It is easy to write about high performance; it is much harder to live it when things go wrong.
I set a hard commitment to publish my new book. Is “Good Enough” Good Enough, this past Wednesday. But as the date approached, I realized I was staring at a 250-page unformatted manuscript and I was essentially out of time.
The company I had hired to do this work had failed miserably. And perhaps I wasn’t paying enough attention early in the project to see the troubling signs. But I was stuck and the clock was ticking.
It would have been to push the release date back, as I searched for new editors. I could have established a new deadline, explaining it by saying, “I made a mistake in judgment.” That would technically be accepting personal accountability, but it wouldn’t align with what I present in the book.
People would have empathized, saying, “Whenever you get it out, we’re looking forward to it.”
But I thought: How can I publish a book on high performance and accountability if I miss my own publication date commitments?
We encounter obstacles like this every day. Most are small, taken individually, they may not have an impact. It’s easy to make an excuse. High performers behave differently. They are not defeated; they do everything they can to meet their commitments. They refuse to settle, they refuse to make excuses. I realized I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t demonstrate the behaviors I write about. So, I sat down to figure it out.
On Tuesday morning, I cleared my calendar. I consulted my “buddies,” Gemini and Claude, to develop a plan. They couldn’t do the editing and formatting for me, but they provided step-by-step support so I could do the work myself.
First was a grammar and writing check on the 250-page document. I walked through every page, correcting punctuation and rewriting clumsy sentences. I was glued to my screens for 14 hours just doing that.
Then came the formatting. Because I had merged different Word documents, the fonts, margins, and spacing were a mess. I learned that formatting a book is different than any other document. I discovered thing like gutter margins, even vs. odd pages, and a lot of stuff I had hoped I would never have to learn. With AI guidance, I eventually finished the manuscript around midnight on Tuesday.
Wednesday was publishing day. I started at 4:00 AM to finish the cover design and assemble the final files. By 1:00 PM, everything was uploaded to Amazon. The eBook is available now, and the hardcopy arrives December 16.
This experience was critical to my own learning. It would have been easy to create an excuse. People would have been sympathetic and waited. But the commitment I made to myself was the driver. As long as there was a way to achieve the goal, no excuse was acceptable.
Some may think this is silly. The impact of slipping the publishing date would have been minor. But accountability isn’t reserved for the big things. The moment we start making excuses for the small things, our accountability erodes. We start making more excuses, eventually doing the same for the big things. We stop figuring out how to achieve our goals and hope that “good enough” gets us by.
We are challenged with these things every day. If we seek performance excellence, we have to meet those challenges head-on.
Afterword: This is the AI generated discussion of this post. It’s a great discussion of this adventure. However, I am embarrassed, they get the title of the book wrong. But it’s a great discussion. Enjoy!
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