Getting Prolific, Day 23: Zhoosh It Up

Does your groundswell of improvements create a positive cycle of prosperity?

Zhoosh is a word that means to improve in appearance with a slight adjustment.

It’s spice and pizzazz. You make something incrementally more attractive and interesting. Typically, fabulous people use it in the fashion and design worlds.

Spritz some salt spray in your hair, add a hat to your outfit, throw some orange zest on flatbread, zhoosh it up a bit.

But this principle has broad applicability to other worlds as well. It encourages continual steps rather than quantum leaps. Improvement doesn’t have to come solely from big, sweeping changes.

We can focus our efforts on smaller accents that slowly but surely move toward success.

Our old yoga instructor used to give students what she called micro corrections. She’d facilitate millimeters of movement, like touching our ankle bones together, flattening out the soles of our feet or aligning our elbow with our knee.

It’s crazy, we would instantly feel the difference in our bodies. Joints opened, muscles stretched, tension released.

To say we zhooshed it up would be an understatement.

Those micro corrections were a physical reminder of the larger principle at work. Growth is a matter of inches, not miles. And the thing is, making small, quick, deliberate, precise modifications might seem like nothing at first.

But once employed, they can make a huge difference in our progress.

Being willing to get one percent better each day, trusting that the compound interest will eventually lead to success, that’s how we win.

Working at a tech startup is another interesting arena where zhoosh plays out. Agile developers tell me that making incremental improvements almost always cost lest, has a lower barrier to implementation and can be done faster.

Once you launch a new version of your product, you talk to users, document their comments in the feedback log, and figure out which slight adjustments will make your software more attractive, interesting and useful. Keep adding small amounts of customer value with each new version, and before you know it, you’ve got yourself one hell of a product.

The good news is, you don’t need to do yoga or work in tech to embrace the idea. Your growth as human beings is very much incremental. Continual steps over quantum leaps. As the philosopher of spiral dynamics once wrote, we’re always engaged in the process of becoming something more than we were, and not yet what we will be.

That motivates me every day. Whether it’s deepening my closest relationships, growing my business or further my spiritual path, a little zhoosh goes a long way.

Sure, maybe it’s only the illusion that I’m doing something to make progress, but that still helps me. It makes me feel less despondent and more fulfilled.

In a world that often seems like it’s conspiring to annoy and thwart me, that’s not an insignificant effort.

Does your groundswell of improvements create a positive cycle of prosperity that replicates itself?

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