Glen Gould recalls a memo from his Slazenger Golf mentor David Brannon that challenged the idea that giving your best is enough. He outlines four strategies: set ambitious evolving goals, do a little more each day beyond what feels comfortable, measure activities and double down on strengths, and plan for longer timelines and higher costs.
Hello again, Glen Gould here. It's Wednesday, and on Wednesday I like to share with you a big tip for your business or your entrepreneurship. And remember, if you're working for somebody else, you can still be an entrepreneur within your organization. So these tips are designed to help you build your business or build your work life, because I'm a firm believer that greater freedom is found through our work. And most of these tips that I share with you are things that I've learned from businesses that I've had the opportunity to work with through my work with Chambers of Commerce and consulting over the past 30 years. For today's Today's tip, I'm going back 28 years in my business career to when I was a traveling sales rep for a company that had just relaunched its brand in the United States, a golf company called Slazenger. And I had the great opportunity of working with some wonderful people there and learning a great deal early in my business career. And one of those people was the president of the company, David Brannon. Dave Brannon was just an unbelievable mentor to me. I learned so much from Dave. Dave was a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University. He had been the president of other companies companies prior to Slazenger Golf, Dave and his friend Jeff Gorman had gotten the rights to the Slazenger brand name and had started their own company, and I was a part of that, and it was a very exciting time. This is going back a number of years, of course, before the internet, and we didn't have email. And so each week we would receive a Federal Express memo from Dave telling us what was going on in the company and how we were doing. Well, of course, we knew how we were doing. All we had to do is check our own numbers. We knew whether we were doing well enough or not. And I remember this one particular memo and I've talked about this memo a number of times throughout my life. It left an indelible mark on me. You opened up the memo and it said, "Give it your best, that's all anyone can ask." And then he went on to say, "How many times have you heard this tired old phrase regurgitated?" What if your best isn't good enough? And that's what I want to talk to you about today, doing better than your best. When you start a business, you're going to have to be better than you think you can be. You're going to have to be better than your customers think you can be, and you're going to have to articulate that in a that people will believe you and that you'll believe yourself. And then once you have employees, you're gonna have to inspire them to be better than they know how to be. Well, how do you do that? How do you go and be better than you even know how to be? Well, I've got a couple of ideas for you that I'll share with you today, but I want to go back to this memo because we already knew this memo was going to be one of those nasty messages that kind of woke us up. He went on to give the explanation that if somebody goes out in the Masters Golf Tournament and shoots 78, well, that's not good enough and they better do something about it. He was trying trying to tell us that our numbers weren't good enough and we needed to do something about it as well. When you're an entrepreneur though, when you're on your own, when you've got your own business, the only person you're accountable to, of course, other than your customers, of course, and your employees, the numbers, everything about the company rides on you. It rides on the expectations that you build, the expectations that you deliver, and everything rides on whether or not you believe that you can be better than you're supposed to be. So I promised I'd give you a couple of ideas on how to be better than you know how to be. First of all, you need to set goals. A lot has been said about goals. As a matter of fact, there was a classic study that was quoted in What They Don't Teach You in Harvard Business School that was actually not even true, but it outlined the value of goals and whether or not you have data behind it. The fact is, it's hard to go somewhere if you don't have a destination, and that's really all a goal is, is a destination that you're trying to achieve. One of my favorite quotes ever was by Earl Nightingale. He said that success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal. But I've come to realize that true success is not only the progressive realization of a worthy goal, but that that worthy goal is also progressing as you grow. You see, it doesn't do any good just to reach the goal. You actually have to continue to reset the goal in order to have more opportunity to grow. So the first thing you need to do if you want to make sure that you're going to be better than you know how to be is to set a goal that's beyond what you believe is capable. Not out of sight, but beyond what you believe is capable.. The second thing you need to do if you want to be better than you know how to be is to do a little bit more each day than you really feel comfortable doing. Now, this is hard in the beginning because in the beginning you feel like you're working yourself to death, but you've got to take that next step. And when I say a little bit more, that doesn't mean more work necessarily, although it could be, but it means more than you think that you should be expected to do in order to be successful. Make one more phone call, knock on one more door, call that one more person and ask for an appointment. Do those things that other people won't do, and you'll be more likely to be successful. Now, we've got a goal and we're doing a little bit more than we think we have to. The next thing you have to do is measure what you're doing. Make sure that what you're doing is effective, and then make adjustments on the things that aren't so effective. In the early going, one of the things that I can tell you, you probably need to focus on is whatever you're doing well, do more of it, and whatever you're not doing so well, don't do any of it. You can't ignore paying your bills and you can't ignore certain things, but what you can do is you can put that in the hands of somebody who will be able to do it well. Perhaps a family member, or you can outsource it if you have the available funds. One last thing that I want to encourage you to do in order to be better than you know how to be is to have an expectation that it will take longer and it will take more money than you expect in order to be successful. This is really harsh in the beginning, but it's better to have a plan to overspend in both time and money to get where you want to go than it would be to plan to underspend and not have enough in the tank to get there. So there's a couple of ideas on how you can be better than you know how to be. I'd like to know what you think. What do you do in order to inspire yourself or your team? Put those comments in the section below. We'd love to hear from you. Love to have you subscribe. I publish a new video every Wednesday, and of course throughout the week I also add some things from time to time. If you're a subscriber, of course, you get the information first. And if you like this content, please share it with your friends. Maybe you know somebody in business that could benefit from this information. Let them know about what we're publishing here. Share that on Facebook or on YouTube. We'd really appreciate that. So that's it for this week. We'll see you next week. Have a great week, everyone. Bye now. Thank you.
