Like any small business owner, I’m constantly reading and researching online ways to get better at what I do. Jim Collin’s book Great By Choice caught my eye about six months ago because it’s based on the fact that what you accomplish is more about what you do then about chance.

Where It Came From

The main advice he gives in this new book is “SMaC” (which is also fun to say!). It stands for Specific, Methodical, and Consistent. In all Collin’s research, which is a lot, he found one major difference between people who do good and people who do great.

It wasn’t chance: he quantified the luck similar companies experienced and found no major differences.

It wasn’t intelligence: the people who ran great companies weren’t necessarily smarter.

It wasn’t innovation: the companies who were great were most often not on the leading edge of technology, but more in the middle.

The biggest thing was a good SMaC. Companies who had one and kept to it would almost always succeed 10x as much as those who did not.

What a SMaC Is

A SMaC basically consists of goals to live/work by; a lot like Jonathan Edward’s Resolutions. For example, one of my SMaC’s (I have 6 for my work) is: End each day making sure my workplace is ready and clean to work the next. This is my single greatest productivity booster.

Now that may seem simple, but since I work at home, simply moving my laptop from wherever it is back to my desk at the end of the day, sets me  up to work, not mess around, the next day. I’ve seen a huge jump in my productivity from this simple change.

Another huge productivity booster is Always assign time worked to a project. Keeping track of hours worked is the best way to know how to improve. I can now look back and know exactly how many (billable) hours I worked yesterday, last week, or last month. And you can’t know how to improve if you don’t know where you are.

Note that each of these are specific, but can also be applied if my circumstances change. So even if I have a major life event, they are both still valid.

You can find tons of examples in Great By Choice, which can often be found in libraries though I’d recommend buying a copy.

Summary

I’d highly recommend reading Great By Choice or at least creating your own SMaC. Even though there’s no research showing that if you have a SMaC you will succeed, those who succeed 10x over their competition (except for 1 company out of 20) all had a SMaC. And that’s a good enough reason for me.