Ever since I was young I enjoyed getting progress in different things.

This is innate in humans, we like progress.

If weren’t designed this way, we would have settled for swinging from trees in Africa.

Humans wouldn’t have felt the urge to explore new lands, to travel, to take over the WORLD.

Our ancestors were wired to get evolve and get progress for survival reasons. We have the same innate drive in ourselves.

But this progress…….how does it happen?

Is it in big jumps? Small increments? Easier for some and harder for others?

We don’t know. It’s not something we look into. We don’t understand the power of small gains yet, if ever.

We just hear advice from our elders or from the mainstream and internalise it as truth:

• About how you are ‘naturally’ good or bad at things.

• About how you ‘can or can't’ do certain things

• About how it’s ‘genetics’ holding you back. So don’t even bother.

Is that the truth? Is that how progress works? Well, that's what we will discuss today! And you will see how YOU HAVE SO MUCH MORE CONTROL THAN YOU THINK in terms of your own progress.

You look in the mirror and see a fiat…..but little do you know you have the potential of a Ferrari.

You will realise this by the end of this newsletter if you keep reading.

You might see me now on Instagram having got progress in many things:

• mobility

• strength

• business

• self-awareness/mindset

But was it always like this? Nope.

All my progress has come over the last 6 years. In 2016 once I had finished college…..that’s when I decided I want to turn my life around. And start working on improving myself.

I had just finished college in 4k of debt after coming home from a J1. Drank 3 or 4 nights a week my last year in college just before the J1. I had no idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Hating the thought of starting a 9-5 now. Hence why I just went on a big blowout party year! I was like fuck….my life is going to get so much worse now, might as well enjoy myself when I can…….is that a way to live? Well that’s the path we are GIVEN isn’t it?

Get a 9-5, work and save money, get a pension, get a mortgage and a wife, get a car, do shit you don't give a fuck about…..and you can only pursue things you love and are interested in after 65, once you are retired. I don’t agree with the concept of retirement.

Postpone my life………ALL THE PRIME YEARS OF MY LIFE………and give it to build someone else's dream? Line someone else's pockets? Be a cog in THEIR machine…….and then only do what I WANT…..when I’m an old man?!

It’s backwards. The amount of pushback you get from people when you go against this norm - “but pension this, but safety that”……look it’s your life you decide. But don’t live the lives of our predecessors out of fear and have regrets on your deathbed when IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY. I decided to small gain my way towards creating my own life true to me. You can too. A topic for another newsletter I think.

So it was time to start making a plan and improving myself to create the LIFE I WANT once I finished college. Not just jump onto the hamster wheel of life for the next 40 years. Fuck that. It’s most people but it’s not going to be me.

Before this, I didn’t UNDERSTAND progress and how it works. I never understood the power of SMALL GAINS that you see me preaching about every week on Instagram.

You might think I’m patient chasing goals YEARS down the line……..I am naturally very impatient

You might think I find it easy to get on board with the small gains……but I naturally want progress RIGHT NOW

You might think I love playing the long game, when in reality that didn’t come easy to me either

You might think I’m different than you but I have the same natural reactions engrained in us from evolution. I have just learned how to detach from them and not let them run my life.

I have made the unconscious conscious….and this is when you can change it.

We All Want Progress Instantly

A memory that pops into my head instantly now is one from my early teens.

A memory to show you how naturally impatient I was with progress.

I was at my desk in my room trying to build this little toy car….what were they called?!…..aghh it’s on the tip of my tongue but I can’t remember.

Anyway…..I was trying to build it, to get PROGRESS with it…..but it wasn’t happening.

I would try this and it wouldn’t work, I would try that and it didn’t work either.

I could feel tension rising in myself. I feel uneasy. I don’t like this.

I try again - nope. I try another way - nope.

The frustration is boiling over inside me.

After a few more fuck ups I pick up the tool and hurl it towards the floor in a rage. I cut a big line into the floorboard

……….what just happened there?!…….my first memory of losing my temper.

I sat there looking at the floor. Why did I do that? It’s just a toy.

Emotions are not easy to navigate as an adult, never mind as a kid of course! haha but I was always just curious as to what is going on? I never knew. We all go through it. You live and learn.

I still see that cut on the floorboard in my room on weeks when I am working from my family home.

It reminds me of who I used to be. How little control I had over myself.

I was at the whims of my emotion. I had no self-awareness, no understanding of how my brain or body works. No understanding of human nature in general.

Now I look at the cut floorboard and I feel EMPOWERED.

I understand myself so much better. I’m peeling back the layers of self-awareness for the 7th year in a row. And it just keeps going deeper and deeper. But the most rewarding journey I have ever been on.

