Lowering the bar
If you rated your last week out of 10, what would you give yourself? How many 10/10 would you actually give your life?
5/25/20261 min read
If I asked you to rate your last week out of 10—10 being the absolute best, 1 being the worst—what would you give it? Now, if I asked you to rate the 51 weeks before that, how many actual 10/10s would you give yourself?
How about your life as a whole? How many perfect 10/10 weeks have you actually had? If you are like most entrepreneurs, the answer is probably zero.
The problem is that we reserve the "10" for the absolute moonshots. We only hand it out when the stars perfectly align: you land three new premium clients, hit inbox zero, win the lottery, and book a dream holiday to Hawaii. We build the 10 up in our minds to be this flawless, unreachable pedestal.
And because of that, we spend our time scrutinizing the perfectly good weeks. We find a thousand reasons why our solid 7/10 could have been better. Why do we do this? Somewhere along the line, we learned that this hyper-criticism is how we improve. We think that if we give ourselves a 10, we will get lazy. We believe that withholding the win is the only way to keep our edge.
But it isn't. It is just how we make ourselves miserable.
The hustle culture says: "never settle" and always find the flaw so you can optimize it. But chronic dissatisfaction is not a business strategy. It's an emotional trap.
What if we stopped making the 10 so unachievable? What if you redefined it so that a third, or even half, of your weeks actually got a 10? You are an ambitious business owner, you are not going to stop improving your business just because you start letting yourself win.
Your Challenge: Look at the week ahead of you. What does a realistic, achievable 10/10 week look like for you? Write it down today, and when you hit it on Friday, actually give yourself the 10.
Stop holding your own satisfaction hostage in hopes of improving your business and work ethic.
