How to Be Extraordinary

Writing this blog every week made me think about how the ordinary can often become extraordinary. Think about the following 2 points:

1. The cumulative effective of ordinary

If you did something ordinary every day in a focussed way, after awhile it might become extraordinary. Think about writing a blog for example. If you write two posts a week for a year you will produce 100 independent articles (possibly more than some journalists write). If you decided to take half an hour a day to write a book, you could be finished before a year was up.

Try putting this into practice today. What goal do you have that has been eluding you? What ordinary action could you take every day that overtime would create something extraordinary?

Do you want to be an expert in R&D credits? Think about how much you could learn in half an hour a day for a month, even factoring in taking notes and following up points you don't understand.

2. Make the ordinary into something extraordinary

The other point I was thinking about was all the little things we take for granted - which are boring - but which could be amazing if we took the time to think about them and do something differently.

For example, do you send out an invoice on headed paper, with just a description of work done, with the same format you always use? Consider how useful this is to your client. Do they need anything else? And, as a brain stretcher, how could you make clients positively want to receive your invoice?

A real world example is on Accountingweb as well. The Practitioners Diary talks about clients who won't open their tax return envelopes until chased several times and threatened with penalties. Tax returns (and the envelopes they come in) have become very ordinary. Is there an opportunity to make the event more interesting? I wonder how much time is wasted chasing these returns, and what difference an innovation could make that 'helped' clients return their forms.

One further point is how easy a small innovation in this area can set you out against everyone else because it is an area that is 'under the radar' for most businesses because no one thinks about it. And it's alot easier to have good ideas in an area that is less competitive.

So in order to be extraordinary, the answer is to be ordinary!