Marginal Gains Is The Enemy Of Entrepreneurship

Being from a sports background, I witnessed firsthand the obsession with incremental improvement and marginal gains

This is believed to have originated from British Cycling, where Dave Brailsford famously championed the concept of ‘marginal gains’ by making it a core tenet of sport science.

Wind tunnels, nutrition strategies, sleeping environments - the little 1% things which when added up, compound to become a huge advantage.

Which in sport, is definitely true. And it’s true for one reason.

The unit of victory is given - it’s the same track, rules, competitors - you’re trying to cross the line faster.

But I think it’s become a bit like the 21st Century equivalent of ‘SMART Goals’, where it was maybe useful in one domain, one time - but then just got applied everywhere.

Even in business, where I think it can actually sometimes hold entrepreneurs back slightly.

Where marginal gains is asking ‘How do we climb this hill slightly faster than all of our competition’

Entrepreneurship is asking ‘Is this even the right hill?’

Or better yet,

‘What hill doesn’t exist yet, that I should create and then climb?’

It’s searching for a new landscape, not optimising within the current one - that’s why it can’t be marginal, a new field is discontinuous.

Marginal gains is what’s left when a field is crowded. In mature fields, every obvious move has been made - so the remaining edge is incremental - 1% here, 1% there.

The popularity of the field is what forces you down to the margin - so if you find yourself obsessing over marginal gains, you’re already entering a saturated game where the big value has been captured. You’re fighting for scraps with everyone else reading the same playbook.

In a new field, you don’t have to be 1% better; you just need to be the first there and roughly right.

When we think about coaching, we realise how many people are playing games where they have to work really, really hard to get marginal gains over competition.

Insta-hacks, different coaching service etc - it’s HARD.

Instead of being curious enough to find a different hill to a climb, on their own.