It’s in our culture and it’s everywhere we look. We are programmed to idolize and hold up successful business owners, world-class athletes, and amazing minds. What is it that sets us apart from these public figures, idols, and celebrities? Birth-right only gets you so far. How does one go from average to extraordinary? I know what it is and it’s simpler than you think.
The most successful people in their craft practice their specialization with a dedication you and I have trouble maintaining. They aren’t experts of everything; they are masters of their one thing. What’s the difference between you and legendary guitarist Eric Clapton? His fingers aren’t anything extraordinary. He didn’t come from a lineage of advanced music genetics. It’s not money and not even the tools he was given when he first learned to play. Eric grew up in an otherwise average military family and was given a cheap guitar as a gift at 13 as a gift. Once he took interest in it, he practiced his craft non-stop and was an advanced player by age 16.
The difference between talented and successful people and those who are average are the habits they build around their one thing.
Notice I said “one thing.” He who attempts to master everything, masters nothing. Perhaps you know someone who dabbles in lots of things and who is a Jack of all trades. While they may be able to fill lots of roles in your life or your business, they generally aren’t the best or the top pick for any one of those roles. Remember when working with a Jack of all trades that he comes second to the Queen and the King.
Identifying your one thing isn’t always simple. In the business world, you’re in a phase we call entrepreneurial. This is where you are figuring out what it is you do best, what stokes your passion, and what it is you do which fills a need for others. This is a normal phase in leadership development and we all must go through it if we are to identify our one thing. We don’t want to get stuck in the entrepreneurial phase for too long though. The goals is to move to a more purposeful execution on your top strengths and the highest and best use of your time and abilities. We call this the journey of moving from E to P.
Entrepreneurs tend to get stuck beneath their ceiling of achievement. They do what comes naturally to them and sometimes they do quite well… for a long time. Those who are most driven tend to go through cycles where they make changes and pivot their strategy, attempting to grown, only to hit their ceiling and fall back to what they are most comfortable with.
To break through your ceiling of achievement it takes intentional goal-setting and purposeful planning to develop a breakthrough strategy. Even then, the battle is not yet won. It takes high level of daily accountability to break away from what is familiar and do the uncomfortable activities we know we must do to break through to the next level, beyond our ceiling of achievement.
Whether you are learning to play guitar, baking pizza, or running a direct to consumer sales business, you must practice your craft in order to perfect it. When you create a rhythm, you can master whatever your one thing is. That rhythm being regular and habitual execution.
Where most habit building goes wrong is in scale alone. If you are striving to learn guitar and you task yourself with one hour of practice each day, you are bound to find yourself exhausted, frustrated, or a combination of the two, before that hour is up. If you fail to meet your hour of practice goal, day after day, eventually you will feel bad about your performance, quit, and resolve that you are not the kind of person who plays guitar.
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear describes the Two Minute Rule. Simply put, the act of executing your habit must take two minutes or less. In the guitar playing example, this could simply be setting the goal to two minutes of guitar playing, per day. Two minutes is far more sustainable than sixty and you’re bound to start going over two minutes as your skill-set improves.
In the case of more complex habits, where two minutes of execution alone may not be enough to get started, find a precursory task which takes two minutes or less, which will make execution inevitable, and build a habit around that. What does this mean?
If your goal is to attain peak physical fitness by exercising daily and your track record leading up to now shows you have not gone to the gym at all in over a year, it may be difficult to begin a daily hour long workout habit. Go smaller. It may not be enough to say you workout for two minutes even. Go smaller still. The habit could be as simple as packing your gym clothes before you go to bed and putting them in your car. This daily habit may be all the trigger you need to make it to the gym each day. If you can record a “W” each day, you’re more likely to uphold the habit. When building a new habit we must standardize before we optimize.
Don’t lose focus. Constantly benchmark your successes, re-analyze your goals, and correct course as needed. As I title my last post, You’re one habit away from your next breakthrough. What is that next habit which will put you at the top of your game?
Want to take it to the next level? Start a 66 Day Challenge. If you don’t know what that is, email me at adam@mymapscoach.com and tell me about the habit you are building. I will bring you up to speed and join you in a 66 Day Challenge in my private accountability group. Get your habit tracker below and get started today.
