When it’s OK to be just ‘acceptable’ in performance

I’ve talked lots about how it takes being somehow remarkable if you want someone to hand over their money for whatever you are selling.

Your marketing has to be special to reach and touch the right people, and your product has to live up to the hype.

However, you don’t always have to be remarkable. You know when?

When it doesn’t matter enough.

“Many individuals seem satisfied in reaching a merely acceptable level of performance such as amateur tennis players and golfers, and they attempt to reach such a level while minimizing the period of effortful skill acquisition.

“Once an acceptable level has been reached, they need only to maintain a stable performance, and often do so with minimal effort for years and even decades. For reasons such as these, the length of experience has been frequently found to be a weak correlate of job performance beyond the first two years.” p. 691 The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.

And it not just sports…it’s anything we do where being remarkable is not the point. Just doing it at all is the point, and having fun with it.

But for your business, being remarkable (and having fun) matters because otherwise, you are out of business.

Sigh.