Potential is a multiplier but consistency is an exponent.
Let’s pretend that you can objectively measure your amount of Skill Level in an area of your life, or overall, and you can compare this number to your number in the past and make projections about it out into the future.
Now on top of that, I’m going to pretend that the equation above gives you this numerical measure of your Skill Level. To better understand the equation, let’s first understand the parts themselves:
The first part, Good, can best be understood as your initial skill level; it is your starting combination of natural advantages, previous experience, and current ability. This is the part that gets all the publicity and hype and you would think that it’s the most important part of the equation but in reality it actually ends up being the least important number. You can’t grow taller or change the past so this is the only part of the Skill Level equation that you can’t change, so let’s just not worry about this number since we don’t have control over it. [And yes, some people can in this pretend case be multitudes bigger on their Good number, just look at a 6’6” prospect vs. a 5’6” prospect – the 5’6” prospect has much more potential as a jockey!]
The true most important number is the Better number, or the rate of improvement as a decimal, and the most important aspect of it is that it HAS TO BE a positive number. Whether you’re 1% better or half of 1% better than you were yesterday, as long as your Better number is positive day after day, the base number will be greater than one and the Skill Level will continue to grow. So the first part of being good at growing your skills is focusing on being better today than you were yesterday, and being better tomorrow than today.
The last part of the Skill Level equation (the Best number exponent being the number of times repeated) is the boring part but it’s where the real *math magic* happens. The reason I called it boring is because it only requires one thing: show up and continue to work at it, and that can get boring from time to time. Some days you won’t want to get up and work on growing your Skill Level but if you want true transformative growth, the second rule of being good at growing your skills is that you need to show up and work every single day.
For a simple example, take someone who starts as a 8 level prospect that doesn’t work to get better each day vs. someone that is a 4 level prospect but works consistently to get 1% better each day. After 100 days, the 8-prospect is still at an 8 overall since 8*(1.00)^(100) = 8, but the 4-prospect has now surpassed the 8-prospect since 4*(1.01)^(100) = 10.8. If the 8-prospect worked as hard as a 4-prospect for the 100 days, they’d be at a 21.6 instead of an 8!
That’s it – show up ready to work, make sure you leave better than you arrived, and repeat that day after day. Don’t worry about what people say about how good you could be or not be, just show up and get better.
Potential is a multiplier but consistency is an exponent.