Do It Better

In my last post, I told of a speech I gave to a room full of competitors in a StartUp pitch contest. I gave them three ideas to improve the quality of their thinking and of their pitches. At the end, a woman asked me how her team could win if everyone followed my advice. I answered in three words:

“Do it better.”

I didn’t mean to be flip with that answer. There really is nothing more that really needs to be said. Assuming my advice was on target—and of course I believe it was—it was like handing a treasure map to three teams and then getting out of the way. The team that did the best job of following the directions would get the treasure.

The limitation of most blog posts (including this one), most training programs, and even most university degree programs is that they can only point the way; they can’t do the work for you. Every time I deliver a training class, I know that there will be a bell curve distribution describing how well participants will apply the ideas they learned. Out of the 90 people who heard me last week, some didn’t listen fully; some didn’t totally understand what I was saying; some didn’t fully believe me, so they are automatically headed to the left side of the curve. Of those who heard, understood and believed, they will sort themselves out along the right side of the bell curve according to how hard they work and how intelligently they apply the ideas.

The pint, though, is that winning or losing comes down to executing better than everyone else, and that’s something that is almost totally within their control.

To give a real-life example, my friend John Spence, who is an enormously influential and successful management thinker, actually failed out of college his freshman year, mainly because he loved to party a little too much. It was a wake-up slap in the face to him, so he was determined to make a fresh start at community college, and he decided to figure out what he did wrong and what he could change. The most mind-bogglingly obvious, simple and yet powerful insight he got was: the answers are in the books.

If he wanted to succeed, he need to find, remember and apply those answers better than everyone else—which is exactly what he did, and he graduated number one in his program.

We’re always looking for a new angle that will help us get ahead, or a fresh answer to our existing problems, which is why so many thousands of self-help books are published every year and so many billions of words of well-meaning advice are avidly consumed every day. But most of what it takes to win is already in the books or in our heads. Maybe what we all need to do is stop trying to learn the next new thing and work on applying the time-tested old thing better—better than everyone else, or maybe just slightly better than we did yesterday.