Now I am in CONTROL of my life. I know I can do WHATEVER I WANT IN TIME. And while it started with just belief and understanding…..now it’s TRUTH. It’s FACT. I have EVIDENCE:

• 10 years of chronic pain and injury and giving up sport………..to coming back to where I am now

• Weak, skinny, could never get strong or bigger…………5kg heavier and stronger than I ever thought I could be. Got a one arm chin up with just 2.5kg assistance this week as a new PB

• No clue what I want to do in life at 23 after college………….to making a new passion into my career

I’ve learned so much along the way. But one of the most important and most empowering realisations to help me achieve these things????

The Power of Small Gains

The small gains are all I’ve ever got.

The small gains are all I ever need.

They are all YOU need.

So let’s get to it. What is the power of small gains all about? How can you understand it in depth change your life?

The Power of SMALL GAINS

Small gains as you might have guessed, are small incremental bits of progress.

But……….you have no idea of the underlying power it has over TIME.

We are designed to want instant gratification, to want the fix INSTANTLY. So we are naturally blind to the power of small gains.

This is evident in the world if you watch people and how they talk about progress. “I could never”, “why bother”, “you won’t be able”, “I couldn’t do what you do”. Not true, but they make it their self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s safe in these illusions of helplessness. I can’t do anything so it’s not on me, it’s the world! My genetics! My situation! (insert excuse). A safe place indeed. But safe is where progress fades and regret/resentment builds. Stay there at your peril.

The ironic thing is that you DO understand the power of small gains in SOME areas of your life (like your pension). But then that logic & understanding doesn’t transfer over to other areas of your life (which is completely illogical but we are blind to it as I was - humans have many biases).

Let’s whack you in the face with it’s power, and then we’ll dive into it more.

We can’t really comprehend the impact that the amazing compounding effect of small gains has until you hear some facts/examples:

• A penny doubled every day for just 30 days ends up being over 5 million. Google it.

(While our progress obviously won’t double every day, you get the point)

• If you get 1% better each day, you are 37% better each year

(Read ‘Atomic Habits’ from James Clear. It’s what I call small gains. Same thing. It’s funny, I figured out this same approach but more through evolutionary biology which you’ll see down further. I had never heard of James or his book. But then I did read it I was like oh shit, that’s basically what I have been doing haha. So I can see why it worked so well. James puts it much more elaborately and eloquently so go read the book! He beat me to that one anyway! But this is why I say for you to FOLLOW THE RESULTS….because people will get there through different avenues. There is no ‘one best way’, but results are results, they happen because it WORKS. And we usually arrive to the same conclusions)

Once you start to get progress, it compounds on itself over time IF YOU STAY CONSISTENT WITH IT. And straight away there you see the problem

With your pension there will be great weeks, good weeks, bad weeks, horrible weeks…..but you STAY CONSISTENT THROUGH IT ALL (mainly because you aren’t aware of these ups and downs so you are shielded from making EMOTIONAL decisions to ruin it out of fear of it not working).

You just keep putting money in the pension each month NO MATTER WHAT. And this is key

You don’t stop paying your pension if the stock markets have a bad week do you? No. Why? Because you know that would be silly and you will lose.

You understand you are in it for the LONG GAME, so you are at ease to keep putting in the deposits and know it will come good over time. That’s why PLAYING THE LONG GAME goes hand in hand with the power of SMALL GAINS. And you will see me mentioning these all the time on Instagram.

The average person applies the power of small gains to ensure their financial PROGRESS….but uses a completely different strategy for other areas of life and wonders why they don’t get the same outcome? They wonder why progress eludes them.

The way most people approach progress in other areas of life….would be similar to paying into a pension for 12 weeks……and being like how come I haven’t made any money?! Why amn’t I RICH?! This clearly isn’t working. I need to try the new fix, or maybe its me and my genetics, ah whats the point? It’s not working. And they drop off into safe unconscious distortion.

……..are you seeing the irony yet? It’s a sad irony. As you could be getting so much more progress in other areas of your life. And that’s what I want for you. To have more control over creating the reality you want

Nassim Taleb (read ‘black swan’ & ‘anti-fragile’) calls this ‘domain dependence’, and it's rife in the world. You have certain logic & understanding in one area….but you fail to bring that to other areas of your life - when it would actually get you the same progress there too.

All I have done is use the power of small gains that you use in your pension, but have applied it to ALL AREAS OF MY LIFE.

You are only building up your pension fund with the amazing power of small gains, but I’m building up that and also my MOBILITY fund, my STRENGTH fund, my SELF-AWARENESS fund, my BUSINESS fund. And the progress is starting to compound in them 6 years later. Imagine where it’ll be in 10, 20, 30? Oh that’s gets me PUMPED.

I’m taking the same small gains approach with it all. And the outcome will be the same.

