Ch. 39 Better Every Day

 “We already have all the facts and solutions. 
All we have to do is to wake up and change.”
- Greta Thunberg

We can imagine a world where we share knowledge and resources and care for one another. 

A world where we have innovation, create things, and build things without polluting the air and water. Where we produce food without the needless suffering of other living creatures, have healthy living soil and an untilled, productive Earth. Where we live in harmony with nature and give wildlife the space they need to live their lives in peace. 

In this better world we imagine, there is room for everyone. No one needs to be left out. There is enough food, money, and homes for everyone to live comfortably and well. People can be themselves, love and marry those they care about with pride, and without fear or threat of persecution.

In this world, We the People can get ahead instead of just getting by, and we have ownership in the economy, and a say about the world we raise our kids in. 

We can imagine all of this... Someday.

In this book, we've been clear about the fact that our plan to build a better world is a decades long (30 year) proposal. This is a marathon, not a sprint. 

Progress is not an Uber ride that you, the individual reader, ordered on your smart phone from the comfort of your couch, arriving at the click of a button to whisk you away to the destination of your choice. 

No, progress is more like a great big, crowded, dirty, double-decker bus, filled with people that you may not know and may not have much in common with. Most of the riders on this Progress Bus are not even going to the same destination as you. Some are getting off early, some are staying on till the end of the line. And you really have no choice but to accept the constant stops and starts, and the delays from traffic and bad weather. The distracting cacophony of conversations, gossip, and complaints from your fellow passengers. 

The Progress Bus is not particularly romantic. It's tedious and time consuming. It's dirty, noisy, and maybe even a little smelly. But that bus keeps moving forward, sometimes fast, but often maddeningly slow. 

However, consider for a moment that you and I have the power to not only speed that bus up, just a little. But also to make the bus itself, and the trip, a little bit better and more enjoyable every single day. 

Anyone who has read Atomic Habits by James Clear or caught one of his interviews or talks, is probably familiar with the story of Team Sky. But it's a good story and one worth repeating, especially within the context of this chapter. 

Team Sky was the British cycling team known mostly for their mediocre performances. In one hundred years, they had never won a Tour de France and won only a single gold medal, in 1908. 

All of this changed when a new coach named David Brailsford came on the scene, bringing with him his training philosophy of the "aggregation of marginal gains." He believed that a simple 1% improvement in almost everything the team did would produce unprecedented results, in the aggregate. 

For example, slightly lighter tires, ergonomic seats, and biofeedback sensors. They tested different massage gels to aid in recovery time. They learned how to wash their hands better so that they spent fewer days being sick. They even tested out different types of pillows so that each team member would get their best sleep while they were on the road. Brailsford predicted that with all of these tiny improvements the team would be able to win the Tour de France in five years. 

The result? 

They won the Tour de France two years later. Then again in the third year and had two winners the fourth year. In the next Olympics in which they competed, they took home 70% of available gold medals. 

Here's the point:

A 1% change, for better or for worse, compounds over time. If you get 1% better every single day at any one thing, after a year you will see a 37x improvement. 

In the previous few chapters, we've been talking about Project Drawdown and how every action on that list will not only help reverse global warming but also helps to make the world better everyday in sometimes unforeseen ways. For example, let's look at #6 on the Drawdown list, Educating Girls. 

Educating girls has myriad cascading benefits, not just for the girls, but for their families and the communities around them. 

Better educated girls: 

• have fewer, but healthier children
• actively manage their reproductive health
• have lower maternal mortality rates
• have lower infant mortality rates
• are less likely to marry as children, or against their will
• have lower incidents of HIV/AIDS and malaria 
• have higher wages and better upward mobility, sparking economic growth (Ch.14 Community Wealth Building) 
• have more productive agricultural lots and better nourished children
• have the best opportunity to break intergenerational poverty (Drawdown, 2017)

Educating girls is certainly one action on the Project Drawdown list that every sane person can agree is a practical and moral priority. However, every other item on the list has unanticipated cascading benefits as well. 

Every girl we help educate makes life better for the community around her. Every solar panel we help install brings us a little closer to energy independence. Every step we take towards responsibility and stewardship for the Earth allows us to live in harmony with nature and the wild. 

We build a new cooperative energy grid, one house, one building, one neighborhood at a time. We connect with our communities and together we build something better, something living, something we can be proud of. 

These small but consequential actions are how we make the world better, 1% better everyday. This is how we make our big, dirty, stinky Progress Bus to go a little bit faster and to be a little less dirty and stinky as we go. We get to know our neighbor in the next seat over. We offer to share what we have and what we know with them to make their trip a little bit easier. We talk and we share and we make plans, but we also take the time to admire the scenery outside the window. "Look, kids, Big Ben, Parliament...."

We sing songs, we write poetry, and we listen to each other's stories. 

We recognize that we're all riding the same metaphorical bus, headed in roughly the same direction. And we take responsibility for making that mostly uphill journey just a little bit better everyday for our fellow passengers. 

It's a long, strange trip. But together we can keep this progress bus moving, always towards that better world.