The BIGG Successs Show
Anything I Can Do, You Can Do Better!
This new twist on an old song will help you succeed bigg faster! Read our show summary at biggsuccess.com.
Welcome to The Big Success Show. Today, we'll share why anything we can do, you can do better. The Big Success Show with George and Mary Lynn. There's a fairly well-known song from Annie Get Your Gun. Anything you can do, I can do better. It's a fun song where Annie Oakley and Frank Butler, the two characters, show their competitive sides by trying to outdo each other. And with all due respect to the great writer of this song Irving Berlin, we're putting our own twist on it. Anything I can do, you can do better. Well, thank you, Mary Lynn. I'm glad to hear you finally recognize that. No, wait a minute. I wasn't necessarily talking to you. I was talking to our listeners. Oh, well, I think they knew this a long time ago. The point is, the way that you can do anything better than me is to learn from my mistakes, so you don't have to make them yourself. There's a great story about Jim McCann, who was a social worker who got a part-time job in a flower shop. A few years later, he decided that he wanted to start his own flower shop. So he got one going, made a little bit of money, but wanted to make some more. So he opened another flower shop, and over 10 years, he ended up with 14 shops. One morning, while getting ready for work, he was shaving and listening to the radio. When he got a bright idea, Mary Lynn, he decided to start a nationwide flower service. And he found this bankrupt company that had stopped doing business several years earlier, and they had one significant asset, a toll-free number I bet you've heard of, 1-800-FLOWERS. And this was before the internet, so toll-free ordering was huge. But Jim McCann made a large mistake. He agreed to buy the company and assume the debt. Now, he figured the liabilities had to be pretty insignificant, since they really hadn't done any business for quite some time. But after buying the company, he found out how wrong he was. It turned out that they had over $7 million worth of debt. Yeah, his friends advised him to declare bankruptcy, but he pressed on. So it took him about five years to pay off all that debt. The good news is, he did it. And last year, his little business did about $750 million in sales. Wow. So Jim McCann learned a valuable lesson about due diligence. But anyone who wants to buy a business can learn this lesson without having to go through a similar experience and go into debt. Yeah, and you know, I learned from one of my mentors about due diligence, and he said he'd never bought a business where a problem showed up that couldn't have been discovered if he had done the due diligence better. I learned from him and carried that into every business I ever bought. And people who succeed big learn as many lessons as they can from others. Not only do they not repeat their own mistakes, but they don't repeat the mistakes they see other people make, so they succeed much faster. And today, with information so prevalent, there's another way this saying, "Anything I can do, you can do better applies." In many cases, it doesn't make sense for me to hoard information. I'm better off sharing it, which is great because the final step of mastering any craft is the desire and ability to mentor others. Highly successful people want to share their success and help others. And coming up, we'll talk about how sharing what you know can lead to knowing more. Today, we're talking about learning from the mistakes of others and mastering your craft. And the final step to this is mentoring, sharing what you know. And an interesting thing happens when you do that. The people you are mentoring may at some point start doing better than you. Anything you can do, I can do better. Anything I teach you to do, but the interesting thing is that as the person you're mentoring does better, you start to learn from them. The student helps the master. And you know, Marilyn, I've seen this with my own students. They go on to their own endeavors, and then I learn from them because they have a different perspective. In some cases, it's because of their age, but it's also current market conditions, right? So then I learn anything you can do, I can do better. But then you learn more from me, anything I can do, you can do better. So the point is you both help each other grow. And Big Success is a great place to learn to do things better. Backed I learn all the time. Me too. And you can get a daily dose of Big Success by subscribing to our feed. You'll find that on our website at BigSuccess, that's bigwith2gsuccess.com. And that's also where we have a written summary of today's show. And let's get our big quote for the day. Our quote today comes from Will Rogers, who said, "A man only learns in two ways, one by reading and the other by association with smarter people." It's the smart thing to do. Next time, we'll talk about how to have the discipline to invest, even if you don't have the discipline to invest. Hmm, I'll have to have the discipline to listen to that show. Until then, here's to your Big Success. The Big Success Show at B-I-G-G Success.com. [BLANK_AUDIO]