Lets Talk Standards; Steve Sims
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Well, it’s that time again. You’re about to listen to a riveting episode of The Art Of Making Things Happen with me, Steve Sims. It’s there to make you more productive, more impactful, and to get you thinking. Enjoy this episode.
Hey, how you doing? Last Friday I did a virtual happy hour. These things started about a month ago. And quite simply what we do is we get together via a Zoom call every Friday, pour different a kind of drink. I usually demonstrate a different cocktail that I’m doing. And then we go into an hour of basically bad jokes. This is a time that we do no publicizing and no promotion, no advertising. It’s just the end of the week chill. There’s no selling allowed involved in any of this. We accept and expect bad jokes, humor, and for people to get gradually drunk through the hour. But last week I had to call out a PSA.
I had to, it was a must. During the last few weeks and about a week ago, it kind of hit a head, I heard people saying about, “Well, you know, we’re not sure where it’s going to go. We’re not sure what’s going on with the pandemic, with the recession, with all the negativity that we get off of the media. And we’re going to have to back off of this, we’re going to have to slow down on this. We’re going to have to hold our purse strings a little bit more on this.” And it was the usual backup maneuver. But then one of my clients turned around and really upset me when he turned around and said, “Yeah, I want to be able to do this, but I can’t. So I’m going to settle for that.” No, that’s where it went south real quick.
You see, if you can’t afford something and you can settle for something cheaper, don’t do it at all. Okay? And last Friday, to bring that to head, I demonstrated how to actually take it a little step further, because everyone knows I love old fashioneds. One of my favorite watering holes in Hollywood and Los Angeles is the restaurant Spago, one of the most famous restaurants in Hollywood and the Beverly Hills area. And they do an incredible old fashioned. And I was speaking with my dear friend, Barbara Lazaroff, who’s the co-founder of Spago. And she informed me, which excited me, that they were actually now doing bottles of old fashioned that you could pick up directly from Spago, pre-mixed. A premixed drink from one of the best watering hole out there. Now it ain’t cheap. It ain’t that much more expensive than a good bottle of whiskey.
But you know, at the same time, it’s not the cheapest thing. But I went down there on Friday afternoon and I bought this bottle and then I came back and I smoked it. If none of you have ever seen how you smoke a drink, look up smoking cocktails and it’ll demonstrate it. Basically this takes it to another level. I wanted to demonstrate to my people, to my tribe, to my family, that today is the day that we increase our standards. Now, every week I had done cocktails and they had been damn good, but this week I showed them how to take it to a next level. I bought an expensive bottle of pre-mix from a high end bar and I smoked it, which meant it was an extra five minutes before I got my first lug of that whiskey. Today is not the day that you actually would use your standards.
The word settle should never be in your vocabulary. It’s a slippery slope. If you can’t afford the top shelf whiskey, and you can’t afford two glasses of that, have one or none at all. But settling takes you down and creates a habit. You never want a habit to be created that your standards are down and today is when you actually increase your standards. You want people coming to you because your standards are so high that they want to get there. Never reduce your standards to someone else. Now, I don’t advise you go out and drink expensive whiskey, although it is wonderful. I suggest you look at your standards and make sure that those things that you don’t need you put on hold, but you never reduce the level that you’re already at. Please don’t allow us to do that. Settling is a horrible word.
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