To transform is a significant change from the norm. It is not a small thing. It is not the same thing as improve. Improve seems to be getting better at what you already do, whereas transform means getting good at something you’ve not been doing. That’s a bigger jump.

It occurs to me that if you actually keep improving as you go, that is the transformation. I’m not saying it is easy or common — just that one of the principle lessons of transformation seems to be that if you keep improving continuously, if transformation is your norm, then transformation is a result rather than a circumstance. Transformation is self-directed rather than imposed.

Please push against this notion if it doesn’t seem to hold. It would appear that at least in the business world if you want to succeed you have to get better. The world around us changes. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes dramatically. If we stay the same as we are, we lose some choices in how to respond to the new environment. Less choices, less adaptability usually means less survival – or at least less success. So transformation seems non-optional though how we encounter it varies by choices we make and the vagaries of our external environment.

To succeed in business (if not in life), you have to get better. You could appropriately argue over the word succeed or success. Let’s hold that success is what you decide it to be. You could rightly question what better means and let’s just say that it means your definition of how a skill or situation improves in a meaningful way. No matter the definitions it seems that getting better, constantly developing more awareness and more actionable choices, is a requisite response to change.

However, not everyone gets better. Significantly better. In fact most don’t. They may get more comfortable, more competent, more accustomed to what they already do well. They just don’t get significantly better. At least that’s what the researchers say. So perhaps one day transformation will come to them and require that they change or move aside. Perhaps the pace of change will allow them to remain the same a while longer.

If you want to get better, significantly better, and if you think we might help – reach out to us. Getting better is our passion. If we can help we will. It is what makes us better. It is how we transform ourselves.

Maybe that’s true; maybe not. I think it is true. Which likely exposes some of my sense of what “success” and what “better” mean. Actually, I don’t know if it’s true or not… yet it seems worth exploring.

You could argue about the word success — and rightly so. For my purposes here, I’ll stick with my claim and see where it goes.

To succeed in this world you have to get better. You can get by. You can do fine. You can have a great life… all by not getting substantially better. However, you won’t rise above the norm in some distinctive way — unless you get better than you are today.

Because things change.

By: Mahan Khalsa via NinetyFive5::Less Nonsense. More Sales.