In my opinion growth is the single most powerful force in our lives. Our constant desire to be a better person in the future will drive our ambitions to strive for more, more reading, more learning more knowledge. We must push ourselves out of our comfort zones each day to achieve a little more.
Some refer to it as the incremental 1% rule others talk about the fact that pain and effort deliver success, whatever the context, doing a little more today will improve the outcome for tomorrow.
Small incremental improvements continuously will build a solid foundation for significant growth in the future. Although we tend to set large audacious goals and then aim to implement leapfrog changes, this leads to burnout.
Getting one percent better isn't going to make headlines.
There is one thing about it though: it works.
Whether it is losing weight, building a business, traveling the world or any other goal, we often put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about. We convince ourselves that only large gains and major changes are impactful.
Honestly this is neither the case nor sustainable.
If you get one percent better each day for one year, you'll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.
The other way to improve is to do less wrong; this concept is known as - improvement by subtraction, which is focused on doing less of what doesn't work: eliminating mistakes, reducing complexity, and stripping away the inessential.
To make big gains avoid tiny losses https://jamesclear.com/subtraction
One sure way to ensure that we strive to accomplish more each day is to build better habits.
But why do we have habits?
In the words of James Clear (The Habits expert)
We don’t build new habits in the hope that our lives will become fully automated, repetitive, and robotic. We do it because habits are a tool for helping us do the things that make us come alive more frequently and more consistently. Habits are a method for accomplishing the things that provide meaning and purpose to our lives.
Pondering...
Steve Jobs, was certainly eloquent. He touched many with his passion and creativity for making beautiful things, and his legacy lives on through his company and the many motivational thoughts he shared with the world.
Jobs was famous for creating great products and building a prolific company. One of his mantas was: A broad set of life experiences is essential for creativity to flourish. He truly believed in learning from all the experiences life throws at you and growing as a result of them.
There have been a number of incredibly inspirational Steve Jobs quotes recorded, these are my most favourite:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Steve Jobs preached this to an eager crowd in his commencement address at Stanford University in 2005. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
Steve Jobs, Apple's legendary co-founder, is one of Time's 20 Most Influential Americans of All Time. He has made the list that also features the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Ford, Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Abraham Lincoln.
Steve Jobs could be considered as one of the most motivated and driven entrepreneurs of all time. Most people believe that it was his constant need for perfection that drove him to persevere through projects, but his biggest motivation was his desire to leave something behind that changed everything. He wanted to change the world and technology for the masses.
As an entrepreneur, you need to dig in each day and work toward achieving your vision. By identifying someone as your inspiration who has already “been there, done that,” you can find the motivation to carry on, and learn from that person's successes and failures.
Wisdom/ What I'm Reading...
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt
An excellent book to learn how to improve systems. It doesn’t read like a traditional business book. It is narrated as a story, the story is set in a production plant Situated in a dreary old industrial town.
In his book ´The goal´, Eliyahu Goldratt describes a new method to optimize production environments: the Theory of Constraints (TOC). Where traditional efficiency theories are focused on maximizing machine outputs to gain advantages of large scale production, the TOC focuses on the utilization of the Bottleneck machines only,
The THEORY OF CONSTRAINTS is based on the possibility that the output of different machines in one production process can differ from one another. The slowest machine will always determine the speed in which products can be produced and therefore also the speed in which sales can be realized, the turnover.
The Goal: Increase throughput while simultaneously reducing both inventory and operating expense.
If you don’t know what the real goal is, then you can’t figure out what to do to reach the goal. And the goal of any business is to make money.
“Doing work and making money are not the same thing. Not all work leads to making money. Much of it is wasted”
The key message of the book is to increase throughput, because throughput generates revenue. Be aware that working and making money are not the same thing. Just because production is happening does not mean you are efficient and definitely doesn’t mean you are profitable.
The issues are Bottlenecks.
Bottleneck: “A bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it. And a non-bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it.”
The whole system only moves as fast as whole system only moves as fast as the bottleneck, so it makes sense to focus on increasing the bottleneck’s capacity, and tying the rest of the system’s rate to the rate of the bottleneck, so it makes sense to focus on increasing the bottleneck’s capacity, and tying the rest of the system’s rate to the rate of the bottleneck.
To optimize the system, make the flow through the bottleneck equal to the demand from the market. Or, a tiny bit less than the demand from the market.
The goal of a business
“To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.”
My key learning from this book was:
In business, you have three primary levers – net profit, return on investment, and cash flow. You want all three levers to move in the right direction. A common mistake is optimizing for one of these metrics, which may inadvertently make one or both of the other metrics go in the wrong direction.
It’s important to view your business as a system, and the system improves when you move the three metrics the right way.
The Goal is one of three books that Jeff Bezos requires his top management team to read. In fact, he uses it as a framework for sketching out the future of Amazon.com.
