What the Most Boring Job I Ever Had Taught Me About Getting Better
One of my first jobs was at a place called Insty-Prints, a quick print shop that was home of the $9.95 Business Card Special. You could have 500 business cards printed on either white or cream linen card stock with your choice of three ink colors: black, black, or black. Place your order by Wednesday and your cards would be ready the following Monday.
Insty-Prints was also the home of the most boring job I have ever worked.
All I did every day was load thousands of sheets of paper onto the back of a press, watch them feed through, and pull them out the other side. Day in, day out. That was the whole job.
Rather than lose my mind, I turned it into a game.
I created a simple Tracking Form that included the customer's name, how many sheets went through the press, and how long each job took. At the end of every week I would tally up the numbers and ask myself a few questions about the upcoming week:
How can I speed things up?
What can I prep ahead of time?
Can I run two presses at once?
Can I run three presses at once? (It got a little sketchy.)
Can I anticipate, and eliminate, problems like paper jams before they slow me down?
Some weeks I set a new record. Other weeks I didn't. My boss didn't care, my coworkers didn't know, and my customers were none the wiser. It didn't matter. What mattered was that each week I was getting just a little bit better at what I did.
How can this be applied today? Turn what you do into a game. Challenge yourself each week to find ways to make things faster, anticipate and eliminate problems ahead of time, or get more work done with the same or less amount of effort.
I like to call this Compound Experience.
Compound Interest is often referred to as the 8th wonder of the world. Take that concept and apply it to your skills and your habits. If you improve by just 1% each week, in one year you will be 68% better than where you started. That's a pretty solid ROI (or ROE - Return on Experience).
Even though Insty-Prints is a distant memory, the lesson it taught me is not. Take whatever you do and make it just a little bit better every day. That’s how you build experiential wealth, and experiential wealth is priceless.
PS: Be sure to ask me about the guy who came into the print shop every day wearing a full-blown gas mask to make copies.
