Don’t accept mediocrity in life or business

Gross, my kids yelled as I showed them the big lump of yellow wax that I had just picked out of the sink.

To me, this lump of gross wax was a relief. A few days earlier I had barley survived the flight from Rome to Dublin without screaming out in pain.

My ear had been plugged and it had felt like my head was going to explode. It was imperative that my ear was unplugged before the transatlantic flight home.

I was desperate to find a solution to my pain and I resorted to YouTube to find the answer. The solution involved a plastic bottle, a pen, and some hot water and a few days of effort but I was not disappointed and now had a big chunk of yellow ear wax to show for it.

A few years ago, I heard about a business owner who needed a fix for a high cost energy problem. He had his refrigeration company design a solution to bring in cold air from the outside on days when it was chilly in his northern climate instead of using energy to cool his products. The solution saved him thousands of dollars per year.

Recently, I was working with another business owner who was backed into the corner with his struggling company. Desperate to save the business, he came up with a solution to go after a totally new market for his product, which allowed him to reduce his labour costs and have a higher gross margin. He saved his job, his business and probably his health.

In business, as in life, we often do nothing until we are in a fair bit of pain. We let our accounts receivables slide until we need the cash to pay our own bills or we put up with non-performing employees as long as they don’t make trouble for us. We have advertising that doesn’t work but customers are still walking through the doors.

We have suppliers who give us terrible service because we don’t have the energy to discover more suitable ones. We have a business that makes a little bit of money but we aren’t ready to sell it so, we do nothing.

The truth of the matter is that most of us live with mediocrity in our lives and in our businesses. We find it easier to do nothing than to put in some effort that will take our businesses, our relationships and our lives to another level. As a result, most of us end up not living the lifestyle we want but get the life sentence we deserve – 25 years to life of mediocrity! So how do we change?

The first thing we must do is identify the source of our pain. When I am working with clients and doing a business strategy session, I ask them to tell me about the things that are not working for them right now and then I run through a list of areas in their business that they might consider modifying.

Next, we prioritize the problems. At that point, we identify all the possible solutions to the most important issue that they want to work on.

We then pick a couple of possible solutions that will get the best results and decide how to implement them.

It’s like unplugging your ear. There are a variety of ways to get the wax out including going and seeing a doctor.

However, if you have the time and energy, sometimes you can find a solution yourself. There may be risks involved in this process which need to be taken into consideration and risks need to be weighed.

Change itself is incremental but unless we take the initiative to undertake changes to reduce our discomfort we will continue to live lives full of pain and mediocrity.