Good to great doesn’t make you better
James C. Collin’s 2001 bestseller Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t outlined a model for turning regular companies into great ones by bringing together disciplined people, using disciplined thought and disciplined actions to build greatness that outperform their peers. Another bestseller, Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 Outliers The Story of Success spoke not just about innate ability and opportunity to success, but an emphasis on meaningful hard work to attain mastery — about 10,000 hours to be precise. For many of us, these lessons serve as templates we can adopt in our professional and personal lives. But I would be remiss if I didn’t borrow one more concept to bring us closer toward mastery: humility. Even the late Peter Drucker, the venerable father of management consulting, stated that leadership must be driven by humbleness.
Many readers know that my daughter’s passion for swimming started when she was 3 years-old. By the time she was 8, she had already finished the entire 10 levels of Red Cross Certification. Her peers are usually 3 to 4 years older than she and there’s little her mom and I can do except to keep her wet in classes building on strength training, rescue and competitive swimming until she is old enough to advance to the Bronze series—a direction she wants to go. We are fortunate in that we found the right swim school with disciplined coaches putting her through disciplined actions. But that journey wasn’t free of setbacks either as the coach insisted she repeat two levels. My daughter often competed with older kids and she goes into each heat thinking that she will lose. But every time, she comes out performing better than she had thought. She may not come in first, but she doesn’t come in last, either. By normalizing her age, height and weight, she’s actually performing at the top of her cohort. Although she certainly has not swum 10,000 hours, her combined exposure to the sport both in and out of water over the last 6 years certainly adds up. While ability and opportunities are present, through regular competition, she’s actually working on the next crucial element: respect for the competitor.
A win derived from an honest struggle is the sweetest victory. A loss derived from hard fought battle presents opportunities to learn and adjust for subsequent game play. This realization would not be possible without rivals as our performance is based proportionally to theirs; it is because of them we are pushed to our limits in ways we would not have been able to do in isolation.
In any engagement worth pursuing and especially in sports, we bring our A-game in anticipation of fierce game play. We strategize on the situation, align our resources and mobilize our efforts because we expect that our competitor will do the same. What follows is a campaign of moves and countermoves as we outwit and out-move each other for the slightest advantage. A win derived from this honest struggle is the sweetest victory. A loss derived from this hard fought battle presents opportunities to learn and adjust for subsequent game play. This realization would not be possible without rivals as our performance is based proportionally to theirs; it is because of them we are pushed to our limits in ways we would not have been able to do in isolation.
There is no advantage to be gained from trashing a rival. Pity the disgruntle adversary who denounce or sabotage the competition for a hollow victory. In the same vein, ignoring the opponents whom a participant has bested, speaks of poor sportsmanship since it was the effort of the runner-up that made a first place performance possible. If not for the efforts of rivals nipping at our heels, better performance wouldn’t have been realized.
Although these are mature and advance topics that can be studied at great length, the practice of respect is not lost on a young child. Teaching them that opportunity and hard work alone will not guarantee success is just the beginning. The road to mastery is something far more tenuous. Having good coaching and putting in 10,000 hours of effort is mere table stakes for training the individual and being great at something does not make one better than others. Even self-deprecation may also come across as disingenuous and deceitful. Going from good to great is the easy part; going from great to better is much harder. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”