The secret of great success – in business as well as in life – lies in the small steps of incremental improvements.
That was the message from Paralympian Danny Crates, who closed NEN’s 2024 Annual Conference with his winning formula for achieving success.
Now a business coach, Danny Crates shared his life journey, starting from a car crash at 21 that led to the loss of his right arm. Despite this setback, he returned to rugby and later pursued scuba diving and athletics.
Crates represented Great Britain in the 1998 World Athletics Championships and won a bronze medal in the 2000 Sydney Paralympics. After multiple setbacks, including injuries and illness, he achieved his career highlight by winning the gold medal in the 2004 Athens Paralympics.
Transitioning to a career in broadcasting, Danny now runs a performance consultancy called 1404, helping individuals and businesses understand high performance.
Speaking to conference delegates, Crates emphasised the importance of setting goals, having a high-performance team, and making incremental improvements.
He described the success formula as ‘the simplest maths you’ll hear in your life’ which he learned after almost giving up at the scale of the challenge when he realised how much faster he would need to get to win a Gold in Athens when he was already training as hard as he could possibly manage.
“My coach sat me down and he said; ‘Danny, if you could get a second faster every three months, you could be a champion’.
“How simple is that? A second every 12 weeks? That’s all we had to focus on. That’s how we did it. Every day, chipping away, chipping away, chipping away; every day, trying to be better than I was the day before, every day, trying to learn something and take into the next day, every day trying to find just 1%.”
And he said he also learned that the 1% didn’t just depend on him being able to run faster – it needed changes across the board in his performance – similar to a business working on productivity and efficiency.
“I knew the year before Athens, I was capable of breaking a world record. But every time I stepped on the track, I failed miserably. Why? Because every single time I stepped on the track, I had one thing in my mind, crossing the finish line faster than anybody else had ever done it before, but I forgot the fundamental part of performance to enable you to get the result you’re looking for, which is that you’ve got to do each element of the job and I wasn’t focusing on the elements. I was focusing on the end results.”
It came together for him at the British Olympic trials when disastrous weather conditions meant a world record should have been impossible.
“It was raining sideways, freezing cold and gale force winds, and I knew there was no chance of me running fast that day, so I switched my mindset, and I thought, rather than trying to run faster than anyone’s ever done before and break a world record, I’m going to try and execute as near perfect race as I can. I’m going to focus on each element of the race individually, including pacing, positioning, etc. And guess what happened? I broke the world record.”
Danny said that lesson was one he now passes onto businesses ‘ because a business will never get the results he’s looking for if each member of the team does not do their job well. Build a robust process, trust it, deliver it, and the results will always take care of themselves.”
Danny finished reminding the businesses in the room that they should always be asking themselves ‘What is your 1% better?’.
“What can you learn today you will take into tomorrow? What can you do better tomorrow than you did today? Because these 1% come together very quickly to give you these huge incremental gains, which accelerate you on your journey to success.”
Featured Image Credit: David Easton | www.FanaticFilms.co.uk