Seeking excellence often begins with recognizing first, that we find excellence by paying attention to the small things. When I speak about seeking excellence I often ask, what is your one percent?
By one percent, I mean being excellent professionally is not about doing one thing a thousand percent better than anyone else, but rather doing a thousand things, one percent better than anyone else.
Looking for the one percent is something that we all can do. As we begin this process some of us start to look at things differently then we have in the past. Excellence in a lot of small things can make extra-ordinary changes.
I use the example of thank you notes. First of all, are you writing thank you notes? If you said yes, then there is your first one percent…..
Next question: Are you emailing those notes or hand-writing them? If you said hand-writing, there is another one percent.
Then if I asked, are you writing them on nice stationery or a correspondence card? If you said yes, then there is another one percent.
Then if I asked, are you mailing the card or hand delivering (assuming that is possible)? That may be another one percent.
We start to look at a lot of things and ask what is my one percent here….what can I do one percent better than others?
If we look a little deeper at how we are doing things, even for just a moment…we often find new, small, but excellent ways of expressing ourselves.
