Make It Remarkable

Update: Sharon Adl-Doost – featured in the post below – passed away in 2017. While the Lunch Lady Hotline is no longer a working number, I’ve chosen to leave the post up in honor of a spectacular lady. Someone shot a documentary a few years before she died, and you can hear one of her recordings at the 1:15 mark.

Whatever you do, you can do it with flair.

If you lead a ministry, there’s a little something extra that will lavish grace on those you’re reaching. If you manage a team, there’s a way you can interact that will build cohesion. If you’re raising kids, there are tiny touches that will make lifelong memories out of otherwise mundane moments.

The key is to figure out the tiny tweak that will set your specialty apart. Sharon Adl-Doost did. If you’ve never heard of Sharon, you should. She’s better known as the Lunch Lady, and every day she sings and jokes her way through the menu on her nursing home cafeteria’s phone line.

Sharon is not a singer. Far from it. But her off-key, pitchy songs and offbeat banter has endeared her to thousands of people who call her each month. (I recently rediscovered her and now force my kids to listen to her every morning on the way to school.)

She’s remarkable.

Seth Godin talks about the remarkability factor in his bestseller Purple Cow. In the followup The Big Moo, he says

Good enough isn’t good enough, because now everything is good enough. Our expectations of quality are unrealistic – and are being met every single day. We don’t just want to be satisfied, we want to be blown away.

Remarkable isn’t up to you. Remarkable is in the eye of the customer. If your customer decides something you do is worth remarking on, then, by definition, it’s remarkable.

So what are you doing that’s worth remarking on? What’s the memorable moment you’ll create for your kids today? What’s the takeaway your team will talk about? How are you going above and beyond in caring for the people around you?

What makes you remarkable?