Welcome back to another quick 'Coffee Catch-up' - a weekly thought from one Mum to another! A 5 minute episode to listen to whilst downing your coffee before the baby wakes up, or you have to start work or head out on the school run!
Today I wanted to talk to you about margins of greatness and how close we could actually be to achieving whatever we want to achieve! Inspired by watching the judging at my daughter's dance festivals and a very interesting chapter in this incredible Jack Canfield book - The Success Principles.
I hope you enjoy these quick little episodes and as always come over and hang out with us over on Facebook or Instagram and if you enjoy any of our podcast episodes please do leave us a rating and review so that other Mums can find us and benefit from these episodes.
If you want to be the first to know about upcoming Mums' Night Out events then sign up to our email list here.
You can also come over and join our growing community of like-minded Mums in our brand new Mums' Night Out Facebook group!
Welcome to the Mums' Night Out Podcast. I'm Rachel and I'm back with another quick coffee catch up, a little five minute podcast episode to listen to whilst downing a coffee before the baby wakes up, or you have to start work or head out on the school run. As a busy Mum myself, I know how hectic life can be. And some days a quick five minute coffee break is all you get. So without further ado, pour yourself that coffee, stick in your headphones. And let's have a quick coffee catch-up. Welcome back to another Mums' night out coffee catch up. This week, I wanted to talk to you about I guess I'd call it margins of success or margins of greatness actually, which is a term I read about recently. So the last few weekends, my daughter has been competing in dance festivals and watching the competition, watching the marking with the adjudicators markings is really, really interesting. So basically what happens is in each category, all the dancers are given a score out of 100 by the judge. And there's placings and then there's what we call a qualifying mark. So basically, if they get 86 or more out of 100, then they can qualify that number to then take place in regional finals, which is like the next stage up in the competition at the next round. And then also what happens at the festival is that people with the highest marks are awarded first place, second place, third place, fourth place, and then everyone else obviously doesn't place. And it's really, really interesting to see the sort of different reactions. Now, obviously, the kids are really, really pleased when they place, they're really pleased if they qualify. And they can be really disappointed when they don't. But what I want to talk about was really the margins in it. And the reason why I'm talking about this is not obviously because I want to talk about dance competitions. But because I really think this is relevant in so many areas of our lives. So basically, in one of the categories that I was watching the difference between the first place, and the person who got the lowest mark in the category was just three points. So it's really crazy, because you could have this absolute, like euphoria of somebody winning the gold medal on placing first and then a real disappointment from the person in last place. But three points separates the whole pack. And it's just crazy when you think of it. And I think it's really important to remember that everywhere in life, we are just so close sometimes to success, and so close to what it is that we want to achieve. And sometimes we can be really disappointed when things don't go our way, when we don't get quite what it is that we want. And I think it's really important if we can remember just how close we actually are that actually, it's not a time to give up. It's a time to say, wow, like we were like one point away. And next time, what can we do just to get that one extra point? And it's really, really interesting. If you look at life in that way, when we have disappointments, and we all have disappointments and things don't go well to look at it that way and think okay, well, perhaps we were just one point off, you know, perhaps we were this close? And what is it that we can now do next time so that we will get past that? And I just think that's a really, really great way of looking at things. And I read something about it actually, in this incredible book that I'm reading at the moment, a Jack Canfield book called The success principles, which I will link to in the show notes because it's amazing. But he talks about this this exact same point as well. In terms of professional baseball, now, I don't really profess to understand much about the scoring in baseball or what these even mean. But basically, you can get the same idea. So he says in this book, that sort of respectable baseball players, batting average of 0.250. And what that basically means is that they'll hit it once every four times. So every four times that the ball is thrown to them, one of those times they'll hit it, so a quarter of the time, they're going to hit it and that's considered like great. And then anyone who hits 0.3 is considered to be a star. And that is three, sorry, three hits for every 10 times. So that's incredible. So it's like it says out 1000s of players in the league, about only about a dozen players will achieve a 0.3 average. And these players are honoured as the greatest players, they get multi million dollar contracts and land commercial endorsements, sponsorships, all these sorts of things. And they're considered in high esteem, but then look at actually the difference between them between a 0.25 who's okay and a 0.3 who's amazing is incredible. So I'll read this to you. So the difference between the truly great ones and the average players is only one hit out of 20. So a player who bats a 0.25 who gets five hits every 20 times the ball is comes to him, but a 0.3 He gets six hits out of those same 20. So it's incredible. When you look at it, it says, In the world of professional baseball, the margin of greatness is only one more hit out of 20. And so it only takes that little bit of extra performance to go from good to great. And I just think this is so key in life that we're all like this, anything we're trying to do, we could just be that one hit that one mark away from getting everything that we want, or achieving even really small things, you know, oh, say you have a goal, you want to get out the house on time to not be late on the school run. You could be so annoyed that we're late again. And then you could look at and say, We were one minute late. Okay, so maybe that's just one minute, what could we do to like free up one minute? Well, there's loads of stuff you could do to free up one minute. And I think it's looking at things in that way, will just give you a really different outlook in life. So I think it's a really, really great lesson that I certainly intend to follow. So I hope that was helpful. I hope you found that interesting. As I say, I will link to that book in the show notes because it is incredible. And yeah, enjoy the sunshine again and have a great day. If you've enjoyed any of our podcast episodes, we'd love so much for you to leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts. And come and hang out with us on Instagram or Facebook. It's @mumsnightoutpodcast. Hey, did you know there's now a great new place you can hang out? A supportive and inspiring community full of like minded mums who want to prioritise themselves a little more and have great fun along the way. Want to come join us? Of course you do. Head over to facebook.com/groups/mumsnightout. I'll link to it in the show notes. See you there.