I love it when I beat an author to the punch.

This time I was reading Built To Last and started pondering comfort. (I don’t know if it was well foreshadowed, I tapped into some “collective unconscious,” or just used my Blink skills…)

My train of thought led me from comfort to contentment to complacency to a crash. I realized that my emphasis on growing does not leave much room for being comfortable. Being comfortable and content does not lead to stretching and growing. It often leads to sitting around and not getting things done.

In chapter 9 (Good Enough Never Is) Collins and Porras got there too:

COMFORT is not the objective in a visionary company. Indeed, visionary companies install powerful mechanisms to create discomfort — to obliterate complacency — and thereby stimulate change and improvement before the external world demands it.

One construct I use in my own life is iteration — a cyclical process of continual improvement. With an iterative approach “good enough” turns into “good enough, for this pass” with the certainty that it will be refined with the next iteration.

So what have you left unstarted because you “don’t have time” to do it perfectly the first time? (Ha! Perfection, another myth for another day!) And if you did a “poor” job but it was started? How much time can you “squeeze in” to do a little here or a little there? And when will it be be done? (And done well!)

Now go do a poor job of something!