Episode 98. Big Improvements Are Made of Small Ones

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Big Improvements Are Made of Small Ones.”

Sometimes the difference between those that have everything and those that don't is a lot less than we might think. The more successful people that I meet, the more normal they seem to me, at least in the sense that they don't appear significantly more intelligent than many other people I know.

Regardless, these people have acquired hundreds of times more wealth status and influence than most of the rest of us. In baseball, the average major league baseball player has a batting average of around two 50, give or take, which means each time they're up to bat, they manage to hit the ball and get on base.

25% of the time, the best hitters in the league manage to hit the ball more than 30% of the time. The season leader for last year was Aaron Judge who had a batting average of 331. That being said. When he's up to bat, Aaron Judge has an 8% higher chance of hitting the ball than the average Major League baseball player.

Now that] improvement is notable, but still relatively small. When you think of how likely it is that you're going to get to see him hit the ball when he is at the plate, when Aaron Judge is at bat, there is almost as much of a chance you will see him strike out as he would any other player. Where a normal player doesn't manage to get a hit 75% of the time, Aaron Judge doesn't manage to get a hit 67% of the time.

The thing is though, having an 8% higher chance of hitting the ball amounts to hitting the ball 31% more often than the other players. In terms of how that 8% is valued, you can look at his pay. The average major League baseball player last year made around 5 million each year. Aaron Judge makes 40 million a year.

That 8% improvement makes him worth eight times more than the average Major League baseball player. Progress is kind of funny. It's a relative thing. The difference between people that have mastered a game, or a skill doesn't always amount to a huge difference, but the value society will pay for the best versus the second best is exponential.

In baseball, an 8% improvement on someone's batting average can be a reliable factor that lets a team win games. It's that little bump. It needs to just more predictably win. The more above average players you can get on your roster amounts to above average play overall, and it adds up. As people attain mastery at something, progression slows because there are usually some kinds of limits involved in what's even possible, but those tiny improvements over everyone else is what it takes to win.

One of the best examples where only a little bit goes a long way is sprinting. The fastest man in the world to have ever competed is Usain Bolt. Who set a world record by sprinting the 100-meter dash in 9.58 seconds. So, if you remember back World War II era, or just before it, Jesse Owens famously competed at the Olympics in Berlin, Germany.

A few months prior to that. He set the record for the 100-meter dash and managed to run it in 10.2 seconds.] So, with all of the tweaks and improvements to the sport over the years, ranging from techniques, shoes, and even upgrades to the tracks themselves, the fastest person alive today has only been able to best Jesse Owens by 0.62 seconds.

So, the second-best sprinters are only point one second behind Usain Bolt. That tiny improvement is what has made Usain Bolt world famous.] Just about everyone I know knows that man's name all because of 0.1 second. So, the impact of small improvements is not limited to sports. The same thing happens with money.

So, a good example in life would be something like compound interest. Let's just say you make $50,000 a year and you choose to invest 10% of that income over the course of every year. And maybe we'll say you get a 5% annual return. Well, if you do that in 10 years, you'll have roughly $63,000 in your bank, which is roughly $13,000 more than you would've put in.

And at 20 years, you would have $165,000 in the bank, which is $65,000 more than you would've put in. That may not seem astronomical, but I think I could have managed that when I started] working and had I started that 20 years ago when I first turned 18, I would have an extra $165,000 in the bank. Today that I don't have 5% isn't even a very great return.

The stock market averages closer to 10%. Had that same amount of money grown at 10%, I would have $285,000 sitting in the bank. Small things add up into big things. People like to say. It takes money to make money, which in my experience has been almost completely true. But I think it's fair to say that success builds on success.

If you ask a rich person about making money, they'll often tell you that the first hundred thousand dollars was the hardest. When you first start out in life, all of your money goes towards feeding housing and entertaining you. But over time, if you can save and make more money, you need less and less of that money to feed, house and entertain you, which frees up even more money for you to put to work.

An extra 10% increase in your income that you manage not to spend can start to work for you instead of just maintaining the status quo. Of course, it will never work if you find ways to spend every windfall that you get, which I think a lot of us are probably guilty of. In ordinary life becoming even just a little bit better in anything leads to a compounding return.

Working 10% harder at something should, in theory, allow you to make use] of whatever that 10% extra of work produced for you and applying just a 10% improvement in the right place can even have an outsized impact. It's more often than not. That the small changes in improvements are the ones that reap the most reward.

I've never been one to pay attention to the little things. A consequence of that is that it's difficult for me to really gain mastery at a thing because at the end of the day,] mastering something means knowing all the details and being able to perform on them. I rarely continue long enough to master those little details, so I rarely become an expert.

It is the people that are willing to push forward and invest the time into the boring stuff that went out. The good news is that sometimes that's all it takes when people are trying to turn their lives around. Usually, it begins with just a little more effort in one direction. Maybe] it's as simple as remembering to brush your teeth in the morning.

Maybe it's making a point of getting some exercise each day. The more of these little improvements you make, the more they add up to become big improvements overall. 

Soon enough, you might be laser focused on something as specific as measuring how long it takes you to make breakfast. There is a time in my life when many of the things that I do today without thinking about would've sounded impossible to me.

Voluntarily writing something equivalent to an essay a week for this podcast is the last thing. My younger self would've thought that I'd end up doing. Exercising regularly is something I never believed I would do, and working long hours is something the old me couldn't really comprehend. These things did not all come at once.

They came one by one. By no means do I consider my life to be a perfect model for others to follow, but my life is full. So much so that it seems like there isn't much room to improve on things. But the good news is I don't have to make huge changes because if I can just make little tweaks here and there, it will amount to mountains of improvement in my life.

Improving even just a little in the right place can make things better by a lot. The average person. Is not a master at anything and easily has the capacity to improve in any number of things. We don't have to dedicate our life to something in order to make a meaningful improvement on it. Although if we did do that, the rewards would be substantial.

This is Skipping Stones - “Big Improvements Are Made of Small Ones.”. You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonesr.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me. At info@skippingstonessr.com, new episodes will be released weekly every Monday.