You’re Not Good Enough (And You’re Perfect)

You have a long way to go to make the impact, money and legacy you want to. Am I right? And you won’t get there thinking you’re anything less than perfect. 

A tree constantly grows. From the smallest of seeds, some species will continue to grow for thousands of years. Lizards, snakes, amphibians, and coral all continue to grow until they die, too. They’re what the scientific community calls "indeterminate growers". No matter the size of the plant or the animal, they are never less than they’re supposed to be. 

People too, especially business leaders and entrepreneurs, are indeterminate growers. Not in the physical sense, in the mental sense. We’re designed to constantly grow in terms of what we think we are and what we think about those around us. Ideally, always expanding our sense of the world we live in. 

We cannot continue to push and grow like that if we don’t know where we are. It’s like running a race but not knowing where the starting line is. Do you know all the key metrics in your business? Building a personal practice or a business culture that’s constantly engaged with measuring sales, margins, customers, even soft things like employee and consumer sentiment is critical to getting anywhere.

Measuring what’s happening is not just one-and-done, either. It’s an ever-deepening process to get more and more specific as your business grows and you get more proficient. In my business we used to just measure the number of speaking engagements. Today, we look at things like email open rates, company inquiries, client feedback and page conversion. Tomorrow it will be an even greater level of detail, always deepening our understanding of what’s actually happening.

The ironic thing is that growth is next to impossible if you’re feeling bad about what those numbers are. Numbers and even the customers, products or sales they represent have no inherent emotional meaning. They’re just numbers. And as soon as we sink into the malaise of “not good enough” it becomes even harder to get out of bed and make any kind of difference. 

Constant awareness of where you are combined with an ever-growing mindset is a necessary balancing act. How do you bring those ideas together? Businesses and leaders that bring that dichotomy together will find success in just about anything. You’re not good enough. And you’re perfect the way you are.