12/05/2026
When I was 21 I learned that “Greatness” is just good, repeated. This lesson changed my life👇🏾
In 1954, Ray Kroc was a 52-year-old milkshake machine salesman who walked into a hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California.
The McDonald brothers had already perfected the system: eight items, assembly-line cooking, food in 30 seconds. Simple. Efficient. Good.
The brothers wanted three or four locations.
Kroc saw something different: what if you did this exact thing, without changing a single detail, 30,000 times?
For the next 30 years, that’s what they did.
The 1960s came. Competitors added pizza.
Kroc kept selling 15-cent hamburgers.
The 1970s brought health food trends.
Kroc kept selling 15-cent hamburgers.
Franchise owners begged for local specialities - lobster rolls in Maine, tacos in Texas.
Kroc’s response never changed: no.
Board members showed him market research demanding variety.
He ignored it.
Executives presented Burger King’s innovations.
He didn’t care.
This drove people mad. Competitors mocked the boring menu. Food critics antipated thier downfall.
Meanwhile, McDonald’s opened a new store every 17 hours.
The exact same store.
Same kitchen.
Same menu.
Same golden arches.
By Kroc’s death in 1984: 7,500 locations, £7 billion in sales.
The boring hamburger company was worth more than General Motors.
After Kroc died, McDonald’s spent decades adding salads, wraps, gourmet coffee - hundreds of items. Growth slowed. Complexity soared.
In 2015, their new CEO’s strategy? Remove two-thirds of the menu. Back to basics.
Kroc didn’t invent fast food. He didn’t even improve it. He just had the discipline to repeat something good 30,000 times while everyone else got distracted looking for something great.
His edge wasn’t genius.
It was the rare discipline of ignoring the temptation to introduce complexity and focus on simple repetition.
As boring as it sounds, 90% of success is often just doing the obvious, simple and successful thing for a bizarrely long amount of time, without convincing yourself that there’s a shortcut, without being distracted, while realising less is more, and that addition is often subtraction.
At 21 I learnt a lesson that changed my life;
Greatness is just good repeated.
