Average at Best

I’m noticing more often that successful people have a theme for each day. An example might be that they only have meetings on Tuesday. If it’s someone who creates content, maybe they only record on Wednesdays. They have specific days when they do certain things; this makes it simpler to figure out what day to schedule something. If they only have meetings on Tuesday and they need to schedule a meeting it needs to go on Tuesday. This also means that if it’s not a meeting, I know it isn’t going on Tuesday. Sometimes when I look back at how a week went for me, I notice that some things didn’t get done, and other things took me all week to finish because I didn’t have a set time to work on it. Instead of dedicating a few hours on one day, I had to spend twenty to thirty minutes on it every day. I think I have been procrastinating for so long on this because I feel like I don’t have any one thing that I need to spend a whole day on. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t have some free time every day or give myself some leeway. This way of thinking has led me to what is next for Mid-Shift Mentality. Last week I went out and created an Instagram account for Mid-Shift Mentality. The bad news is that they don’t let you use a hyphen or a dash. The good news is that they do let you use the underscore character. So, I went with Mid_Shift_Mentality for the name. If you have Instagram, please go out and follow the account. If for some reason you can’t find it, let me know. My first post will be on Wednesday, September 3rd. For those of you that know me, you will know why I picked that day. If you don’t know, we will put that down for a future article. My goal with this account will be to bring focus to every single day. You may not have a theme for every single day, but every single day you can focus on something to get better or just to keep going. I’m far from being done with adding new things, but as I said a while ago, I don’t want to do everything all at once. So, for the next few months, my new focus will be getting something out every single day on Instagram. During this time, I will also be focusing on the next thing I want to add. One of the things that I have learned over the last month or so is that sometimes I get so focused on so many things that I don’t finish one thing, and I am already to move on to learning the next thing. It reminded me of something I thought about many years ago and it led me to create a saying that I plan on using a lot over the next twelve months. Something I have learned from being in management for so long is that you will come across someone who learns really quickly. It seems like in only a few weeks they go from knowing hardly anything to knowing how to do something at eighty percent. Everyone is impressed, the person is happy and says that they are ready for the next thing. Management wants to reward them for their hard work, so we let them go to the next thing. It sounds like a win/win situation, but it’s actually the opposite. What I have seen over the years is that the person keeps learning everything to eighty percent, then they move on. In the end they know how to do almost everything, but they aren’t an expert at anything. That means that management ends up using them for emergency situations when someone is gone, but never when they actually need to get something done. Instead of making themselves into the greatest player who ever lived, they turn themselves into a utility player. So, when reviews or promotions come up, they get passed by. They get frustrated and usually end up leaving the company. I’ve talked about this before to people, when I was growing up, the grading scale in school was broken down by ten points, so it looked like this.

90-100 = A

80-89 = B

70-79 = C

60-69 =D

59 or below was failing

This led me to my new quote, I realized that being at eighty percent, isn’t really all that impressive for one reason.

Eighty percent is one percent away from being average

---- Mid-Shift Mentality Original

If your ceiling is eighty percent, you are probably spending most of your time in the seventies, that is an average person.

Focus For the Week

Get ready for the new Instagram account being active on Wednesday, I’m going to try and have it out there early. Also, look for situations where you have been satisfied with being at eighty percent. Go back and spend more time on the task and get even better!