Refuse to Accept Anything But the Best

Came across an interesting quote today:

It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
W. Somerset Maugham

Which reminded me of another very interesting Chinese proverb which we have repeatedly found to be true:

Buy the best, cry once

These quotes strike a cord in two different areas, selecting and achieving what we want in terms of our goals. The first describes an approach to selecting and setting goals which we have consistently been very pleasantly surprised with - the bigger and better goals we set, the more we achieve.

The second ties in nicely with the first and actually results in a bit of thriftyness too. If we buy the best (refuse to accept anything but the best), we find we don't 'rebuy'. This is something we have repeatedly made mistakes with, buying something which is 'pretty close but not quite'. The result? A second, third or fourth purchase of essentially the same thing (cry, cry and cry again) costing far more and bringing far less enjoyment than if we'd purchased the right thing the first time.

There's a third quote from Steve (and it may be from somewhere else too):

You always over-estimate what you can do in a day and under-estimate what you can do in a year.

This one ties nicely in with the other two because if you think of achieving the best (dreams and goals) in the context of a day - overwhelming and unachievable. But, if you think in the context of a year or over a period of years, so much of the best becomes very possible.