Preparing For “Pretty Good”
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 18, 2011
Later today I'll be doing a webinar on the overall subject of health care pricing. It's a presentation geared for one company specifically, although it's a presentation I could give to almost any health care group if they were interested in it.
Something I do as a professional is to rehearse whatever presentations I happen to do. I do this for a few reasons. One, I want to make sure I remember my material, even with the Powerpoint part to help me stay on track. Two, I want to time myself to see where I stand based on the amount of time I'm being given to do the presentation. Three, I want to try to shore up any language issues I might have, which happens when I think that something I wrote pertains to one thing when it actually pertains to something else. You might laugh at that, but it can happen more often than you might think.
One thing I don't do is try to prepare to be perfect. Perfection is a dream that no one ever reaches. Sure, gymnasts might get a perfect 10 here and there, but those are arbitrary numbers by the viewer; if you ask any gymnast about their performance they always think they could have done it better.
Something my friend David Goldsmith once talked about in a seminar I went to was this concept of winning, and how most people get it wrong. He said that winning isn't always crushing the other person; as a matter of fact, it's rarely about that. What it's about is doing enough to beat whomever you're competing against. It's the concept of winning "by a nose". If you made $17 dollars selling newspapers and your opposition made $17.25, all that mattered was the higher number and nothing else. Whereas we all shoot for the moon, in reality all we have to shoot for is being better than the next person, in essence, being "pretty good" rather than perfect.
This doesn't mean you don't try your best. It does mean that you don't have to be all consuming in your approach to anything. You only have to be better than the next person. Now, if that takes you giving everything you've got, then that's what you have to do. But for most things, being pretty good will get you over the hump.
Just something to think about as I rehearse some more in trying to be pretty good when I give the webinar.
We all strive for the best at all times. Or well, we should, it’s normal not to feel you gave 100% if you’re passionate enough about what you do, if you care about what you do, so to say. There’s nothing wrong in aiming for the best but you have to keep in mind, as you say, you’ll most likely end up with a “pretty good”, which is more than enough.
Definitely Gabriele. And when it was on the line I delivered and gave a better performance than my rehearsals were going, and that’s the most important thing. Was it perfect? Not in the least, but it was very good and they got out of it what they asked for. Can’t be much better than that.
Ok,I’m a few days late…hope your presentation went well!
Yes it did, Carolee. Not as much fun as when I talked about blogging and the like, but it was fun in its own way.