It's Just a LIttle Better

I've begun to notice a pattern recently. High performance people, machines, and processes all operate using different scaling than your average person/machine/process.

Your average person manages their time in hours if they even really think about it. High performance people from what I have seen however, manage their time in minutes.

Cheap plasticrap consumer products have tolerances measured in thousandths of an inch compared to some parts of fighter jets that have tolerances measured in microns (millionths of an inch).

Processes that have been allowed to bloat and float along can be measured in months or even years. Processes that have been honed and automated can take microseconds.

This is all rather obvious. We all know that top performers squeeze all the performance they can out of everything. What I am beginning to suspect in all this though is that the difference between top performance and average is not that big. At least not at first.

Let's take Bob and Jim. They are salesmen at ACME Widget Corp. Bob isn't lazy, but he's not a huge go getter either. Jim isn't much different than Bob, but he does have try to put a little more oomph into his work. For the first few years of their careers Bob and Jim look just about interchangeable. Jim's sales are a little higher, just a few percent. Over time though Jim improves his call cycle times. Not dramatically, but he makes 45 calls a day to Bob's 40.

Jim also works on his pitch and bearing so he starts closing more sales. 22% compared to Bob's 20%. Jim also learns the options a little better and so he upsells a little more than Bob. All the differences are small. Just a few percentage points. But at the end of the year the boss looks at their sales figures to see who to promote and finds that Jim sold more than 35% more than Bob. Jim gets the promotion.

A few percent here and there add up really quick. Life isn't linear. Small improvements stack and stack and often lead to huge jumps. So spending that fifteen minutes goofing off on your phone isn't important, but that fifteen minutes three times a day for ten years could have been a promotion. Buying that coffee doesn't matter, but buying several a week for ten years might have been that boat you always wanted.

So sweat the small stuff. That's where high performance hides. Your big break isn't coming, you have to build it.