Success Takes Extreme Behavior.

Small gestures have no place in big business growth.  It’s time to stop the “business logic nonsense” around what it takes to create something amazing.

It takes massive amounts of focused intensity to make the changes that catapult your business to the next level.

It takes extreme behavior.

And that might be a concept that’s hard for you to accept.

It goes against everything you probably learned for your advanced business school degree.

See, it’s socially fashionable to want to think your way to the big success that you imagine for yourself.

And in some cases that is possible.

Combine a little bit of luck, the right timing, enough capital, and smart people, and you have a chance for a big success with reasonable amounts of activity.  Reasonable amounts of average behavior.

But that formula usually ends up in failure.

In the real world, average strokes are losing strokes.

In the hustle of day-to-day business, a little step forward is really a giant leap backwards.

It takes something else.

To be the superstar in your industry, you need exhibit extreme behavior.

That’s what it takes.

When Jerry Rice entered the NFL in 1985, only two team were interested in speaking with him.  His speed troubled a lot of the scouts evaluating the players.  He didn’t have the flashiness of the other receivers in the draft.  And the college he had played at, Mississippi Valley State University, wasn’t a top-tier school.

The scouts agreed that Rice was good; but was he good enough for the “big leagues”?

The 49ers decided to take a gamble on Rice and traded picks with the New England Patriots to get him on the team.  And Rice didn’t disappoint.  In fact, he was named the NFC Offensive Rookie of the Year.

But he made too many mistakes.  He struggled dropping balls.

He was getting hurt and felt sluggish.

So he decided take things up a notch.

While others players took the off-season to relax, Rice brutally trained for hours a day to stay in top physical condition.  Most famously, Rice ran hills.

Every day, Rice would run through the trails near his house on a 2.5 mile route that was straight up hill.  And he did it at a sprinters pace.  Day after day.  Grinding through the pain.

And when he showed up to camp the coming year, four days early, he was in the top physical shape that would define the rest of his twenty year career.

Two years later he would lead the NFL in touchdown receptions with a number that was twice what anyone else in the league had accomplished.  He would go on to create, break, and hold just about every wide receiver record on the books.

Is it any surprise that Jerry Rice is considered the greatest wide receiver of all time and one of the greatest football players ever to play the game?

It took extreme behavior.

That extreme behavior — which is most clearly illustrated on the football field — is all the most powerful in the boardroom.

And it comes in a lot of different ways:

• Extreme effort.
• Extreme messaging.
• Extreme discipline.
• Extreme leadership.
• Extreme plans.
• Extreme kindness.
• Extreme wonder.
• Extreme beliefs.
• Extreme patience.
• Extreme positioning.

And the list goes on and on…

It’s all quite simple.

The whole discussion about leadership and business growth really comes down to a single decision.

Are you willing to put in extreme behavior or will you justify your mediocrity?  It’s really just comes down to that.

And while that choice seems hard, there is also a simplicity to the decision.

When you’ve decided that it’s going to be hard.  When you know that you have to out-work, out-think, out-play, out-muscle every part of every thing that you do from this day forward, extreme behavior actually becomes a great way to focus what you do.

You have a single minded purpose — extreme behavior.

Extreme behavior isn’t what you do.

It’s who you become. It is who you are.

A winner.  Not a whiner.

Tired. Sore. And ready to give up.

But refusing to accept anything less than beyond the limits of your capabilities.