How To Go From Mediocre To Great

We're going to talk about why 90% of everything that's done is garbage out there and how you can crawl out of the 90% when you look out there, most books, most movies, most plays, most features you listen to, most of everything you see is pretty mediocre. And most people do a mediocre job at whatever it is they're doing. And why is that? I'm curious if you've thought about this. Because there's a, you know, it's like a fine line between mediocrity and greatness. You hear there's a fine line between a $50,000 a year person and a $500,000 a year person and a 5 million. So what is that line? And why do most people fall in the trap? And the bottom line is, how can you steer yourself out of it? Because at all times there is a downward pull to fall into these traps. I've experienced it in a variety of things. And so what do you guys think it is?

Larry, this is Aletha. I think one of the big issues we face is you have to pay a price for anything that you do. And a lot of times people aren't willing to pay the price or they think the price is too big for the reward.

That's true. So they try to cut corners. But how about beyond that? How about the people who get so close? You really have to do a lot of work to move up to the mediocre. I used to say that mediocrity even earn the right to be mediocre. You have to go 98% of the way. Another one degree you get up to 99%, that's when you get a chance to be really good. But greatness comes in when you're maxing out. So failure so much of the time you'll see it in your own business. People fail and it's so stupid. If they were going to fail, they should have gone ahead and quit right in the beginning rather than after. They put in all time, energy and effort in. Like even businesses that fail, they do it after they've spent tons of money. Every red cent they borrow from the bank and every red cent of their pension and their savings and what they borrowed from mom and dad, brother and sister and all the neighbors and. And then they go bankrupt. So why is it people get so far in and either they fail or they come up and if they survive, then it turns into a mediocre deal. They cut corners, they don't pay the price, or probably in relationship to this, Aletha, is people that get that close. And they say, as much work as I've done, surely I should be successful. And therefore they divert onto, I must not be good enough. I must not be cut out for this. Rather than say, what is it I'm missing that I need to do? What's the missing piece to kick me over the last piece or two of the jigsaw puzzle? Rather than, I can't assemble the jigsaw puzzle. Well, obviously you must be good enough because you got 98% of it put together. That should tell you something right there.

You know, I think that doubt comes into your mind if you are not seeing the success that you want or you think you should have. And the other aspect is sometimes you just don't really know how close you are between those two. You know, caught between those two. Effort lag, I think, is what, you know, really catches a lot of people. I know. It's caught me.

Yeah, I think you're exactly right. Because you can't see. It's the old Bobby Weisson thing of the. You're at a mountain and you got a. It's the old lead ball. You're here and you're pushing this thing up the hill and. And you're pushing the ball up the hill and you can't see over it to where, you know where the top is. You do know if you let go of it, it will roll back down just like that. You'll lose everything. Like if you close the door on a store or shut down a business, bam, it's done. It's in the wind. But if you can push it up to the top, it goes from lead ball to snowball and it picks up momentum and speed. And then it's. To a large extent what you're doing is steering it, keeping it going. But right in here, where you don't know how much you got left, it's easy to give up. So you're going to be more tired, exhausted, worn out, everything. When you get to the last one or two steps, you're going to be the most frazzled. So surprise is we're down to our last penny. We're worn out, we're broke, busted, disgusted, frustrated. But if we keep on going, probably we're right around the corner from this thing, taken off. If you know that this is how it works. Of course, when you start, you're fresh, you're excited, filled with hope. That's what gets you going. But when you put all this effort in, there's going to be a work stage. You're not Going to all of a sudden have a great day and your business takes off. You're going to have a lot of time in there that you've got to get this thing going. There's no school to go. Learn this at the top. What separates the high achievers from everybody else is the mental side of it. If you can be mediocre, you can be great. Unless it's something like some kind of sports thing where somebody can run a half second quicker than you. But who knows? You might be able to do that half second if you did the training they did. Who's to say you couldn't get that half second? There's another reason why 90% of the done is garbage. Mediocre, boring things you read. There's just no pop, there's just no system. Anybody got any ideas? Hey, Larry, it's Andrew. Maybe one of the reasons is that they stop improving. There you go. And that has to do with all these cutting corners, backing off, stop improving. What else? They won't try new things, so they stop trying new things. Anybody else?

