Tuesday, February 23, 2010

No Effort Required In Being Ordinary

I had a quote of mine make its way around Twitter this week. The quote was, "There's no effort required in being ordinary."

Maybe that's the reason why we are overrun with mediocrity, ordinary, sameness. There's no effort required in just being good enough. That's easy. That's why there's so much competition at the mediocre level because almost everyone competes at that level.

The stretch is when an individual or a company makes a decision to move toward "greatness." That's when everything changes. That's when it get s hard. That's when the scrutiny of those who would throw stones (the secretly envious) arises and that's when you hear from the naysayers in your life, all of the reasons why you can't do it.

"You can't increase your business in a recession."

"You can't have a banner sales month in a market downturn."

"You can't risk renovating your house when jobs are tenuous."

"There's no such thing as a perfect relationship."

"Blah. Blah. Blah."

You can do these things and you most certainly will do these things if you have made the decision to stop being ordinary and strive for greatness. The sideline critics are just too lazy to get off their fat asses and do it themselves and they know it. You're embarrassing them and they will complain about it.

There is no effort required in being ordinary. That's why there's so little competition at the "Greatness" level. The people and companies willing to do whatever it takes to be the standard to which every mediocre person and organization will measure himself are very few.

There's hardly been any effort needed to get your results so far, huh? That means you're capable of more but you're not even trying.
--
Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Richard,

Perhaps one of the causes, from the standpoint of the consumer society today, is that one need not be good (or even stress) to have more income or to have greater social and professional or live with a higher level of ness; just enough to be mediocre and slightly more clever than others.

It recognizes that makes the most with minimum effort "that guy smarter ... My dream is to be like him; he is a real winner ..."

"Work? Effort? ... And others will not know what to do in your spare time. I have the money and free time necessary to spend ..."

"Risk??? Another one bites the dust..."

"Change my way of....in order to improve my out put and income? Ha, ha...!! Are you going to teach me? And, if you do, why don´t you also teach yourself?

So the question is: How to change this globalized mentality ?

Best regards.

Manuel de Diego (LinkedIn)