Rise and Shine

Go the extra mile

Many people want to be successful at work and in business but they put in average or even less than average effort. It is not possible. It is all down to hard work especially hard work that makes you to go the extra mile.

Even in football, we learn it all the time, that most of the big name footballers like Ronaldo, Sanches and so on spend far more time in training than their peers. Talent aside, the great footballers pump in hours and hours of training. We hear some of the players remain behind in training doing an extra one or two hours of training every day. That way, they go the extra mile and no wonder they do much better than their peers.

When I was in secondary school, at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Rumphi, we had two great players in my class—Matthews Kasote the striker and Moses ThosiMvula the defender. They both had amazing talent, which of course, cannot be spotted today due to age! However, behind that talent, there was an immense measure of the love for the game, passion and above all, the zeal to go the extra mile.

Thosi used to play with the ball most times when he was free. Kasote loved to watch videos of world cup matches. He would pause the video and then go out of the video room and practice the new dribble he had watched on the screen. By doing this many times, he would shine during big matches as he would showcase the dribbles that no one had seen in Rumphi or Malawi, imported from Brazil, Italy and Germany via the local video he watched at the seminary.

This is how the two classmates got to the prime levels of football. Apply this principle to what you do, be it business, work or even academics, then you will find that you will excel far more and faster than if you aim for averageness. It is simple: average effort is likely to produce average results. And from my experience, you can do things smarter with less effort only after you have invested a lot of effort before.

For example, it would take very little time for Ronaldo or Messi to learn a new dribbling technique partly because they are talented but mostly because they invested a lot of time in the past in learning football, which makes their learning of the game very simple and quick.

Let us now relate this principle in the set-up of work in offices. You find someone who wants a promotion at work but comes to work at 8 am instead of 7:30 am and knocks off at exactly 5 pm. How can you earn a promotion when you are simply doing the bare minimum required of you. A promotion in this case may only come by accident or as an appeasement or someone feeling sorry for you. Not as something you have earned.

When I mentor workers and they want promotion, one of the first things we examine is the number of hours they pump into their work and productivity. You need to increase both the number of hours spent on work and the amount of work you produce per hour.

This way, you will truly go the extra mile. Imagine a person working as a shopkeeper and closes the shop at 6 pm, while 5 customers are outside and wanting to come in and buy goods. That is not going the extra mile. The shopkeeper that wants to go the extra mile will still serve some customers beyond the official closing time.

If you are required to sell 100 tomatoes in a day, sell 120 every day and keep increasing. It is only by stretching ourselves that we can truly excel and grow professionally. If you aim for averageness, your professional growth will be stunted. Do not be one. Rather, be the successful one. Invest in going the extra mile and let going the extra mile be your usual style. This way, you will rise and shine! Good luck!

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