I'm sitting down with Chris Watkin. He introduces me, mentions my book, Done Beats Perfect, and gets straight to it.
"How does that relate to estate agents, and how does it make them better? Talk to me."
Before anything else, I want to clear one thing up. "Done Beats Perfect doesn't mean any old junk's going to do, right?" I tell him.
"It's about doing things to the best of your ability today."
Chris checks he's got it. "So the difference between excellence and perfection?"
"Well, perfection is actually the lowest standard of all because you'll never meet it."
"I like that," he says.
If you're sitting on an email or a video until it's perfect, you're measuring yourself against something nobody ever hits. Do your best today and get it out.
Where the phrase came from
I told Chris the line started as a mistake. I'd read "Done is better than perfect" in a book by Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook. I quoted it at the start of a video, and by the end of that same video I'd turned it into Done Beats Perfect. For whatever reason, it stuck.
I ended up using it on stage and in other bits of content. Then I started asking what it actually meant, and how to put more meat on the bones. At the time there were fewer speaking engagements because there were no live events, so I took that thinking and put it into the book. It's built on four parts, D-O-N-E.
Decide who you need to be
D is for decide. Decide the outcome you want. More importantly, decide who you need to be to create it.
Picking the outcome is the easy bit. You've got one branch and you want three. You've got five and you want ten. Or you'd rather have fewer branches and a central management hub. "The thing you really need to figure out is, okay, how do I need to show up to make that happen?"
Plenty of gurus and business coaches keep shouting level up. I say something else. "Before you level up, first you got to level in." Chris asked what I meant. Dig deeper on who you are. Self-awareness, and also self-design.
I brought up a line from Rocketman, though I couldn't remember who says it. It goes something like this: to become the person you're destined to be, you have to kill the person you were born to be. Then ask yourself if you really want to be that person. If the answer's no, maybe you don't want that outcome after all. At least you're aware of it.
Operate as if
O is for operate. I can't stand fake it till you make it. "I hate that term. It's bad advice. Because if you feel fake, will you ever show up at your best?"
So I talk about operating as if you're already the person you're destined to become, while accepting you're still learning and getting the help you need. Chris said his old area manager used to tell him much the same. Then he made a fair point. "People don't like to ask for help though."
"You got to do it for yourself, but you're never going to do it on your own." There's an acronym for HOPE that I love: Hearing Other People's Experience. Someone has already done the thing you're trying to do. Find them and model them. With business books, I like to read three or four on the same subject and form my own opinion. Reading one and repeating it word for word won't get you far.
N is note. "Note, as in take note of what's working. If it's working, do more of it. If it's not working, do less of it." That means your numbers. It also means your gut, what you're seeing around you and what your team are saying. A spreadsheet doesn't always match reality.
E is evolve. Decision shares a root with incision. "So if you make a true decision, you cut off all the other alternatives." The outcome stays put. The route can change. If a road had been closed on my drive to Chris that day, I wouldn't have rung him to cancel. I'd have gone around.
Watch the full chat
Change the first three seconds
Near the end we got onto how quickly people give up. An email that almost nobody opens isn't proof the email's bad. Change the subject line and send it again a week later. Chris asked if people would remember it. "Well, if they didn't read it, they don't know."
Video works the same way. "If you don't grab attention, it ain't going to work." Change the first three seconds and leave the rest alone, because the message was good. It's the same idea behind doing the verb: do the thing, then adjust it.
So find the email from the last month that hardly anyone opened. Write a new subject line, keep everything else the same, and send it again next week.
First published August 2022 on Christopher Watkin's Letting Agent Podcast.
