Mistakes

One of my hobbies is playing Fantasy Baseball (click on the link if you would like to find out more about this game.) This past Saturday we held our 2006 draft and kicked off our 19th season.

To succeed at this game, you need a combination of preparation, execution, capitalizing on your strengths, minimizing your weaknesses and luck. Of these, the only one I have no control over is luck. Therefore I tend to focus on the others and let luck take it's course. In my experience, this is very similar to what it takes to succeed in business.

While evaluating my draft, I concluded that this was both one of my best and one of my worst drafts. The reason for this is that even though I walked out with a GOOD team thanks to a very sound game plan, I also made a MAJOR mistake that prevented me from drafting a GREAT team. And this mistake may end up costing me dearly if I get any kind of bad luck this year. You see, great teams are much better at overcoming bad luck than good ones.

This mistake I made was due to my lack of preparation in one area- I was using a new tool and I wasn't totally familiar with some of the details. While I had done my homework and was well prepared in the major areas, I did something which I often do. I neglected the details. And it just happens that not paying attention to details is one of my areas of weakness that I constantly have to monitor. And unfortunately, this time I didn't.

In Jim Collins' book Good to Great he states that "good is the enemy of great." Those words certainly were true for me this past weekend. The good news is that it is experiences like these that motivate me to continue working on my pursuit of Xtraordinary rather than settling for "good enough."