6th September 2010
"Since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well."
Henry David Thoreau
I read somewhere that if you do small things very well, big things will take care of themselves. If you study the life of any person who has achieved something very great, you will notice that underneath his success is a secret formula: attitude. Attitude makes you want you are.
Developing an attitude of doing anything extraordinarily well is an attitude. If you want to do anything extraordinarily well, you need to out that extra than ordinary effort. In my time management seminar I teach participants the difference between activities of high priority, medium priority and least priority. We can call it as ABC analysis. While an activity we classify as A is something which will make a very big difference in our life, C class items may not be that much important. I used to say that we should invest our time on A items.
While this principle is very important to decide our priorities, nearly 80 % of what we do in a day are C class items. While we should not spend too much time in doing C class items, nevertheless, if at all we have decided to do a C item, we should do it very well.
Next time if you go to a Departmental Stores, notice how the owner treats a small customer and a big customer. While he would not like to spend a lot of time with a small customer, in terms of customer service, he will treat all the customer equally, big or small. This principle is equally important when we do various activities.
For example, I am writing this piece for my daily newsletter. Tomorrow I may be writing for a leading newspaper. But the effort level for writing should be the same and this will reflect in the readability of my article.
N C Sridharan
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