I think what happens is it's the way they see themselves. You talked once about the environment you grew up in, and it kind of programmed. You get programmed a certain way, maybe for your first 18 years, you're being programmed by your parents, teachers, things like that. And a lot you talked about once about how winners see themselves if something isn't working. They see themselves as not damaged. They don't see themselves as damaged. So I think a lot of that has to do with the way you see yourself. And, and that's why I think the mental toughness, training and the exposure. If you take children and you expose them to different cultures, different people, not just in a book, but you take them and expose them to different things, they grow up seeing themselves different. So I think a lot of it has to do with the way they see themselves.

That's true, too. That's true, too. What else? I am curious, David, why you hear from people. It's hard for me to believe that's true with everybody. When you have an opportunity for people to be financially independent or to have a business of their own. And they say, yeah, that's what attracted me, that's what drives me. That's what turns me on. That's what I want to get. And then five, 10 years down the road, they had some momentum, they had some success, but they really kind of topped out at a mediocre level compared to their potential. And to me, you ask them, why did you? You said, well, I never saw myself as being really big. Like, what are you talking about? Why didn't you even try it? You know, what was all that conversation when you came in? You wanted to do it big. You wanted to your own business, you wanted a big income. You wanted a chance to show, you know, to compete and show people how good you could be and have the freedom to build a life was extraordinary. And then now you're telling me that somehow you're programmed, that you never really believed that was true. What do you, you know what is true? What you said when you came in and out. I have trouble understanding that, David.

Yeah, and it's, it's championship coaching and championship competition while that desire is there, you know, so life has a way of just beating me down. And you need someone in your life or that inspires you or reasons that inspire you. So I know for me, I can only talk from my own personal is like, I've always seen myself doing better, but I needed the championship coaching, keep growing, keep getting better. An environment where it's okay to fail. You know, those kind of things helped me realize, hey, I'm as good as that guy over there. Number one is no different than me. And it was me seeing myself. They're beating me, but they're beating me for a reason. They're doing something I'm not doing. They're getting more done. It's not that they're better than me. They're just getting more done in the hours allotted. And I just, I can learn from them. I could take what they're doing and apply it to my own life. They're not better. See, that's the whole thing is once I got it in my mind, they're not better.

They just got a bigger team.

They just got more people. If I do that and I do a little bit more of this and a little bit more of that, and I just. And I learned from my own mistakes and then my own numbers, my own mistakes could give me feedback. I could make adjustments quicker. I don't have to wait. Then you're all of a sudden because, you know, it's like the cheese is not so far away, so the mouse will pull harder because it sees a chance. So it's those small goals too, you know, it's like small goals. I'm going to have, you know, three, four, five, six small goals a day so that I feel like I'm making progress. So with the way you feel about.

