A little better each day
A line from my high school basketball coach became the thesis behind every venture I have run.
The line came from my high school basketball coach: make yourself a little better each day. It outlasted high school by decades. Over those years I kept facing the same choice, between chasing the big visible win and settling into small daily reps that nobody applauds.
I made the coach's line my thesis, and I have run everything on it: my first sales job, Tellus, Common Ground, Kanopi. Outcomes follow daily practice. They do not run the other way. Overnight success is a story people tell afterward. Every operator I respect has years of plain, unglamorous reps sitting behind the moment others call luck. The weight of the sentence is in the word little, because small reps repeated are what make compounding inevitable.
That thesis sits under every operating rule I have, including how I train, how I build companies and how I judge the people I work with. I lose interest quickly in anyone who cannot tell me what they do every day that other people skip. The one thing I control is whether I got a little better today. Everything else follows from that. Someone handed me the phrase once, and living by it for decades is what made it mine.
Story details
| Project | Kanopi |
|---|---|
| Type | Teaching moment |
| Year | high school through present |
| Firm telling | on the Common Ground wiki |