Doing 4% less does not get you 4% less.

Doing 4% less may very well get you 95% less.

That’s because almost good enough gets you nowhere. No sales, no votes, no customers. The sad lie of mediocrity is the mistaken belief that partial effort yields partial results. In fact, the results are usually totally out of proportion to the incremental effort.

Church, please stop getting by. If you can’t do great, remarkable work…don’t do it. Do what you can be remarkable at. When you settle for mediocrity it’s not just ineffective it will often set people back 10x the amount. Let me give some examples:

If you can’t afford great creative for a mailing campaign…don’t do it.
If you can’t afford a powerful logo…don’t do it, just find a nice font.
If you aren’t ready for a remarkable website…don’t do it, use facebook.

Think about this, remarkable means being worthy of being noticed…especially being noticed as extraordinary. If you are doing anything less then that can you really say you’re effective as a church? If the message you bring isn’t worthy of being noticed what are you doing?

What do you need to stop doing…or start doing to be remarkable?

Eames designed some of the most beautiful, even by today’s standards, creations and this clip brings a number of bits of wisdom that we can bring to design.

The design based on attitude. They don’t try to fit to a certain fashion or trend. In a day when every church marketing piece has to have grunge, or copy pop culture it’s a good reminder that the best design, the best marketing, has a personality and is packed full of its own attitude. Their work is remarkable because they dug down deep and found the remarkable in their own creativity. Certainly they had artistic influences all around them (you should too…on purpose) but their work carried a uniqueness only found when you determine to find the personality in a piece of work.

Timing was on their terms. Now this only works when you truly want something remarkable, but they weren’t put into time restraints. Production wasn’t the goal, creating something so beautiful that it forced people to pause was. Sunday is coming and we most certainly have deadlines, but maybe we would be better off adjusting our process to give room for creativity than adjusting our creativity to fit our process. It’s essential if we truly want excellence.

They created thier own market. All of what they did and how they did it resulted in not just remarkable furniture but also in creating a market uniquely theirs. The people that made up this market would settle for nothing less than unique well thought out design with intent and purpose. You couldn’t create something to take its place. Sure, you could buy a lounge chair today…but it would never hold up to an Eames loung chair. Just being the church will draw a crowd. Sometimes we need to remember to stop serving a market and simple be the church.