TOTAL READ TIME: 3 MINUTES
© Kathy J. Sotak
I’ve worked around 46,000 hours in my professional career thus far, or around 2,760,000 minutes (Note: exclusions include standard annual vacation time and my pre-Corporate America jobs).
If every hour equaled a mile, I would have walked across the Earth twice. Or, driven from Florida to Utah back and forth around 18 times.
If every hour was an ounce of metal, I’d have $1,058,000 worth of silver or $91,402,000 worth of gold.
For the majority of those hours – I’ve been pretty ordinary. I haven’t done anything truly special. Keys to any “success” are that I work hard, I try to improve every day, and I’m consistent.
Think about someone you admire. What makes them extraordinary? I bet they are for the most part – normal. Perhaps their extraordinariness is that they are Consistent. All. Of. The. Time.
Dolly Parton has written 800 songs thus far in her life. Stephen King has published 12,390,490 words in his life. I have to think they would not have had the “success” they have had if they weren’t consistent in their every day.
Every year we work roughly 2,000 hours, or 120,000 minutes. How many minutes of those are we truly doing something extra-ordinary? No offense to all of us, but I think most of those minutes are ordinary.
I’ll speak from a corporate job lens, which is where my expertise lies. Translate the following into your own career language: Most of our minutes in our career are grueling minutes. They are boring minutes. They may be stressful minutes. Those minutes we are doing business. It may be listening to clients. It’s reading emails. It may be creating a presentation or crunching numbers in a spreadsheet. Perhaps its facilitating a conversation between two different parties to gain alignment. It’s you communicating, to create a shared understanding. It’s sending an Outlook invite. Its sitting in meetings with your teammates.
It’s these ordinary minutes that is retaining business. These ordinary minutes are growing business.
Today’s reminder is that our greatness is derived from ordinary tasks, done consistently and expertly over a long duration in our career. Add on top of that James Clear’s 1% better / Atomic Habits concepts, and that is the new definition of extra-ordinary in our world.
The next time you or I want to do something extra-ordinary, like Dolly Parton or Stephen King, I challenge us to focus on the ordinary to be extra-ordinary. I believe that if we can simply do this, every day – consistently – over time this is the gamechanger.