The saying goes "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got".
It's not really true though.
What the saying forgets is that while you're out there doing what you've always done, other people are doing things just a little differently - which advances the status-quo, ups the average.
What the saying should be is "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get slightly less than you've always got".
In reality, you need to do just a little more every day if you even want to keep up with the world around you.
Large companies in general do this pretty well, the ones that have managed to stay around and stay profitable for any length of time all have programs in place to make sure that they're just a little bit better every day. They call it continuous improvement, TQM, Six Sigma, Lean...whatever, it's the same thing - being better every day.
It's a pretty simple concept, do something better each day - you can do this in a thousand ways that aren't difficult, they just have to be thought about in a systematic way and turned into repeatable habits and processes that you can live by. Where it gets tricky is when you're trying to get ahead - then you have to be a lot better every day, you cant just increment, you have to innovate.
Innovation is something that you have to be open to and motivated for, it requires that you lose the ego that says “the way I’m doing this now is the best way it can be done” - there is ALWAYS a better way, in some cases it’s just not worth the cost, but it’s still there and one day, it will probably be worth the extra cost.
Really good innovation generally requires deep, specific knowledge or insight brought from another place where you have deep knowledge. The deep knowledge for a lot of people it comes from university or some form of tertiary study, but if you didn't do those things, that’s OK - the law of averages and compound interest seems to apply just as well to study and knowledge acquisition as it does to everything else.
The application of the law of averages here is simple - if you learn a little every day, but you do it EVERY day, and you stack it up, consistently over time, you’ll develop some seriously deep knowledge - or a lot of simple knowledge about a lot of different things - and depending who you believe, that’s just as good for solving complex problems.
The important thing is that you’re thinking and learning, not only does the mental exercise do you good, after a while you begin to see problems in terms of other problems you’ve seen - and that’s when your average really starts to compound - and it’s the compounding that makes the difference, if you read one page more per day than someone else, that’s about 2 books per year and over your lifetime, it’s 140 books - and that’s just a page, imagine how far you can go if you read 10 more pages per day than someone else.
If you’re looking to get ahead of the people around you, you don’t necessarily have to have a better degree or higher level qualification - you just have to out average them (and then work hard applying what you’ve learned).
Key takeaways:
It's not really true though.
What the saying forgets is that while you're out there doing what you've always done, other people are doing things just a little differently - which advances the status-quo, ups the average.
What the saying should be is "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get slightly less than you've always got".
In reality, you need to do just a little more every day if you even want to keep up with the world around you.
Large companies in general do this pretty well, the ones that have managed to stay around and stay profitable for any length of time all have programs in place to make sure that they're just a little bit better every day. They call it continuous improvement, TQM, Six Sigma, Lean...whatever, it's the same thing - being better every day.
It's a pretty simple concept, do something better each day - you can do this in a thousand ways that aren't difficult, they just have to be thought about in a systematic way and turned into repeatable habits and processes that you can live by. Where it gets tricky is when you're trying to get ahead - then you have to be a lot better every day, you cant just increment, you have to innovate.
Innovation is something that you have to be open to and motivated for, it requires that you lose the ego that says “the way I’m doing this now is the best way it can be done” - there is ALWAYS a better way, in some cases it’s just not worth the cost, but it’s still there and one day, it will probably be worth the extra cost.
Really good innovation generally requires deep, specific knowledge or insight brought from another place where you have deep knowledge. The deep knowledge for a lot of people it comes from university or some form of tertiary study, but if you didn't do those things, that’s OK - the law of averages and compound interest seems to apply just as well to study and knowledge acquisition as it does to everything else.
The application of the law of averages here is simple - if you learn a little every day, but you do it EVERY day, and you stack it up, consistently over time, you’ll develop some seriously deep knowledge - or a lot of simple knowledge about a lot of different things - and depending who you believe, that’s just as good for solving complex problems.
The important thing is that you’re thinking and learning, not only does the mental exercise do you good, after a while you begin to see problems in terms of other problems you’ve seen - and that’s when your average really starts to compound - and it’s the compounding that makes the difference, if you read one page more per day than someone else, that’s about 2 books per year and over your lifetime, it’s 140 books - and that’s just a page, imagine how far you can go if you read 10 more pages per day than someone else.
If you’re looking to get ahead of the people around you, you don’t necessarily have to have a better degree or higher level qualification - you just have to out average them (and then work hard applying what you’ve learned).
Key takeaways:
- Getting what you’ve always got is fine - but in reality, you’re going to get less if you do the same things to get it and if you only do a little bit more, you’re probably only going to break even.
- Getting more comes from being better every day - working at it, systematically, out averaging the competition in the learning stakes.
- Knowledge has a time value - keep your average up and keep what you’ve learned compounding for the best results.
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