all the things I have till now. His book is one of those timeless bibles that I think I will keep referring to until the end of (my) time.

Usually I go into it with a few habits I want to build and a few I want to break.

Surprisingly, I've never finished it. By the time I reach the halfway point, I'm so inspired that I start working on whatever is immediate, and in most cases, the flow state begins.

So today, I started again.

It marks maybe my sixth or seventh re-read. I realized, I am almost re-reading it once a year.

The first chapter is extremely powerful and hooks me in every time. It tells the story of the British Cycling team.

The Story: From 110 Years of Mediocrity to Olympic Dominance

In 2003, British Cycling was a joke.

Their riders had won just a single Olympic gold medal since 1908. No British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France in 110 years. One European bike manufacturer even refused to sell bikes to the British team because they were afraid it would hurt sales if other professionals saw the Brits using their gear.

That's how bad it was.

Then Dave Brailsford took over as performance director. He introduced a philosophy he called "the aggregation of marginal gains." The idea was simple: if you improve everything by just 1%, those small gains compound into remarkable results.

What did they actually do?

Some improvements were expected:

• Redesigned bike seats for more comfort

• Rubbed alcohol on tires for better grip

• Tested fabrics in wind tunnels for aerodynamics

• Used biofeedback sensors to monitor athlete responses

But they didn't stop there. They went obsessively granular:

• Tested different massage gels to find which led to fastest muscle recovery

• Hired a surgeon to teach riders the best way to wash their hands (to reduce colds)

• Determined the exact pillow and mattress for optimal sleep for each rider

• Painted the inside of the team truck white to spot dust that could degrade bike performance

The results?

Just five years later, at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, British Cycling won 60% of available gold medals.

By 2012 London Olympics, they set nine Olympic records and seven world records.

From 2007-2017, British cyclists won 178 world championships, 66 Olympic/Paralympic gold medals, and 5 Tour de France victories. It's widely regarded as the most successful run in cycling history.

All from 1% improvements.

The Math That Changes Everything

Here's the logic: if you get 1% better each day for a year, you don't end up 365% (3.65x) better. You end up at 3700% (37x). That is 10 times better.

Think of it like interest on a bank account. If you save $100 and earn 1% interest daily, you're not just adding $1 each day. You're earning interest on your interest. That $100 becomes $3,778 by the end of the year. That's the power of compounding. (shout out Morgan Housel, his book The Psychology of Money is another cult classic that rewired my brain).

Conversely, if you get 1% worse each day, you decline nearly to zero.

The same principle applies to habits and improvements. Getting 1% better isn't just addition, it's multiplication. Each small improvement builds on the last one.

The difference between making choices that are 1% better versus 1% worse seems insignificant today. In fact, you probably won't even notice it. But as time goes on, these small improvements or declines compound, and suddenly there's a massive gap between people who make slightly better decisions daily and those who don't.

Applying This to Any Company

Now James Clear used this story as a way to help us understand how we can apply this to our personal life and habits. But for the first time, I realized that habits aren’t just something a singular person follows. Even a business follows habits - both good and bad. And so this process can and must be applied to all organizations. The same way it was applied to the British Cycling Team.

It’s been around 2 months since I re-joined Emoneeds after my MBA. I came in with a lot of fresh ideas and radical change-making.

Many people think big changes will bring large successes. And don't get me wrong - moonshots are important, and we should definitely make big bets. But at the same time, every day you come in, you should be able to improve some aspect of your process by 1%.

These small changes compound into good systems, processes, and disciplined success.

What does this look like in practice for any organization?

Data and Reporting

• Improving the way your data is stored and structured

• Making metrics more visible and accessible

Small improvements in data infrastructure compound into better decision-making over time.

Culture and Social Aspects

• Regular team rituals that build connection

• Creating spaces for informal knowledge sharing

These aren't flashy, but they create psychological safety and motivation that compounds.

