A few years ago, at one of our masterminds, my co-author Gary Keller posed this great question.

Are you succeeding so slowly you think you're failing? Or are you failing so slowly you think you're

actually succeeding? And I love the second half of that question because the pace of change

and our awareness of it is really, really hard to grasp unless we're being purposeful.

It's like that nephew that you haven't seen in a year and a half and you're like, wow,

you've grown so much. We realize it because there's a giant gap. But if we were hanging out

with that nephew every single week, we've become a lot less aware of how much they've grown.

And this idea around this whole podcast is the idea of quality inflation. And we'll go deep into it. But basically, the bar for

even average performance goes up every year. And if you're seeking extraordinary,

like all of the followers of the one thing, right, it's the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary success, not average success.

That's on a rocket ship.

That goes up even faster every year, the bar for being competitive and for being the very best.

So I want to dive in and give you some strategies for understanding it, for being aware of it, and actually combat it. And just to make sure I've

got your complete attention, I'll share one of my favorite quotes from W. Edward Deming. And it's around

change. And he says, it is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. And that's just a

truth, whether you're battling for resources out in the wild, right?

It's the classic, may the fittest survive. Now, in business, it's the same. You could have been

the innovator. You could have been the newcomer that knock the old king off the hill. But when you

look up at a certain point, if you don't continue to adapt to your

customer's needs, if you don't continue to innovate, someone can be coming for you.

So we have to measure this.

We have to be aware of quality inflation, and we have to be tackling it purposely.

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