The Basic Basics: Go the last mile(s).
Pardon me for making the career of Will Smith into a pet topic, but I’m fascinated by his approach to the movie business: he doesn’t think of himself as particularly talented, but aims to continue being the biggest box-office draw in the world thanks to a “sickening” work ethic.
This 2006 Premiere article does a good job of capturing his mindset:
In the piece, Smith talks about the motivation he derives from wanting to be admirable for his loved ones, and from the idea that we are each fully responsible for what happens to us.
But in the business context I want to focus on the idea — possibly the most important root of his incredible work ethic — that “99 percent is the same as zero.” Or, as he put it to the Premiere reporter:
“[Y]ou’ll never achieve 100 percent if 99 percent is okay.”
This puts me in mind of something that Seth Godin wrote earlier this month in a post titled “The sad lie of mediocrity”:
Doing 4% less does not get you 4% less.
Doing 4% less may very well get you 95% less.
That’s because almost good enough gets you nowhere. No sales, no votes, no customers. The sad lie of mediocrity is the mistaken belief that partial effort yields partial results. In fact, the results are usually totally out of proportion to the incremental effort.
This matches all of my experience. Warren Buffett isn’t twice as smart or twice as disciplined or twice as hard-working as the average successful investor: but he’s made himself enough more smart and disciplined and hard-working — that critical incremental effort — to put all of his would-be competitors in the shade.
The same applies in area after area: think of Tiger Woods or Martina Navratilova or a great musician or a great surgeon and you’ll come away with the same lesson.
Back to the workaday world for you and me:
- What partway-done projects do you have lying around?
- What almost-there customer interactions are you in the middle of?
- Is there something on your docket for which you have more excuses than results?
- Are you almost a great seller / marketer / programmer / writer / manager / whatever?
What’s the missing increment — the missing 1% — the missing last mile?
What would it take to cover that last bit of terrain? How soon can you get started?
~
Related items:
- The Basic Basics — an Omnibus.
- The Talented Mr. Smith and His Money-Making Ways.
- The work ethic of Will Smith: “deliberate practice” in action.
- Are you willing to re-tool your swing?
~
Photo by Amanda Slater, used under a CC-Share Alike license.
Category: The working life
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6 Comments so far
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I think that the missing 1% is some kind of business acumen that Smith, Buffet and Woods have in each of their areas of focus. I saw Will Smith interviewed on television, last summer. He mentioned that a mentor once told him to act in sci-fi/tech films, because of the successes of films like ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Alien,’ ‘Star Trek,’ etc. Smith has achieved great prosperity with his own sci-fi fare : ‘Independence Day,’ ‘Men in Black’ and ‘Enemy of the State.’ Even though Mr. Smith’s recent sci-fi films, such as ‘I am Legend’ and ‘Hancock,’ have been less successful, I have no doubt that he’ll attain success with films like ‘Seven pounds’ and others to come.
I love the article however I have some questions to pose. Tiger Woods, arguably the greatest golfer to ever walk the planet; would he tell you that he gives that last 1%?
The story of the gigantic bodybuilder, the size of a house, still looks in the mirror and sees a skinny twirp, or feels another couple pounds of muscle and that aught to do it.
How about Warren Buffet? What drives him to make that one more dollar or one more investment. At what point does he have enough? At what point has he reached a point of success that he is happy with?
I agree, that giving your 100% is the only way to be a success, but we all talk about success as if it is something in the distance. Success is not in the distance, it is not what we start to do now. Success is a mindset that we are achieving through our daily actions.
I pose that not every minute of every day needs to be spent thinking about, working on, or pondering your next strategic move, the next big idea, or the new job. To be happy in ones skin and to see the potential of your life energy is more powerful than any one man or woman’s actions.
In thinking about ourselves and our success we often forget to give off an energy of contentment. We forget that our actions not only affect ourselves but everything around us.
Success, by the very nature of the word is unattainable without definition. By the very nature of defining what we see as successful we stump our growth and the ability to adapt.
So I say this. Make every decision the best it can be with what knowledge and experience you have. Make each failure a springboard for opportunity. Also, remember that this time is now. There is no better time to take action towards your goals, but there is also no better time to take a moment for reflection.
Keith
Good article,I used to strive to be the best at everything, in the end I gave up trying to be “perfect” as everyone else was doing great things with less effort or that they were BSing the bosses to make it look as though they were good.
I am starting to get back into that ethic of 100% into everything.
Your mindset is a big influence on whether you continually go for 100%, your mind starts making you think that if you keep pushing you are going to start pushing folks away. I tend to spend too much time thinking about what others think about what I’m doing so that makes me hold back.
Thanks for the comments, everybody.
Mike — I think Smith can live with the numbers from “I Am Legend” (45th alltime in worldwide box office) and “Hancock” (38th). True, “Independence Day” did even better ($811 million in 1996 dollars), but he’s hardly hurting. And yes, Smith has said that he’s analyzed trends closely, which is why so many of his films are sci-fi & monster pics.
Keith — Some great achievers are driven by neediness, but some (e.g. Tiger Woods) seem to be driven by the perpetual challenge to see just how good they can be. I agree with you that we should pursue contentment and happiness in our own skins. But for someone like Smith, this doesn’t *seem* (from a distance, anyway) to be lacking at all. He’s happy *and* his ambitions are still intact.
Richard — What’s interesting is that many of the very best performers divorce themselves from what others think — they live up to their own “private standards of peformance” (a line that Michael Lewis used to describe Lawrence Taylor’s view of himself).
I enjoyed reading this article and very much
Mediocrity and compromise are really bigger killers than utter failure. Failure is actually a wonderful gift and a beautiful lesson. The subtle mistakes that come with mediocre performance make any analysis difficult. Usually, I don’t even realize how mediocre it is until the time has past.
Lately, I have been trying to feed a desire to seek out and to achieve more for the success of others than for mine. There is a joy that is inexplicable in the humility that kind of striving brings. On my college cross country team, we used to say, “You be the best you can be for me, and I’ll be the best I can be for you.” This does not mean that I work for their approval, rather I look for how it is that my 100% efforts can be woven into a much larger success story.
I find this is a way I maintain a level of contentment and ambition at the same time. I don’t think they are mutually exclusive. I have seen it in successful people I know.
Maybe I am off-topic, but…thanks for the article. It inspired me to think and remember.
Thanks,
Jeremy
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