What looks like very little progress (a small monthly pension payment that is insignificant)….will COMPOUND MASSIVELY TO AMAZING PROGRESS OVER TIME (when 40 years later you have 100s of thousands if not 1 million or more depending on your contributions to the pension & stock market etc).

Imagine if you took that same approach with progress in other areas of your life?!

It’s changed my life. It can change yours.

The power of small gains doesn’t discriminate…..only YOU do.

What was my final realisation after all this? The one that took people down of pedestals who I was following. The ones I used to look at and think “I could never do what they do”. The one that showed me I can BECOME whoever I want in this life. I can ACHIEVE any goal I want. One of the biggest realisations that changed my life??:

“Big gains are an illusion. Any ‘big’ gain…..is actually just an ACCUMULATION OF SMALL GAINS OVER TIME. And anyone can chase the small gains”

I ingrained this into my brain. THERE ARE NO BIG GAINS. Big gains don’t make any sense. There are ACTUALLY……just an accumulation of small gains.

So how do you get progress? Well you relentlessly CHASE THE SMALL GAINS don’t you? and that’s what I started doing 6 years ago.

This is how I became so confident. I could say things like “the handstand pushup is inevitable in time”….before it happened. I’ve said the same about the one arm chin up from the start 3.5 years ago…..and now I’m nearly there.

These ‘big gains’……are just an ACCUMULATION OF SMALL GAINS. And when I keep knocking the small gains down like dominos……it’s inevitable in time if I don’t quit.

Congratulations, you now know more about how progress works than 99% of the world.

Go wield this superpower to wage war on your goals. Make them inevitable in time

Let’s dive into the evolutionary lens for a moment. The info that led me to this small gains understanding and mentality. The info that showed me this is how progress works in EVERYTHING.

The Understanding of Evolution

When you understand how human evolution works (or evolution in general) you understand there literally is no such thing as massive jumps in progress with our bodies. It doesn’t work that way.

If we could get HUGE gains quickly, then we could all go to the gym for a few months and come out looking like Arnold Schwarzenneger in his prime….but that doesn’t happen does it?! haha

That takes YEARS. It takes TIME for all the small gains to add up to the BIG GAINS.

But most people think it’ll happen quickly, get disappointed as they had misguided expectations, and then lose motivation and drop off.

They subscribe to the idea that ‘it didn’t work for them’ or ‘there is something wrong with my body’ etc etc etc. Pick your poison.

This is NOT the truth. It’s a narrative, a story you tell yourself. But it doesn’t matter, because if you BELIEVE this, then it will BECOME YOUR TRUTH. It will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A self-imposed glass ceiling you have subconsciously placed over yourself. The only way to shatter this illusion is to QUESTION IT.

To learn about and understand the amazing ADAPTABILITY of the human body, and to understand the amazing POWER OF SMALL GAINS over time.

Even think of the word: EVOLUTION. To EVOLVE.

What does evolve mean? A quick google tells me “develop gradually”.

Develop GRADUALLY.

This is the only way change can happen. In HUMANS. In NATURE. In the WORLD.

It happens gradually and slowly…..until there were enough small changes that we see a BIG CHANGE….and are fooled into thinking that these big changes happen instantly.

Think of it like an iceberg:

• You see only the tip of the iceberg and the achievements accomplishments of others

• You don’t see the 95% of the iceberg under the water. You don’t see all the SMALL GAINS it took to produce the tip of that iceberg. And now your perceptions of progress are distorted

And this is how we have come from chimps 6 million years ago…….to the homo-saipens me and you today.

We see the BIG GAIN (us modern humans who have took over the world). We don’t see the 6 MILLION YEARS OF SMALL GAINS THAT GOT US HERE.

The reality is YOU ARE SMALL GAINS IN ACTION. YOU are proof of it’s power.

You don't even understand what you ARE.

If you couldn’t improve, if you couldn’t ‘change’ now in any area of your life that you want from mobility to relationships…..if this was TRUE…..well then guess what? ME AND YOU WOULDN’T EXIST.

If this was true, we would have stayed as chimps and homo-sapiens would never have existed.

(Well actually you could keep tracing things back and back saying we never would have got to chimps. Apparently, we are all evolved from species of fish 375 million years ago, but look you get the point haha)

But we are here. Evolution got us here. The SMALL GAINS got us to the top of the food chain. And it will get you whatever you want in time if you understand and apply it going forward in your life.

3 Actionable Take-aways:

1) Understanding the Power of Small Gains

• Once you understand evolution and how progress works in humans and the world, you have the secret ingredient to PROGRESS

• Any ‘big gain’ is just an ACCUMULATION of SMALL GAINS OVER TIME.

