The Hammock Papers: Exceed.

07 August 2024

Exceed.

Ari Weinzweig on going the extra mile ...

Extra miles, barely noticeable to the casual observer, can make the difference between keeping a customer or losing them, enriching our community or exhausting it, and even staying in business or going under. They are, I believe, a beautiful way to illustrate French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's statement: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The point of creating an extra-mile-centric culture is not about what you and I might be able to accomplish on our own. It’s about what the collective can make happen when nearly everyone in the organization gets on board with the idea. As Timothy Snyder says, “If 10,000 little groups do 5,000 little things, that will make a tremendous difference.”

Some extra miles can be systematized. Will Guidara writes: “Identify moments that recur in your business, and build a tool kit your team can deploy without much effort.” The Roadhouse has just such a book, and databases and idea banks with other extra miles abound around the ZCoB. Here, we long ago agreed to use what we call the “:05/:55 Rule.” In order to exceed guest expectations, we actually unlock our doors, and are ready to go, five minutes before our posted opening time, and lock them five minutes after our closing time. Small thing, but really, why not?

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL