Coming out of a meeting with a business associate he met some four years ago, my client observed that he was still in the same place.
When they first met, my client’s business, having just gotten started, was less than half the size of the other guy’s, but today he is more than three times his size.
When I asked my client what had made the most difference, he said: “Simple. We keep winning because we keep getting better at everything.”
“We keep getting better at our processes, better at managing our teams, better at marketing, better at selling, my mindset is better, my skills are better, and hence our business keeps getting better,” he said.
There’s not a lot of mystery to success.
The willingness to obsessively keep the eye on the ball and advance it every day will get you most of the way, but the surefire way to crush your goals is to keep outgrowing them.
Sure, there’s some probability that you do nothing right and keep winning, or that you do everything right and end up failing, but, generally, if you’re getting better, you should keep getting better results.
But, that doesn’t happen haphazardly.
You don’t improve at golf by showing up and hitting balls, but by swinging the club better each time. It’s not about one swing being better than the last, but building a system of continuous improvement to keep improving your swing over time.
Doing this, you must constantly analyze your performance, tweak your actions, methodically practice, and seek new ways to grow and improve.
Approaching your business or career the same way, you want to get clear on ways you can improve, develop the metrics to measure your performance, and then build the systematic practices for consistently driving better actions and results.
Growing this way, you are surely more likely to outgrow your competitors, but that’s not the only reward.
As my client put it: “It’s not that my business has outgrown his, but I’ve grown, and that’s the greatest reward.”