There Is No Hack, No Shortcut

Anything Worth Achieving Takes Real Work

Anything great in life, anything worth achieving, any achievement that causes you to pause and look back in awe at the accomplishment… it takes real work.

When you take shortcuts, you incur debt. Pretty soon, shortcuts become habits and the debt starts to pile up. And, at some point, you have to pay that debt back.

Here’s a story that illustrates today’s message…

I am a ½ mile from my house with the dogs. They have already pooped, and I am out of poop bags. But then one of the dogs poops again. I go home, put the dogs in the house, grab a poop bag and walk back.

While I’m picking up the poop, the president of my HOA sees me and asks where the dogs are. I told him they were home and shared my story. The president smiled and thanked me for coming back. He said most people would have just left the poop there.

A couple of weeks later, I had an application in for review with the HOA for some landscaping I wanted to install. The issue was I submitted it late and it would likely sit for a month. So I went into the HOA office to see if anything could be done to speed up the review process. This was important to me because the landscaping installation, if not done soon, could possibly overlap with other events I had planned and would become a bigger issue for me as I would not be able to use my yard. Luckily, while in the POA office negotiating for an expedited review, which is a rarity with my HOA, the president remembered the poop incident and handled my application himself giving me the review and approval I sought.

Had I not had a positive interaction with him a few weeks earlier as a result of handling a common issue in an uncommon way, I would likely still be waiting for my approval.

The lesson of today’s story is obvious:

Doing Common Things In Uncommon Ways Sets Us Up To Win In Ways We May Not Yet Know When We Do The Tasks

Doing common things in an uncommon way, with purpose and excellence, is what separates average from great. And doing all the little things right means you will usually also get the big things right. In other words, we are building good habits, or a winning mindset, by believing and acting as if there are no shortcuts or hacks. There is just the path ahead.

Vince Lombardi has a great quote to this effect:

Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do things right once in a while; you do them right all of the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.