Alignment and Communication

• Strategic group meetings that keep stakeholders aligned

• Removing meetings that don't add value

• Building clear documentation so context isn't lost

Better alignment means less friction when executing on big ideas.

Process and Operations

• Streamlining repetitive workflows

• Automating what can be automated

Like the British team's hand-washing protocol, these prevent small failures from compounding.

Customer Experience

• Reducing response time by a few minutes

• Simplifying one step in the user journey

Each small friction point you remove compounds into higher retention and satisfaction.

Product Quality

• Fixing small bugs consistently

• Improving load times by milliseconds

• Better error messages

These aren't sexy features, but they build trust and reliability over time.

Financial Discipline

• Negotiating vendor contracts more carefully

• Reducing unnecessary subscriptions

Small cost optimizations compound into significant runway extensions.

Like the British team's hand-washing protocol, these prevent small failures from compounding.

The pattern here? None of these are revolutionary. But when you implement them consistently, they create an environment where the big bets become much smoother to execute.

What We Did at Emoneeds

When I rejoined Emoneeds after my MBA, the team had already built a strong foundation.

Now it was about finding those marginal gains - the small improvements that compound over time. Here's what we worked on together:

Technical Infrastructure and Automation

• Reduced manual data entry and maintenance wherever possible

• Automated data reporting and metrics

• Implemented better tools across engineering, marketing, and clinical funnels

• Encouraged AI adoption in as many processes as possible

These weren't flashy changes, but together they freed up time for higher-value work.

Communication and Documentation

• Set up Google Workspace for seamless collaboration

• Created a strong documentation culture so knowledge is easy to share and extract

• Established clearer channels for feedback, both anonymous and structured

Like painting the truck white to spot dust, good documentation prevents small miscommunications from compounding into big problems.

HR and Team Culture

• Revamped our hiring and onboarding process for new employees

• Started hosting more social and team-building events

• Implemented regular one-on-ones to understand how people are feeling

Small investments in culture compound into better retention and motivation.

Data Accuracy and Alignment

• Went into all our data sources to ensure accuracy

• Aligned everyone on clear SOPs and definitions of terminologies

• Standardized processes across teams

When everyone speaks the same language, decisions get made faster and better.

And so much more.

Each of these seems small in isolation, but together they create an environment where the team can move faster and execute bigger bets more smoothly.

The Compound Effect in Action

As we implemented these changes, something interesting happened. The efficiency improvements weren't dramatic at first, but they started to add up. Data became more accessible. Communication got clearer. Processes ran smoother.

And here's the thing - we weren't just making these improvements for their own sake. We were building the infrastructure that would allow us to execute on bigger ideas.

When your data is clean and accessible, you can make strategic decisions faster. When your documentation is strong, new team members can contribute sooner. When your processes are streamlined, you have more bandwidth to take on ambitious projects.

The marginal gains and the moonshots aren't competing priorities. They're complementary. The small improvements create the stable foundation that makes the big bets possible. You can't swing for the fences if you're constantly putting out fires caused by broken processes or poor communication.

The discipline of 1% improvements doesn't replace bold vision. It enables it.

The Quiet Power of Showing Up

The British cycling team didn't win because they discovered some secret training technique or hired superhuman athletes. They won because someone cared enough to figure out the optimal way to wash hands. Because someone noticed dust in a truck. Because someone tested which massage gel worked 1% better.

These weren't the decisions that made headlines. They were the decisions made in quiet rooms by people who understood a fundamental truth: excellence isn't an event, it's a habit.

And that's the beautiful irony of the 1% rule.

The improvements that matter most are often the ones nobody notices.

The ones that don't make for good stories at dinner parties.

The ones that seem almost embarrassingly small when you write them down.

But compound those small choices over months and years, and you don't just get better. You get transformed.

Transformation doesn't happen in the moments we plan for. It happens in the thousand small moments we show up for, day after day, choosing to be 1% better than yesterday.