“Mr. McEwan, I need to get rid of this little scratch – how do I do it?”

I gazed at my beautifully machined brass letter opener.  It was a gift for my dad on Father’s Day and I wanted to make it perfect.  And it was, except for that little scratch on the blade.

Mr. McEwan, my grade 8 metal work teacher gave me the solution:

“Take a little bit of wet and dry paper to the blade and that will get rid of the scratch.”

So, eager to remove the scratch I gingerly rubbed the blade with the sand paper expecting the scratch to magically disappear.  What happened shocked me: the blade no longer had a single scratch, it now had numerous scratches. The solution prescribed by my trusted adviser had actually made things worse.

I raced back to him with my emotionally charged accusation:

“What you told me to do actually made it worse!  See, now it has more scratches!”

With a chuckle at my innocent ignorance he retorted,

“Dave, sometimes you have to make things worse before they get better.”

What he meant was that by further sanding the blade, by putting more scratches into it, the surface of the brass is taken down to the depth of the single scratch originally in the blade.  I then buff the new level of the blade surface to a brilliant sheen with no scratches.

Fast forward 40 years and I am standing amidst the carnage that was formerly our concrete patio overlooking the lake.  It’s a disaster.  It has been completely torn apart by an excavator and a bobcat.  Nothing left but dirt, rocks, trenches and a massive mess.  Shrubs and bushes gone, concrete gone, planters gone – why?  Because we wanted a better patio.

Our former concrete patio was old and decrepit.  It was falling apart.  The view of the lake was awesome, but don’t you dare look down at the patio – it was nasty.  The concrete was cracked, broken up and slowly sliding down the hillside toward the lake.  We have been planning to embark upon this significant project for some time, but finally decided to bite the bullet and go for it.

In the midst of the carnage called construction I found myself wondering, “What did we get ourselves into?”

I thought back to the life lesson Mr. McEwan taught me 40 years earlier,

Sometimes things have to get worse in order to get better.

This principle not only pertains to construction and renovations, but leadership as well.

You may have heard of the progression “Good – Better – Best”?  I think reality is a little more like, “Good – Worse – Better – Worse – Best”.  Moving forward is seldom always onward and upward.

Whenever we want to make change we are shifting from that which is familiar into that which is unfamiliar.  The problem is that we are accustomed to what we have been doing and need to learn to believe, think and act differently.  That requires a learning curve of sorts – some steeper than others.  You cannot expect to immediately become significantly more competent in the area you want to change.  It is a process of trial and error, and you have to resist the temptation to just go back to the way you have always done it.

That is why change often involves feeling like you are worse than you were previously.  It’s like a basketball player learning to dribble and shoot with both hands – he/she becomes a far greater threat than if he/she stayed with their dominant hand.  However, their non-dominant hand feels weak and ridiculous at first.

It’s far easier to simply continue doing what is familiar than to go through the hassle of learning something new.  However, if you keep doing what you have always done, you will always get what you always got.  We all know that.

So, when you are in the midst of implementing some kind of change in order to move forward, don’t get discouraged when things seem to get worse.  Remember Mr. McEwan’s sage advice, and the carnage of our patio…

Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

Worse often leads to better.