One of the biggest keys to being a success and being unstoppable in life is doing something right the first time.

I don’t get it. I don’t understand why, when you give somebody instructions to do something, they don’t do it right the first time.

Do they like doing things over and over again?

That doesn’t make any sense to me. Are they trying to take a shortcut and hope you don’t notice?

That doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Look, I am not the person who goes out and dots every i and crosses every t. That’s what I hire people to do. But when I go back and I check people’s work, I think to myself, I just don’t understand why they didn’t do it right the first time.

You see, when you don’t do something right the first time, it just takes double time to go do it again. Then you’ve got to sit down, and you’ve got to do the task again. And then you’ve got to make sure the boss is really happy, and he’s got to check your work again.

So maybe you spent an hour instead of an hour and 10 minutes doing it wrong, and then you’ve got to go spend another hour fixing it. So, in turn, instead of spending an hour an 10 minutes, you spent two hours doing it. I don’t understand that mentality at all, but it seems to run rampant in today’s culture.

People are always looking for the shortcut. The shortcut is something that, I’m sorry, doesn’t work.

One thing I learned a long, long time ago was my friend, Howard Bernstein.

I was kind of the fuck-up friend of all our group of people.

They were all kind of highly motivated, success-minded guys.

And then I was their pet friend. As a matter of fact, they used to call me Spot.

I was 24 years old. They were 25. And they were all geared towards great success, running advertising agencies.

Being a trader on Wall Street.

Becoming a doctor.

Becoming a lawyer.

And there was me, unemployed Dave, or Spot, as they liked to call me.

I, being unemployed Spot, was their fun friend.

They believed in me. They tried to get me to do better jobs. They tried to get me to understand myself better. But the biggest lesson that Howard Bernstein used to always tell me was this.

He said, if you’re going to do a job, do it great.

Doesn’t matter if you’re going to sweep the floor, wait tables, bus tables, bartend, just be the best at what you can be.

That was a lesson that I’ve learned throughout my entire life, always being the best that I can be no matter what I do.

And if I’m not the best at what I do, I learned to hire the best at what they do because it only makes me look better.

So that’s a work ethic that I’ve always learned to be a part of is to be the best that I can possibly be.

And yet, it’s so forgotten in today’s world. So, if you’re going to do a job, do it right the first time because the person who owns the company is just going to make you do it all over again, and then they’re just going to get pissed off.