When you’re able to be repeatably good over time, you make yourself the outlier.

Today I wanted to recap one of my favorite blog posts . . . all credit to Steph!

How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably

By Steph Smith
Follow her on Twitter (right now!) and check out her really cool personal website

Steph’s preface

The first step in becoming great is recognizing that you’re likely not already great.

In fact, it comes from recognizing that there is no such thing as greatness at a specific instance in time — since greatness in a single instance can be reduced to luck.

Greatness is earned. It’s very difficult to earn something by doing something well once. Greatness doesn’t come from a singular event or given moment. It’s about discipline, effort, and dedication over an extended period of time.

I’ve come to learn that it’s not about overnight successes or flashes of excellence, but periods of repeatable habits.

Perhaps “great’, is just “good”, but repeatable.

It’s Hard to be Consistent

There’s a false impression that success or notoriety comes with being flashy. This notion comes from the media focusing on outliers, whether it be events or personalities which diverge from the norm.

The most sure and therefore the best way to “success” is through consistency.

Being consistent doesn’t mean you’re on the easiest path to success, but it does better set you up to win. It sets you up to win more — rather than betting on winning the jackpot.

Focus on consistently achieving small wins. These small things in fact do not need to be done in a great way, but a good way, repeatably (Don’t focus on perfection).

The described trajectory is what we perceive on the left. Predictable, linear, and a direct reflection of effort put in. — Steph Smith

Life is a series of tiny nodes that tend to look more like the right hand side.

Steph focuses on these two key elements when looking at the graphs on the right:

• Compounding is always present. The earlier steps in any process will be more strenuous, yet it’s difficult to imagine the potential compounding that comes later on.
• With the ups, there are always downs. This seems obvious, but we often forget this when we are in periods of down. We quit at these local minimums (the highlighted sections in red above), because we cannot see the next peak right around the corner.

“The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.” — Atomic Habits, James Clear

Inputs → Outputs

Your actions and results will not always reflect your intentions, but as you move towards “greatness”, you should have a better idea of what inputs actually deliver output.

You’ll still make mistakes﹣as we all do﹣but you’ll have a better grasp on what is more likely to work out.

This is so good:

The line of separation between the “great” companies of all time and the “not so great”, is their ability to stand the test of time.

Would you rather be Juicero that raised $100M and went bankrupt within a year of its Series C, or Zoom, which took almost 8 years to take on more funding than $30M and is now one of the most profitable and highly sought after “unicorns” in the valley?

Greatness comes from asking the right questions and iterating to learn what inputs drive favourable outputs, and ideally why.

Everyone wishes to elevate their life and in association, their happiness. For us to reach these top tiers, we cannot hope for this to just happen.

We must expose ourselves to various inputs that may lead to better outputs, and train ourselves to recognize what’s working.

Reframe the question . . .

Instead of “How do I become great in life?”, ask yourself, “How do I become good in life?” Then go and focus on those habits and repeat them over time. Make that your baseline.

As you move past the local minima and maxima, you’ll soon be beating out the 50% that quit at X time, the 75% that quit at Y time, and the 90% that quit at Z time.

Soon enough, you’ll be the great one that was once just “good” among the rest, but stuck with it and learned something along the way.

When you’re able to be repeatably good over time, you make yourself the outlier.