Improve My Business

Several years ago, I saw a revival of an old musical on Broadway.  The play had everything I’d heard about during the Golden Age of Broadway - complete with a line of gorgeous chorus girls, all looking exactly alike right down to the blonde wigs.  During the opening number, when they all reached up towards the rafters, one girl had a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ - she popped out of her strapless top.  However, she didn’t change her expression, miss a step, or act as though anything bad had happened.  It was to the point that I thought that “Maybe that didn’t happen after all…” - until intermission, when all of us asked each other “Did you see what happened to a chorus girl in the opening number?” and we all had seen it.

Which got me to thinking - how many times, in business, do we blow something up out of proportion - it seems monumental to us at the time - rather than just soldiering on as if nothing was wrong?  Imagine if she’d done what I most certainly would have done - stopped in my tracks, popped it back in, messed up the number, incurred the wrath of the entire troupe, etc.  Instead, she acted so naturally that no one else (except perhaps the girls next to her) even realized that a problem had occurred.  And, the customers weren’t even sure that there had been a problem at all..

How can you apply this lesson the next time something doesn’t go perfectly while you’re doing  your work?

Technorati Tags: ignoring problems, soldiering on, wardrobe malfunction

I am a student.  I read constantly to learn how others “do” what they do.  One of the things I like about reading from ‘gurus’ is when they tell us all how they’re not perfect.  How they made mistakes along the way.  What I LOVE about them is when they tell me what they’ve learned from making these mistakes.  Sure, telling me they’re not perfect is fine; and telling me they’ve made their share of mistakes is better; but telling me what they’ve learned from it, on the chance that I can have that same learning without that same pain, is awesome.

Who do you read, and what have they taught you?  Or better yet, what mistakes have you made (that you’re willing to share) and what did you learn from it?

Technorati Tags: learning from gurus, learning from mistakes, making mistakes