Never Settle For Less

A million and one things call for our attention each day.  From the time you wake up until the time you lay down you’re on the go.  With this kind of load its tempting to give a mediocre effort in order to slide some things off your plate.

Wait!  Before you do that allow me to interject with The Top 3 Reasons to Give 100%.  You may just change your mind.

1. Time

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Time is our #1 asset.  It’s the one of the few things we can’t control or ever hope to recover.  Once a minute is gone its truly gone forever.

With that said you may be asking yourself this question “Isn’t giving less than 100% in the best interest of my time?”.  Intuitively, this seems right.  You can “get something done” and get it off your plate.

There is a major problem with that mindset.  Half done tasks, workouts, projects, or other undertakings ALWAYS come back to bite you (often as even bigger issues).  I struggled immensely with this issue when I began my engineering career.  I constantly felt overworked and over tasked.  Instead of stepping back and analzying my situation I would do what I know now is the worst thing imagineable.  I’d put about 50% of myself into my projects so that I could clean out my task list.

The cycle would look like this:

• Put 50% of myself into my projects to clear my task list
• Pass the half completed work on to my manager
• Celebrate that my plate was empty!
• Get a storm of emails from my manager explaining what I needed to repeat
• Curse, whine, cry, sigh
• Start each half done project over from scratch

Dejected I’d trudge back to my desk and begin again.  This time I’d have even more to work on (the old 50% workload plus the new workload that comes with the territory).  After a few more trips in the repetitive workload cycle I realized that I was wasting a good chunk of my productivity churning out useless trash.

Although it may feel that putting 50% efforts into your projects is ideal it almost never works.  Inevitably the tasks that you slight will come back to you and you’ll have to start over from scratch.  In the meantime your most valuable asset will be wasting away.
Place a high premium on your time and spend it giving 100%.  Using 100% for one hour is a lot better use of your time than giving 20% for 5 hours.  Do the math.

About a year ago I had a terrible experience at one of my favorite restaurants.  The entire experience was terrible:

• The waiter was dressed in sloppy clothing
• A couple that came in 15 minutes after me received their food 10 minutes before me
• The silverware was dirty
• My food was undercooked
• The waiter took our orders incorrectly
• The assistant manager (the mangager wasn’t there) was extremely unapologetic for the entire ordeal

Before that experience I was easily spending $40 a week behind those doors. Over a year’s time thats $2,080 in revenue to a local restaurant.  I haven’t been back since.  If they lose 9 more people just like me (very likely based on the conversations I had) then they’ve lost $20,800 of annual revenue.  I’m sure the owner would much rather have the $21k.  He could’ve easily retained that money and received new customers through referral (I love to share good news ) had the restaurant been staffed with people who were putting their best foot forward.

I’ve never hidden my goals of being a professional speaker and writer and I won’t do it now.  By day I am a Supply Chain Environmental Health and Safety Analyst and at night I work on my speaking/writing career.  Since I’ve started to take my speaking and writing (blogs/poems/seminars/short stories) more serious I’ve run into a dilemma that fits perfectly into this article.

Working a full time 9-5 in a large company is very tiring.  I often have ideas zooming around in my head during the day that I can’t wait to come home and express.  Sometimes I’ll settle in to start writing and everything will flow like fine wine. Other times I’ll sit down and feel tired, lethargic, and my creative spark will be nonexistent.

I’ve forced myself to produce things for the sake of producing them a few times during my slumps.  The result is always the same…a very poor piece of work.  I feel vindicated for a short period of time before I realize that I’ve churned out some trash.  As a result I’ve stopped  writing or planning when  I’m obviously not up to giving 100% of myself.  The combination of providing poor value and conciously knowing that I’m pumping it out is enough to make me stop.
Anything you do from working out to writing is worth 100% of your focus.  Only then can you provide and receive the value you truly deserve.

3 - Carry Over

Think about 5 people that you know.  Whats your impression of these people?

Which ones do you consider to be:

• Hard Working?
• Dependable?
• Honest ?
• Decisive?
• Enjoyable?
• Lazy?
• Unreliable?
• Liars?
• Indecisive?
• Pain to deal with?
• Courteous?
• Jealous hearted?
• Vengeful?

Now look at the answers you’ve either written or mentally placed next to each question.  Notice a trend?  If not, keep looking.  The people who have the traits you desire (hard working, honest, enjoyable) don’t have many of the traits you don’t desire (vengeful, lazy, unreliable).  Attitudes and personalities transfer across all aspects of life.

It’s very rare to see a person who is a hard worker develop a serious lazy streak.  It’s equally rare to see a very lazy person sustain a hard working streak.

Ever met a royal pain in the butt who was also the most courteous person you ever met? I seriously doubt it

Do you have any extremely unreliable but extremely enjoyable friends? I have exactly 0
It just doesn’t happen.

If you begin to give 100% in one area of life you’ll soon be doing it everywhere.  Doing so will in turn give you more Time (1) to provide the Output/Value(2) important to you and those around you.

Anything worth doing is worth doing at 100%.  Never has a situation existed where this statement wasn’t true and the situation never will.  Once you begin to go at full tilt you’ll enjoy

1. More Time
2. Better Output
3. Carry over into other parts of life

I hope you enjoyed it.

If you like this blog please bookmark this page or RSS subscribe.  To RSS subscribe scroll to the bottom of the page, click on entries RSS, and selec the page you’d prefer.  Thanks for reading and have a great day!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Training, Personal Development, Dedication, Life, Success, Heart of a Champion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.