• With this understanding, you can set the foundation for LONG-TERM PROGRESS. You know you can small gain your way to progress in ANYTHING over time

2) Awareness of Small Gains in Your Life

• Notice the ‘domain dependence’ of how you apply the power of tiny gains in your life

• Awareness is the first point of change. If you aren’t aware of what areas of your life you aren’t utilising this, you won’t be able to implement it to get progress

• If it’s just in your pension, ask yourself why amn’t I using this in other areas of my life I want to improve?

3) Apply Small Gains in All Areas of Your Life

• Start to cultivate this same logic in areas you want to improve

• Remind yourself of the many examples we talked about on the journey (Pension, penny doubling, 1% better over a year)

• This will help you avoid distortion when you haven’t seen the big gain yet.

• It’s coming. You just haven’t accumulated enough ‘small gains’ to make it appear like a BIG GAIN

Client Examples:

I teach all my clients about the amazing power of small gains, and this is what arms them on their journey of progress from the start! It’s tools like this that make you so much more likely to get progress than the average person. This is one of many topics, but we will attack them one at a time in these newsletters!

Michael’s journey is a great example! Read this snippet around small gains, then read the full review. And you can see the understanding of small gains that has been one of the catalysts for the amazing progress Michael achieved!

Other clients that mentioned the small gains understanding and implementation being a game changer were Peter O’Donoghue & Anna Cafolla!

Here is Peter saying the small gains are the way to go!

And Anna saying how she will always be grateful for being able to add the ‘small gains’ lens to her perspective on life from now on!

Read their full reviews here:

• Peter

• Anna 

I also have numerous messages from people who just follow me and watch my stories on Instagram who have had massive benefits from really understanding the power of SMALL GAINS. 2 examples that pop into my head:

• a man in the army who finally understood the power of small gains after my stories and said it was the missing link for his progress all along. An epiphany breakthrough moment

• a man recovering from an illness who thought he couldn’t improve. With the understanding of the power of tiny gains he knew he could and slowly worked on his body and mindset and started getting progress! He even said he would talk to his friends about me and this approach which was so flattering and amazing to hear. He said they don’t get it, and that’s ok not many will. But it’s up to you to do what you need to and if people come with you they do, if not it’s their choice

I get a bit emotional when I think of how I have helped people both clients and randomers on Instagram. That I can help change someone's life through WORDS. Through CONTENT. Through my own learning.

This is why I do it. I have learned so much that has changed my life, from mobility to mindset, to life! and I want to share it and give it all back. This game of life isn’t a zero-sum game. I WANT US ALL TO GET PROGRESS AND LIVE THE LIFE WE WANT.

I know what my life was like before. I know what it's like now.

To be the catalyst and bridge from one to the other for another human being, there is nothing like it. I will be doing this until the day I die. The avenues will change, but the overall theme will be the same: get people progress.

My Week

Education:

• Current Reading: Denial of Death (Ernst Becker)

• Podcasts

(Modern Wisdom Podcast - The sexual revolution has failed everyone: Louise Perry #492)

(Modern Wisdom Podcast - Alex & Leila Hormozi: Building a 100m marriage #490)

(On Purpose with Jay Shetty - How to heal your gut & eat smarter to improve brain health: Shawn Stevenson)

(On Purpose with Jay Shetty - 6 ways to know if you’re compatible with someone)

Business:

• Some client wins:

• Cian getting his PHYSICAL FREEDOM back to return to Gaelic!

Personal:

• Fun this week:

• Wednesday: Went to the cinema to watch “See how they run”

• Friday: Went to Bellator 285! Randomly met ex-client Dylan Luddy there who was in last week's newsletter!

Training:

• Got a new PB on the one arm chin up journey last Sunday!!!! I can now do a one arm chin up with just 2.5kg assistance (previous PB was 3.75kg assistance). A year in the making! But as you know now, any big gain (the one arm chin up), is just an ACCUMULATION OF SMALL GAINS. I’m chasing those small gains 3.5 years on it so far, another 6 months of small gains and we should be there or thereabouts. The SMALL GAINS reel any goal in over TIME

• Jiu Jitsu twice this week. Went ‘lighter’ with some of the lower belts on Tuesday and nearly got tapped!! Just showed me how people have levelled up when I was abroad and injured with the meniscus tear for a few months! But that's how it goes! You can’t get the results you didn’t work for! They have been chasing the small gains in Jiu Jitsu and I haven’t been, so of course the gap between us will close. I’m back on the SMALL GAIN train for Jiu Jitsu now though!

And that’s a wrap! Hope this newsletter was useful! It’s been a game-changer for me and for clients, it can be a game changer for you too!

Enjoy the weekend! 🙂 Chat soon.

Don’t Settle,

Mark