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Seth Godin is one of my favorite authors, unknowing mentor and personal hero. He has a great post from a couple of years ago that he quoted for his last post of 2007. His question is “Why not be great?“ To all of us that have tracked the implosion of this market, the epic shifts in business and the everchanging tides of finance, regulation, legislation and more - now is the time to embrace Seth’s advice.
This isn’t my last post of 2007; but it surely is important. Here’s Seth on something we should all do (read his whole post - it’s worth the time):
Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.
So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.
You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.
Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?
In fact, it’s a great message for whatever you do. Why not?
Hi Morgan -
I feel the same way you do about Seth, and have collected and read all his books (except the newest which should arrive in my mail in the next few days.) Along those same lines as “why not be great?” I have lately been keenly aware of noticing the rare “remarkable” (from his “Purple Cow” book) businesses and services, and comparing them to the many “forgettable” ones. (Locally, Trader Joe’s market and my Lexus dealership’s service department get “remarkable” ratings from me because they go “above-and-beyond” my expectations for customer service.)
In our businesses, I think it’s difficult to be remembered as any better than average unless we suceed in solving a last minute problem. Most times, if we are doing our remarkable jobs (of which much is invisible and behind-the-scenes), there will be NO last minute crises to solve. So how do you demonstrate “great” or “remarkable”?
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