Insights on Improvement Part.1

The Stone Age didn’t end because people ran out of stones.

It ended because people kept learning and improving. The desire to improve oneself is in the DNA of all successful people. Getting better has been a personal passion with me for many years. Part of that involves striving to perform better day by day, but the desire for improvement has also prompted me to study others who share this passion. That has helped me to learn some important things when it comes to improvement, which I want to pass along to you.

1. Improving Yourself Is the First Step to Improving Everything Else

A few years ago I was leading a roundtable of twenty highly successful people. One man expressed his frustration at having plateaued in his business and personal life. He asked, “How can I keep from plateauing?” As we asked questions and he opened up, we made a discovery. He was more concerned about his personal success than he was his personal growth. That was getting in his way.

Success does not always bring growth, but personal growth will always add to our success. The highest reward for our toil is not what we get for it but what we become by it. The most important question is not, “What am I getting?” but “What am I becoming?”

Authors Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus asserted, “It is the capacity to develop and improve themselves that distinguishes leaders from followers.” That same capacity is also what separates successful people from unsuccessful ones. And that ability is becoming more important every day.

The world is moving along at an incredible pace. I joked earlier about the end of the Stone Age. Some archaeologists believe that period lasted millions of years. The Bronze Age, which followed it, lasted roughly two thousand years. The Iron Age, which came next, was less than a thousand years. Each period in technological history has come faster and faster.

In the modern era knowledge, technology, and improvements continue to accelerate. Now that we live in the information age, the world is moving even faster. Economists at UC Berkeley recently calculated that in the year 2000, the total amount of information produced worldwide was the equivalent of 37,000 times as much information as the entire holdings in the Library of Congress. In 2003, the amount of new information created was more than double that. And those numbers came from the time before Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other information-generating options were available.

The bottom line is clear. If you are not moving forward, the world is passing you by. If you want to improve your life, your family, your work, your economic situation, your influence, or anything else, you need to first improve yourself.

2. Improvement Requires Us to Move Out of Our Comfort Zone

Novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky observed, “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” Instead people should most fear the opposite—not taking the step. Why? Because if we don’t step forward out of our comfort zone and into the unknown, we will not improve and grow. Security does not take us forward. It does not help us to overcome obstacles. It does not lead to progress. You’ll never get anywhere interesting if you always do the safe thing. You must surrender security to improve.

What does it take to get us to move out of our comfort zone? In my observation, it requires two things:

Handling Our Aversion to Making Mistakes

Jack V. Matson, professor emeritus of environmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University and founding director of the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education, develops courses in innovative design based on “intelligent fast failure.” His philosophy is to stimulate creativity by encouraging students to risk failure and realize failure is essential to success.

When he was teaching at the University of Houston, he created a course called Failure 101 and organized an international conference, "Celebration of Failure." In his Failure 101 course, Matson had his class build ice-cream-stick mock-ups of products no one would buy—from hamster hot tubs to kites to be flown in hurricanes. Matson says his students learned to equate failure with innovation instead of defeat, and it freed them up to get out of their comfort zone and try new things.

We can learn a lot from Matson. We need to fail quickly so that we can get it out of the way. If we’re not failing or making mistakes, it means we’re playing it too safe. Management expert Peter Drucker explained, “I would never promote a person into a high-level job who was not making mistakes. . . . Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.”

Mistakes are not failures. They are proof that we are making an effort. When we understand that, we can more easily move out of our comfort zone, try something new, and improve.

Overcoming a Life Controlled by Feelings

Legendary Baltimore Oriole shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. played in more consecutive baseball games than any other player: 2,632 games. That means he didn’t miss a single game in more than sixteen seasons! When asked if he ever went to the ballpark with aches and pains, Ripken replied, “Yeah, just about every day.”

Ripken didn’t allow his feelings—even feelings of physical pain—to overwhelm him or keep him from performing. He pushed through them. If we want to succeed in getting out of our comfort zone so that we can improve, we need to follow his example.

Improvement demands a commitment to grow long after the mood in which it was made has passed. Speaker Peter Lowe once told me, “The most common trait I have found in successful people is that they conquered the temptation to give up.” Not being controlled by our feelings means that we can face our fears, get out of our comfort zone, and try new things. That is an important part of innovation.

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Checkout Part 2 of Insights on Improvements