I haven’t always lived up to this axiom, and occasionally have to re-learn its wisdom. It’s not easy to achieve compliance with this one.
It’s like painting a room in your home. Once painted, the other rooms look worse in comparison. Improvement in one area makes the unimproved areas look bad. You did nothing to the unpainted rooms, but suddenly they look worse in comparison.
Does that mean that improvement should not be sought after? Not at all. In fact, pursuing improvement in one area tends to raise the bar in others — and that leads to increased improvement across the board. And that translates as increased long-term profitability.
It’s a long range strategy. If you are not in it for the long haul, you won’t make it. Short term strategies produce long term failures. More »