Just a Little Bit Better

There's that old saying, "Don't confuse activity with results." And while that's important, all to often we confuse results with no results. Yes, I purposely wrote that sentence just that way to make a point.

There are plenty of times in live in which you can measure quite distinctly how you've done on something. That's the way life works. And even when you can measure objective success, that might not be that important in the grand scheme of things. The point here, is that sometimes it's too easy to focus so hard on the challenges ahead that we forget to celebrate the challenges conquered.

If you walked into a situation, whether personal or professional tomorrow and made it 1% better, would you be pleased with that? Most people would probably scoff at an improvement of one percent. They'd consider it a waste of time, a demoralizing failure. But what if you did that every day? If you worked just 200 days a year that would be 200% improvement. (And, no finance folks, I'm obviously not compounding here!) Now that's nothing to sneeze at.

But how do you measure these things? How can you say you've improved subjective things like staff morale, effectiveness, etc? Guess. Make an educated guess. No, it's not a fancy system. 

At the end of the day, give your self a point if you made things better, subtract one if you made things worse. Keep track for a month. The results will undoubtedly surprise you and it might just focus your goals and activity for the next day.

And that my friends, is both activity and results.