Kaizen

Principle #18 – Commit to Constant and Never-Ending Improvement

The Japanese calls it “kaizen”.

If you want to be more successful, you need to learn to ask yourself, “How can I make this better? How can I do it more efficiently?” And so on.

The problem with most of us is, the moment we set our sight on our ultimate goal, we tend to want to achieve it so fast that we get ourselves paralyzed by the humongous gap between where we are now and our ultimate goal. If we could just learn to begin in small, manageable steps instead, we would have given ourselves a greater chance of long-term success.

One of life’s realities is that major improvements take time; they don’t happen overnight. But because so many of today’s products and services promise overnight perfection, we’ve come to expect instant gratification – and we become discouraged when it doesn’t happen. However, if you make a commitment to learning something new every day, getting just a little bit better every day, then eventually – over time – you will reach your goals.

Consider this interesting statistics:

In professional baseball, a player who bats an average of .250, or 1 hit for every 4 times he comes to bat, can expect to do well in the majors. A player who bats an average of .300, or 3 hits for every 10 times he comes to bat, is considered a star player. 

Statistically, the difference between star players and average players is only 1 hit out of 20! The margin of greatness is only 1 more hit out of 20! 

This shows that it takes only a little extra bit of performance to go from good to great.

Whatever your goal, decide where you want to improve, and what small incremental steps you’ll need to take to achieve that improvement.

If you do, you’ll enjoy the feelings of increased self-esteem and self-confidence that come from self-improvement, as well as the ultimate success that will inevitably follow.

“He who stops being better stops being good.” ~ Oliver Cromwell