Getting it right…

I love stories about superior performance.  Behind the accomplishment (which everyone sees) lies the effort; the practice; the coaching; and the commitment (which only the performer sees). 

Success is uncommon and not to be enjoyed by the common man.  I'm looking for uncommon people because we want to be successful, not average… Steve Kerr of the Chicago Bulls shot five hundred free throws a day to make himself uncommon.

Tony Dungy

Superior performance is easily associated with sports.  Athletes’ accomplishments are televised; commentated on; entered into databases for the data analytic aficionados.  Yet uncommon success spans every walk of life.  Perhaps even those behind the data analytics:

    Jean P's story illustrates both the irrelevance of average and the growth potential of talent.

    For data entry roles, the national performance average is 380,000 keypunches per month, or 19,000 per day.  Many companies use an average performance measure like this to determine how many data entry employees they need to hire... the top-performing data entry employees make a mockery of the national average...

    Jean P. is one such employee.  When she was first measured, she averaged 560,000 punches per month, already 50 percent above the national average.  She was recognized (by her manager) for her performance...

    ... Three months later she hit a million keypunches...  A couple of weeks later, Jean checked ... and saw that she had managed 112,000 keypunches in one day...  She and her manager put a plan together, and six months later she soared past 2 million.

    Jean became a model for her role.  Her manager spent time watching her, asking her why she loved her work so much ... He designed a talent profile to find more like her and a compensation plan to reward her excellence.  Today, Jean's personal best is 3,526,000 keypunches in a month, and the average of all the data entry employees working around her is over a million."

Marcus Buckingham

I’d call that superior performance!

Uncommonness isn’t always scored or commentated on.  In his book, Getting Past No ©, William Ury shared his passion for performance:

In working on successive drafts of this book, I often felt like the opera tenor whose finale was greeted with enthusiastic, cries of Encore! Encore!  After the fifth encore, the tenor asked the audience, 'How many more times do you want me to sing?'  And the answer came back: 'Until you get it right!'

Ah yes…  getting it right.  Uncommon performers share that standard; a passion for getting it right.  No matter how long it takes.  No matter what the effort entails.  Uncommon performers are driven. 

Perhaps you can relate because you’ve achieved a level of uncommon success in something you’re passionate about even if it’s not televised, scored, or entered into a data analytics database.

Here’s a Mile Hi Salute for your uncommon, off the charts, performance and all the effort behind the scenes it takes to get it right!

GAP

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.