This hilarious clip is from the beginning of the 4th season of The Office, a comedy show on NBC.
I was a huge fan of The Office. It was hands down my favorite television show around its 2nd/3rd season. The Office, now in its 7th season, is no longer funny. Not even by its own standards.
It started out as an excellent American translation of the British dry humored original. The show got very popular around its 3rd season, but around the 4th season, the show itself started to change. Over the seasons, it stripped away little by little what made it so unique; the humor became less intelligent and more in-your-face with character development taking a back seat to wild antics. In essence, the show stopped trying and just became mainstream.
Why is it that when something gets popular it often “goes mainstream” and loses its identity? The creativity and the very things that made it innovative in the first place get tossed by the wayside. Copycats arrive and you get a clone war. This is the fundamental business model of media industries like television, movies, and music.
The answer? It’s simple. To them, it doesn’t matter.
Once you reach that magical tipping point and get popular, businesses don’t think you need to put any work into your product. Instead, they invest as little as possible while trying to milk it for all its worth. They call this efficiency. In reality, it is a very short-sighted strategy that seems good in the short term, but is disastrous in the long run.
The problem? Success does not last.
To be a success, you need to do something great once. To be successful, you need keep doing great things.
Someone who is simply a success is a one-hit wonder, a fluke. No success lasts forever. They must worry about what happens when that success inevitably ends.
What you must understand is that once you’ve done something, it is no longer great. Doing it again doesn’t double your success necessarily. Why? Because you have a new standard to live up to. What was great before is now just normal. To be great again, you need to do something even better. The good thing to know is that, because you raised your standard, things that seemed impossible become easier now.
Just because you reach a point of success in your life does not mean that your work is done. Quite the contrary. You now have just as much work to get to a newer higher level. Otherwise, you face the problem of diminishing returns where you achieve the same, but resulting success keeps decreasing.
You need to pick up success-building good habits and get rid of success-killing bad habits. You want to be following each success with another success to create a life full of successes. That is a successful life.
