He’s right that it was mostly “basic stuff”, but he’s still not doing it. It’s “basic stuff” for a reason: while it seems really simple and obvious, he still needs to do it to be successful.

I was reminded of the Biblical story of Naaman the leper. When told what he needed to do to cure his awful disease, at first he refused because it sounded too simple for a great man like himself. (It’s a great story, btw).

Look, success is rarely easy. But sometimes we make it harder than it needs to be by overlooking the “obvious” things. Sometimes we’re trying to install a complicated triangle offense in a pickup basketball game with 2nd-graders. They don’t know how to dribble the ball, much less run the triple post.

You have to start with the basics, and keep working on just those things until you’ve got them down. Then worry about the complicated stuff. Details, details, details.

The great thing is that most people seem to make this same mistake. They try to fly before they can crawl. So if you get the fundamentals down, you’ll easily beat out other people — some of whom may even be more qualified than you — who are running around trying to launch some grand, complicated plan without “wasting time” on that piddly basic stuff. Without a foundation, they have very little chance of succeeding, no matter how talented they are.

Don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t worry about what the other guy claims he’s going to do. Don’t worry about how good the competition could be if they just did the “basic stuff”.

You just make sure you’re doing all the basics right, and worry about the rest when there are no more “basic” things to master.

We’ve used it at Conditioned Air since we’ve been in business (March 2004) and have had very few interoperability problems with Microsoft Office. It is an amazing tool set that looks and works as well on the Mac (among other platforms) as it does on the PC. Few of our current customers or vendors use it but (and this is a big part of my point here) that’s not been a problem for us – Open Office easily reads and writes Microsoft’s .doc/.xls/.docx/.xlsx files.

So why do I care what my vendors use? Three reasons:

1. I hate to see people spend money they don’t have to. Conditioned Air has proven, with 5.5 years of real world use on thousands of documents and spreadsheets (and much interaction with our Word/Excel using customers), that most people simply don’t need Microsoft Office. Why spend the money, worry about licensing issues, and just deal with the hassle if you don’t need to? Maybe this strategy isn’t for everyone, but for many small businesses it is just the thing!
2. As Ryan and I do more writing (such as our upcoming ebook on how to do collections in a small business) and sometimes have contractors help us, we find that we want to keep larger projects in one format instead of translating back and forth (in this case, from .docx to .odt and vice versa).
3. When I hire a contractor, the purpose is to make my life easier. I’m paying them to do something that I either can’t do, can’t do well enough, or simply don’t want to do. Receiving projects in OpenDocument format is just one more little thing that helps me.

So why not download it and try it out? It isn’t a free trial or anything like that – it is FREE, period. You have nothing to lose and $ to gain!