Good To Great

This is a phrase I remember fondly because it was a tag line for a few years of my career. Other phrases like ‘clear blue water’ still make me smile.

But there’s something to be said for the ‘Good to Great’ phrase because it shows movement and willingness to improve to become better. So for me this is a phrase that we can and must apply to our lives.

Let’s not get hung up on the actual words; instead we should think about the process that sits behind those words. It’s the desire and process of continuous improvement.

In a couple of weeks, it will be three years since I started my PurposefulMe Blog and I can definitely relate to this phrase because it has been steady progress over the past three years.

I am challenged by a quoted from Jim Edwards which says, ‘Before you can be great, you have to be good. Before you can be good, you have to be bad. Before you can be bad, you have to try. You have to do something.’

My Blog definitely started as ‘doing something’ and looking back, there are some elements that were cringeworthy in the early days, visuals could have been better as well as layout. The entire website was created by me with zero web design experience.

Well I didn’t stay at that point, I moved forward and for the second anniversary, I got a professional to upgrade the website which took it to the next level. And the journey towards excellence continues.

So my questions for you this week are as follows:

What do you need to become great at doing?

Maybe you are already good at something and you’ve started to build a good reputation. If so, well done. So how do you move to the next level? What and who do you need, when will you start, how will you go about it? Draw up your plan to move towards ‘great’.

What do you need to become good at doing?

Perhaps you already know that you are bad at what you are doing. This can easily apply to us when we are learning new skills or starting to deploy skills on a larger scale.

A homemaker could decide to start a cake business and we all know that a ‘good enough for the family’ cake is different from a ‘paid for cake’.

Moving from bad to good starts with critical self-assessment and us being honest with ourselves. This acknowledgment and acceptance must be followed by a willingness to learn how to become ‘good’ at our craft.

What do you need to become bad at doing?

Being bad at something requires us taking a risk, accepting that we would be bad from the start because our starting point is ground zero. I would love to be able to draw and know for a fact that my first attempts would be laughable at best.

But I must be willing to be bad at drawing if I will ever have any chance of being good at it. Same applies to you.

Do something

What is that something that you must start today even if ‘try’ is the only word that is appropriate for it?

We all have a list of these things starting with skills we want to learn, languages we want to pick up or connections we want to make. Some people are very bad at making conversations and shrink into a corner during events.

How about at your next event, you make a decision to ‘try’ and talk to somebody starting with introducing yourself and showing interest in them.

Whatever you decide to work on, the important thing is not to immediately become the Picasso, Oprah or Bill Gates of that field. Your goal is simply to move through the stages.

Remember the journey ‘From Good to Great’ involves passing through the stations named ‘Try, Bad, Good and then Great’.

Excellence and perfection are parts of a continuum that starts with the mindset that says ‘I will start and keep going, getting better each step of the way’.

Thanks for reading my post. Have a fantastic week.