In life, you have a ceiling and you have a floor.
Most people think about the ceiling. Their best day, their best round, their best life, their most productive day, their most ecstatic moment.
What they don’t realize is that it’s almost impossible to live there day in, day out.
Take me, for example.
10 years ago, when I was starting my first business, I sat down full of focus drugs and wrote a 30,000-word book in a single day.
Seriously. I got up, had coffee, took the drugs, sat down at the computer and wrote for about 12 hours straight.
I still remember the meal I had at the end of that day: a huge plate of Mexican food from the place next door. Carne asada. Rice. Beans. Tons of tortillas. And Coors Light. More than a few of those.
The problem is, I’m not going to hit that ceiling on a daily basis. It’s physically impossible, and I’d probably fry my brain with nootropics trying.
What I’ve worked on over the last few years is raising my floor.
Now that you’re hungry, let’s talk about something nasty:
Raw chicken.
Take a restaurant.
You can overcook a chicken dish. You can occasionally forget to take something out. You can put the wrong side on the plate. You can get a lot of things wrong.
But your floor needs to be high.
Not every dish needs to be Michelin-star. But you cannot send out raw chicken.
The floor is cooked chicken. It can never be raw.
Job seekers should apply the same thing.
Your floor for interviews needs to come up. You might not knock every interview out of the park, but every one needs to be at least decent.
Every recruiter screening call, when you pick up the phone and you’re not ready, your floor needs to be high enough that you at least get to the interview.
Your application quality needs to go up too. They don’t all need to be A+, but they need a minimum bar.
Everything in life works this way.
Golf, for example. I’m about to head out to the course and play a round. My ceiling right now is 96, but I’m probably not going to shoot that every time.
So I keep gradually moving my floor up, and the ceiling rises with it.
If you want help with your job search, we’ll lay out everything we do at Unfair Careers, walk you through the four steps to getting a job, and find where yours is breaking. Then we’ll plug you into our system and raise your floor.
Click below to book your free consultation call and see exactly where it’s going wrong: