"Marginal gains are not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn't. Ultimately the approach emerges from a basic property of empirical evidence: to find out if something is working, you must isolate its effect," - Matthew Syed in "Black Box Thinking"
Enjoy the process. Teach students to embrace failure by leaving their comfort zone. "Don't tell me you can't; show me you will."
Expecting excellence to arrive in a quantum leap means assured disappointment. Innovation (e.g. pace and space) without discipline will only produce undisciplined, low percentage actions. Walk before you run. Run before running well.
Specifics drive the process. If I expect ball pressure, then players must have literal and figurative representation. "Head on the ball, balls of the feet, active hands" gets supplemented by "smell their breath and breathe fire onto them."
Jump higher because you did the work - the pogos, the box jumps, squats and lunges, leg presses, and used the resistance bands.
Feedback refines. That's dead man defense (six feet under) or "that's great discomfort" informs progress. Correction requires a "performance-focused, feedback-rich" environment with willing learners. Students must value success as much as their instructors.
Incrementalism precedes competitiveness. Imagine a spelling bee. An individual speller must strengthen her skills gradually before seeking a wider climb. The buzzword in system development is MVP (minimum viable product). Establish a working model for testing, failure, and progress.
Iteration drives improvement. Subtle changes in a technique or product repeated applied can create championships. The Mercedes F1 racing team is just one example. They first structured measuring parameters and broke down every aspect of performance from parts to pit stops using slow motion photography en route to winning. Ben Franklin cut up manuscripts and rewrote them to enhance his writing skills. When Michelangelo was asked about crafting Pieta at age 26, he answered that he had been doing this for ten hours a day for almost two decades.
Capture the power of time. Commitment and patience create transformation. When we convince our students to invest in themselves, powerful change can follow. Edison's lightbulb worked because he suffered a thousand failures. Wooden didn't win immediately at UCLA but he sculpted a transformational process that made time his ally.
Discipline is more important than conviction in fabricating change.
Lagniappe. Coordinating spiking timing...
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