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People rise to their complacency
The opposite does not follow. If 10,000 people all want to be CEO, they will not all get there. But people create their own limiting factors, and that shows up in sports and in business, where a lot of it is mental, 90 percent or more.
People underestimate how far they can push themselves, as athletes like Tom Brady and the cyclist Sepp Kuss show. Curiosity and hard work, with moderately decent judgment, intelligence, and clarity of thought, take a person a long, long way, because that is how compounding works over time. There is no easy path, no shortcut, and no backdoor.
Even pushing 1 percent more counts. Munger's idea is that if everybody just went to bed a little smarter every day, the compounding effect over time would be large.
How did Sepp Kuss go from helper to winner?
Kuss spent years as a domestique, a rider who works for the team leader by pacing climbs and fetching supplies. He rode for Jumbo-Visma alongside Primoz Roglic and Jonas Vingegaard, who were the team's leaders in Grand Tours. In 2023, he won the Vuelta a España, with Roglic second and Vingegaard third. He was the first American to win a Grand Tour since Chris Horner won the Vuelta in 2013.
How did marginal gains transform British cycling?
Dave Brailsford, performance director of British Cycling and later principal of Team Sky, championed the idea of improving many small things by about one percent each. Team Sky launched in 2010 with the stated aim of winning the Tour de France with a British rider within five years. Bradley Wiggins won it in 2012, the first British winner of the race.
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