Yourself, what happens is you find out about yourself in the beginning. You think, unbelievable. I want to be the number one golfer in the world, yada, yada, yada. But then you find out how much work it is, and you find out what that really entails. You become like Bill Arinder. And Bill Arinder, you know, he's always making the funny observation, but he said. He said, I always thought I was a competitor. But he said, once it got into the real heat of the battle, he said, I found out I was just really jealous. I thought I was a competitor. I was going to go out there and beat everybody and get what they had and build that for myself. And he said, when I got in the heat of the battle and found out what it took, I found out, no, I didn't really want to compete for it. I just wanted it. But if you have the ability, a lot of times you give up because you run out of ideas. I want you to think about this. Here's why a lot of those things come in. When you start off, you have a prize. Whatever it is you want to do, it's a championship or you got a goal, you're sitting down here and your eyes are looking right at that thing. Here's why most people don't get there. Speed. They don't go fast enough. They don't race to it. You got to run down your dreams, folks. One of the first posts I put on the website was, you can't walk down your dreams. You got to run down your dreams. You run to glory. That's why it always seems like, what, an overnight success. Well, it might have taken you 20 years to get prepared to where you could run them down, but when it comes go time, you know, it seems like, you know, you run up the ladder, you burst out of nowhere. Bam. And people say, wow, Never heard of you before. Never knew of you before. Unbelievable. Yeah, they didn't know what was going on back here. But see, when you start, you got your eye on the prize. All you're thinking about is getting there. Getting there. You're not worried about all the jumbo mumbo that's in here. But here's what happens. In my experience, the road to the top does not go like this. It goes more like this. See, you're looking here, but you notice how the success comes slower than you expect, doesn't come as fast. So you're thinking this, you're working on that, but it's going to be more like this. That's more like how the road to the top goes. It starts slower. Now, the reason most people quit is the last little burp they Forget about the momentum they got, like what you were bringing up at the end. The resources, the leverage is in it. They forget about that. They just think about how far I've come, how much harder I'm working, how hard this last little bit thing has been. And then they start to slow down. See, here they're racing the other eye and they're racing. They lose their focus and you start looking around and start wondering. Whenever you slow down, it's death. Because thoughts come into your mind that are bad. See, why do people get so much done at the end of the month? Why are people so end of month if they're going for a bonus, a promotion, a contest? It's unbelievable how focused they are. Am I right? They know how to work like that because they do it during the go time. But see, at the end of the month, you're racing. You're not wondering and thinking because you clearly have screwed around so much. You ain't got time for that. You are hammering down, you're driving the car as fast as you can go, you're cramming in as many appointments, you're pushing things to the sideline. That will be interruptions because you got that deadline. Clearing your. But see, when you're trying to do something you've never done before, as you get into the final assault, all these questions, the temptation. See, again, you're more worn out. It's more complicated than when you started. When you started, all you had was this. It was a wild dream, a long shot, and so just give it a try. But now you might actually get there. Now you start wondering and thinking and all of these things slow you down. What usually happens is the closer you get, the more people lose focus, the more they get distracted, the more thinking they start doing. No, see, you get things done by doing. The thinking is done when you're starting. And then you might make some adjustments, but you make quick adjustments. But you've got to keep doing, doing, doing, doing, doing. When you slow down, you move from less doing to thinking and then wondering and then distractions. And that's where the thing comes in about, well, am I good enough? Do we have time? And then you start worrying. As a result, you don't pull it off. The closer you get to the line, the more you've got to go into this. More focus, more work, more driven to mentally tough in terms of, I'm not going to get sidetracked now. I am racing this thing down. I've got the rest of my life to worry about stuff like that. Right now, we are going for it. But what it does is when you move fast, you concentrate on getting it done. That's how you can pull off the impossible. When you race to it, how fast can you do it? Not can you do it, how fast can you do it? Because unless you die or quit on me, you go and do it. The test is, are we going to drag it out and make it like an annoying homework assignment? Are we going to do it, make it fun, make it exciting by getting it done fast. And set a record so you can challenge the people that come behind you to see if they can match you, See if we can make a name for yourself while you're doing it. And that's why most people, they move into the logical mode. See, like writing, even the writing of books and writing plays and doing movies and doing artwork, they over when things are done fast, you have a spark of inspiration, excitement, the thrill. They know the details, but it sizzles when you go slow. You're worried about the logic, is it making sense? And you slow down and you overwork it and you overanalyze it. What happens is you suck the life out of it. All of your meetings, whatever the content, need to be fast paced. They need to move. You need to be buff, buff, buff, buff, buff. Don't worry about explaining every detail. They never remember the details anyway. They're not going to remember hardly any of the words they hear. They're going to remember the spirit. It's like a song. They remember the melody, they remember the beat. They do not remember the words they might give hey, Marc arena or something, or who let the dogs out. Other than that, they don't remember nothing. But they remember the fun of it, the excitement, your job to drive it and keep it moving. Because what you do is you're maintaining the excitement and the energy and the inspiration and the dream and the thrill of it. And people wind up working five and 10 times harder than they're even aware they're working because it's an adventure. But when you slow down, every appointment is like pulling nails. That's when you're doomed. And so the trick is to not just get where production is high, get it to where that enthusiasm and excitement is high. And from that, you get all the production and the results. Speed drives the excitement. Most people, they never amount to much because they slow down, they lose that sizzle. And the sizzle is what attracted the men to begin with. You can get more done by accident when you move fast than you'd ever get done by design. And that's where the excitement and the. The thrill comes from.