I took this class that Disney offered about customer service. The first thing the instructor asked is for everyone to raise their hand. Everyone did. With all the hands still in the air, he asked the class to raise them a little more. Hands rose slightly higher. Now how hard was that? The class collectively reached just a bit higher with a minimal amount of extra effort.
This is a core concept Disney practices to ensure all their guests have the best experience visiting their parks.
That lesson has stuck with me for years.
When you get into your day-to-day work, often you want to rush through, not expend any more energy on a project than you have to, or want to get on with something else. But how big of a difference can you make if you would try 1 or 2% harder?
Conversely, back about 20 years ago I read an article in MacWorld that said if you do not open all the windows in the Finder, you save seconds of processing time every day. You’re making your Mac faster. In fact, over the course of a day you might even safe as much as a couple of minutes. Those minutes add up to hours, days and so on over the course of a year.
When you apply this principle to everything in life, how big of a difference can you make? How much change? Make things better?
Little things can be powerful forces.