Peter Lohmann explains why founders accept mediocre employees: they've never seen A-players perform. Once you work with superstars, the gap becomes obvious and you can't go back to tolerating average talent. The daily question to ask yourself: what am I tolerating right now?
there's a quote that I learned several years ago now, and I repeat it to myself almost daily. And it's a quote by this existentialist named Søren Kierkegaard, and it's paraphrased, but he basically says, we accept a level of despair we're willing to tolerate and call it happiness. God, that's brutal. It's brutal, right? But if you ask yourself that every day, and it's hard when you're in the fishbowl, right? Because you don't know what you're tolerating. You don't know what you don't know. But if you're really disciplined about asking yourself every day, like, what am I tolerating? And that's true in your personal life, your family life, your spiritual life, your business life, whatever category you would apply it to. But in business, there's all sorts of things we tolerate all the time, especially from staff people that once you start to level up and you see like, oh wow, that's what an A-player looks like.
Like, why am I not, why am I accepting anything less than that? I've reflected often on the show and elsewhere about how I didn't realize how good employees could be. If that makes any sense at all. Basically, my bar for talent was nowhere near as high as it needed to be because I just hadn't been around high-performing people before. You know, I spent a limited amount of time in corporate America, you know, working a real job. And in that time I was not around superstars. And so I didn't realize how the, how big the dynamic range is between good and excellent and superstar. Like it's way bigger than you think.
