“How you do anything, is how you do everything.”

It was just a simple trip to the trash cans. It was a quick goal – throw away the trash – get back inside, get onto the next task. But I noticed something on the ground, I picked it up, and it was the dryer vent. You know that simple plastic piece on the outside of the house; it vents the dryer exhaust outward. It has a simple one-way flap to allow air to escape but keep critters from making a nest in the pipe. I picked it up, and although white plastic on the outside, the inside was caked with dryer lint – not the soft easy to remove stuff -like years of caked on dust.  In a moment of vulnerability, my first reaction was just to put it back on. I thought, “No one ever sees this, when it’s installed. I don’t want to do this right now, I can just put it back on and move on.” But I just couldn’t do it. So I took a quick wipe with my hands, got the majority of the lint off, and then in another moment of mediocrity thought, “Ok. That Is ‘good enough.'”

In our business and my own life, I don’t want to settle for ‘good enough.’ I talk about pursuing excellence, yet here I wanted to settle for an ok-clean dryer vent. No, that was not me – that’s not how I am going to make decisions. It didn’t matter if it was a dryer vent or the floor for our highest end customer. I was going to do it well and work towards excellence. So I pulled that vent out and went to town. I used my fingernails, my shirt and rubbed with my fingers until every piece of plastered lint was gone. I didn’t stop just because it got hard; I rubbed harder. This whole event took 30 seconds, but I was finding that I was going to do my best in whatever was put in front of me regardless of the task.

Excellence is going to take more time; it will take more resources, it will be harder work, it comes with more frustrating moments. Excellence is not about reaching the goal, but its focus is on the journey – every move to get there. To be excellent, you must work on the first step right now. You can’t do excellent if you rush through. You can’t do excellent on Step 3 if you skipped Step 2. It’s a day-in, day-out work.

Excellence will never be for the masses. Complacency and mediocrity are what most people will work with. Without intention towards your work, this is where you will drift. The tide is the average. That’s fine. It makes excellence a rare commodity. When others say an eight is good enough, you deliver a 10.

People will talk about how they work with excellence, and we all have bright spots. But to develop this skill long-term, you need to be tested. You need situations to arrive where it’s easier not to work this way – yet you still make the conscious choice to work with excellence. That’s our choice. We welcome the challenge. Excellence in Everything. 

Heard. Watched. Read. 

• “Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work.” – Chuck Close, American Artist.
• Realizing I didn’t even know how to scramble eggs – I wonder how many other things I don’t fully understand. Gordon Ramsey shares how to make the weekend breakfast staple of scrambled eggs in a short video. I did it this way this morning, and I just 10X’d my breakfast skills.
• Everybody wants a ‘transformation.‘ Good habits are the compound interest of improvement. James Clear shares the impact of getting 1% better.