The Art of Incremental Improvements
[An excerpt from my manuscript “How to spark new ideas magically”]
Magic is an art of finding incremental improvements daily. Here’s a trick I learned years ago from powerhouse card magician: Michael Vincent. I haven’t performed it in over a decade and I have forgotten 50% of the trick. Strangely, that’s what allowed me to create small improvements to it.
Incremental improvement is about getting 1% better, leading to a compound effect in a long run. In essence, it is finetuning what you do down to the tiniest details. But don’t mistake tiny with easy. Oftentimes, tiniest detail is the hardest to improve. Why?
Because there’s a double-edge sword of being polished. Everything becomes so second nature that we no longer notice the tiny areas that can be improved. Autopilot buries the tiny details that deserve our attentions. So here are 2 solutions:
1) Step Away Briefly
Whenever I stopped performing a trick for a while and I had to revisit it, I was able to view the trick from a fresh perspective. Those tiny details that weren’t good enough but were buried in autopilot are now painfully obvious.
Have you noticed the same happened in your world? After you return to work from vacation, don’t you need a ramp up period to get back in the groove? It is often during those moments where you are able to revisit those tiny details you had missed before right?
2) Train Someone Else
I used to mentor a young 10 year old magician. Every time I taught him a trick, I had to slow down and really dissect the details with him. It is often during these moments that I made incremental improvements.
By training someone else it forces you to slow-down and revisit all the tiny details you had missed. And sometimes during these training sessions, it is the trainees that will come up with a new idea because they are looking at it from a fresh perspective.
Ultimately, incremental improvements come from your ability to see your process through fresh eyes, snap out of autopilot, slow down so you can finally pay attention. What other ways do you think will allow you to do that?
