Badwill And Mediocrity Vs. Goodwill And Amazing

Repetitions compound. 

Potato chips and beers? Ice cream and whiskies? Malört and and Old Styles? 

Those don’t compound all that well. 

It’s the same in relationships. It’s the same in business. It’s the same in… well, life. 

The basic reps compound. The basic stuff stacks up. It’s worth noticing. 

Christina Garnett gave me this word in our Just Press Record episode with Vic Ruggiero:

Badwill. 

Goodwill is great. Or good. Or- you get it. 

You know goodwill is there when you’ve built up enough trust so that when something a little weird happens you comfortably say, “That’s ok, they’re good for it” and you move on. 

Goodwill, when it keeps compounding over time, leads to amazing because it allows for humanity to work. 

So how have I never thought of this in reverse before? How’d I never think of badwill?!

It almost always starts the same way. 

I give myself a reason to like, respect, or automatically trust a person or a business or a whatever. “Successful!” “Known brand!” “Nobody has said anything remotely bad yet!”

Then the repetitions start. 

You get an “ick.” Or an “ugh.” Or a “this, again?”

And you get it more than once.

The badwill compounds too.

It compounds until the assumption becomes “this won’t be good,” and instead of a glorious snowball, you find you’ve drained a giant snotball into a murderous blob that you suddenly can’t get away from. 

Badwill leads to us not doing our best work. And even if we fight it, if we tell ourselves the “successful” or “known” or “nobody else seems to think this” ideas are still true, badwill means we top out at mediocre. 

There’s no escaping a pile of badwill.

So it’s best to just stay as far away from it as possible.

Want to know what happens if you only focus on finding goodwill and keeping that snowball rolling? 

(I said man you better watch this)