Being Really, Really Good
07:32am MST, 10 Jan 2007

It's amazing. Sometimes you don't know just how good a person can get at something until you watch the person who's the very best.

In fact, that's way you can identify true greatness. When something or someone is truly great, it's because they're beyond remarkable--they're better than you could have even imagined someone could be.

I was watching some footage of Muhammed Ali fighting and the way he slipped punches had me awed. He wasn't just good at it--he was so good that, looking at him, you can't help but think, "so that is how it's supposed to look!" I think that every time I watch Ali's fights.

Of course it got me thinking. When an industry or even a new sport starts, soon a few stars appear that are better than everyone else. For example, when the IBM PC first appeared on the fresh personal computing market, people were excited. But it wasn't until Apple came out with the Macintosh that people saw how far it could be taken. It wasn't a better IBM PC, it was a totally different animal. The Mac destroyed all the existing ideas about computing--that computers had to be boxy, that you had to be technical to understand one, or that computing was about typing commands.

Apple's motto in building the Mac? Insanely Great.

That's why often when you get coaching from someone who's only "good" rather than "bloody incredible and borderline superhuman," you just end up trying to perfect the wrong thing. Just as my understanding of what "slipping punches" meant was totally different before watching Ali do it right, when you try to emulate someone who's only "pretty good" then often or not you'll end up emulating the wrong thing. Imagine paying someone to train you with bad habits that make success almost impossible!

As owner of a dance company, I see this happening all the time, and this is why it's so vital to me to ensure that our teachers are trained in the best teaching methods.

One thing to remember, though, is that the best coach isn't necessarily the best athlete. Performing and coaching take different skills. So how do you identify a great coach? One good sign is that either they are the best at what they do, or they consistently analyze and model the best performers. Another key characteristic is that a great coach can identify the "myths" of the industry and justify with specifics why these beliefs are wrong. But the only sure way to know a great coach is to see who they've trained. Not only do great coaches tend to coach great performers, but even their average trainee is far beyond the industry average. So look to who's training the best.

Discovering the vital importance of learning from the best, I've started to see two strategies emerging that are essential to pursuing greatness:

• "Only PERFECT practice makes perfect." Focus on what the very bleeding edge best-of-the-best are doing, and do that. Learning from anyone else can in fact handicap you in serious ways. Learning the wrong way can actually make you "stupid" about something, by teaching you to use the *wrong* criteria for success, which is even more damaging than simply learning ineffective techniques. Learning from the best can enable you to improve orders of magnitude more than an average coach, because the best coaches and performers identify the often counterintuitive traits that ensure success.
• "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind." Always keep asking yourself, what would you do if you didn't know anything about the subject? Sometimes you finally see the stupid things that your industry is doing that only make sense to an insider who's been indoctrinated by "industry practices." And when you come up with an insight, make sure you test it. After all, maybe the industry wasn't stupid after all. You only know once you try.

So what can you do right now to pursue greatness? Stop poisoning your mind with mediocrity. Stop reading mediocre books and watching bad movies. Nourish your mind and soul with greatness. A great truly book is worth ten times its cover price. And a great mentor is priceless.

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