Pursue Perfection by Getting Better With Each Step

The greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, Phidias, around 440 BC made the statues that to this day, 2,400 years later, still stand on the roof of the Parthenon in Athens. When Phidias submitted his bill, the city accountant of Athens refused to pay it. “These statues stand on the rook of the temple, and on the highest hill on Athens. Nobody can see anything but their fronts. Yet, you have charged us for sculpturing them in the round, that is, for doing their backsides, which nobody can see”. “You are wrong,” Phidias retorted. “The Gods can see them.”
Whenever people ask me which of my books I consider the best, I smile and say, “The next”. I do not, however, mean it as a joke. I mean it the way Verdi meant it when he talked of writing an opera at eighty in the pursuit of a perfection that had always eluded him. Though I am older now than Verdi was when he wrote Falstaff, I am still thinking and working on two additional books, each if which, I hope, will be better than any of my earlier ones, will be more important, and will come a little closer to excellence.
ACTION POINT: Pursue perfection in your work, however elusive.
Drucker on Asia.

The above gem was today’s daily reading in The Daily Drucker, a delightful little book with “366 days of insight and motivation for getting the right things done.”

It got me thinking about that old phrase “practice makes perfect.” We’ve all heard it I’m sure, and yet, how many of us live it out?

When was the last time you tried something, only to fail at it miserably, and then subsequently gave up on that thing?

I’d be willing to bet that many of us would be embarrassed to think of how often we’ve done that.

There’s virtue in “sticking it out.” Thomas Edison didn’t succeed at creating the light bulb the first time around. Depending on the source, he failed somewhere between 100 and 10,000 times before being successful. And yet, he never looked at those as failures, rather, he looked at them as different ways of not making a light bulb.

How can we apply this to our own lives, and ultimate pursuit of success?

Dear reader, each time we perform an action, we merely have to aim to be better than the last time we performed this action.

Want to be the best field goal kicker in the country? Make sure that each kick is better than the last.

Want to be the best piano player around? Each practice, be sure you are playing better than the last.

It all sounds so very simple, perhaps even a little too simple. After all, if success was the result of improving just a little bit each time, then why isn’t everyone successful?

The answer to that question is in the question itself. Everyone isn’t successful precisely because not everybody is looking to improve with each iteration. Some folks have the attitude “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” They will keep doing the same things over and over again, and will never see improved results because of it.

Would you like to be known for being the best decision maker in your company? Then keep making decisions. The more decisions you make that turn out for the better, you will build up your “gut instinct” and continue making even better decisions.

Measure yourself against yourself.

Remember when you were a kid, and your mom made a mark on the wall every so often showing how much you’ve grown since the last time? It’s exactly like that. Each time the measurement was taken, a small increase was noted. These increases seemed slight and insignificant, and yet over time they have lead to your height now.

If you continue to grow yourself and your abilities in this manner, then you can be sure that you’ll catch someone’s attention. Better still, you’ll best yourself.

In closing, I’ll leave you with a few quotes from Tony Robbins:

The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself in some way.
I don’t worry about maintaining the quality of my life, because every day I work on improving it.

I’d love to hear how you’ll implement this into your success toolkit, or better yet, how something like this has benefited you. Share your stories below!