It’s true: I’ve slacked off on writing a LinkedIn #FridayRead two weeks in a row. I blame New York for that—because of the moving and apartment hunting, I haven’t done much besides gawk at the collective prices of some fat penguin and 8-bit mohawk NFT collections. I had to buy an alien just in case this whole Earth thing doesn’t pan out. #SaveTheMartians.
What I have been able to do—besides spend money—is read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. One of the concepts I’m kicking around is pairing his idea of aggregate advantages with the importance of small wins.
Aggregate Advantages
Gladwell walks through how and why people become successful. Most of it is outside of our control. The term “aggregate advantages” explains why.
The main case study involves “top-level athletes” from youth soccer and hockey leagues in Canada. After examining what similarities the athletes had, one researcher realized that depending on the league cutoff date for participation, an outsized number of players on these “top-level” teams had birthdays that fell directly after the cutoff dates.
For example, if a league’s participation cutoff date was Jan 1, then having a birthday on Jan 2 would be the most advantageous. Athletes would have, theoretically, up to 364 extra days to mature relative to athletes born later in the year.
This is exactly what the researchers saw with the teams they examined. Huge percentages of players were born within one, two, or three months after the cutoff date. This gave them more time to grow, mature, and develop than their younger peers.
“OK, Austin, but this is only one advantage? Not all of the best athletes are simply older.”
Yes, but it’s the catalyst. From here, Gladwell outlined how the “aggregate advantages” really compound. Natural talent and hard work mattered, but much less than the initial environment the athletes were born into.
Since physical development is accelerated during puberty, a head start of mere months meant the athletes who had more time to mature were bigger, faster, stronger than their peers. From the eye test, these athletes had advantages over the rest of the team. They received more attentive coaching, had more playing time, and were afforded opportunities to practice skills that led to better performance. These better players would be selected to all-star and travel teams and continue playing all summer. Those not selected went to summer camp and pottery class.
After the course of a few seasons, the kid who was initially just older, is now in fact, better. This is less a result of natural talent than it is the compounding effect of aggregate advantages.
--
I recently watched Naomi Osaka’s three-part documentary on Netflix and scrolled past the trailer for “King Richard,” a Will Smith-led biography about Serena and Venus Williams’ father. When applying Gladwell’s theory, the advantages check out. Osaka’s parents married with the intent of having children who played tennis. For Serena and Venus, Richard Williams is even quoted in the trailer saying he had “a 78-page plan” for his daughters’ careers before they were born! The aggregate advantages started early—the intent to develop was there.
Unfortunately, most of us don’t plan that far ahead—and nor do our parents.
So, that got me thinking about how people without parents who set them up for a life of aggregate advantages can manufacture their own success, and create their own opportunities.
Enter: Small Wins.
Small Wins
This isn’t a novel concept. Small Wins cause momentum. Building up a cache of achievements from the beginning of your day leads to your own set of aggregate advantages.
Personally, my Small Wins start in a rather mundane fashion: I wake up, and make my bed. (I credit Tim Ferriss and his book Tools of Titans for that one.) I’m not saying I’m tucking in corners and fluffing pillows to impress coworkers with my Zoom background, it just shouldn’t look like I had a Kendall Roy level breakdown the night before.
Make bed. Drink water. Gym. Read. Write. Yes, I write in a little diary (I call it a journal) virtually every morning. I may sound like a robot, but this gives me momentum. By the time 9am rolls around, we’re firing off emails and getting ahead of the day, baby.
Discipline begets consistency. Consistency opens the door for improvement. With improvement, you gain confidence to develop an action bias. Doing instead of watching. And once you’re in motion, opportunities find you.
The idea of Small Wins is also from James Clear. In his book Atomic Habits, he explains how we can build ourselves into the person we want to be by casting votes that reinforce said identity. If we want to be a person who does X thing, Clear suggests, we have to do things that that person would do. The more we reinforce those actions, through small wins, the more we can build ourselves up.
We can create our own aggregate advantages.
--
Not only do small advantages compound into larger opportunities that disproportionately favor the advantaged, but small wins compound into larger opportunities that disproportionately favor the active.
Let’s get after it today, and everyday, friends.
ps, if you have any habits or routines for gathering up small wins, share them in the comments. I would love to hear what and why you do what you do.