Magnetic

9Never Stop Improving

“The moment you think you know everything, you're already done as a chef. You should just quit.”

—Niki Nakayama, owner/chef, n/naka restaurant, Los Angeles

You Could Just Do This, and You'd Succeed

Many successful businesspeople (and I agree with them) believe that if you're good at what you do and there's a market for what you do, you could just do this and you'd be successful: Never stop improving.

My guess is that almost all of the people who claim that they are always improving really aren't. They may be thinking about it, and I'll bet they're talking about it, but they're probably not really doing it.

When people tell me that they believe in continuous improvement, I ask them what they did last Thursday that made them better than they were last Wednesday. It's exceptionally rare that anyone is ever anything but completely stumped by that question. They remember that last Thursday was really busy and everyone was slammed and doing all they could just to keep up with what was going on. No one really had time to actually get better at anything. And the problem is that that's going to probably be true for every day. They were too busy to get better.

Lip Service

Nothing gets more lip service than the idea of continuous improvement. Everyone is for it. It's unanimous. Everyone agrees with the idea that constant and continuous improvement is essential to staying competitive.

And hardly anyone does it.

Most people try to improve occasionally, as a project, ...