When I tell people that, as a motivational speaker, I work with, and speak for, organizations that want their people to play a bigger game and produce unreasonable results, the first question I get is, “What do you mean by unreasonable? Isn’t that kind of negative?”

To answer that, let’s first take a look at what reasonable results might look like. When I look up the word “reasonable” in the dictionary, some of the synonyms I find are: average, adequate, fair, all right, tolerable, passable.

Pretty exciting, huh? I mean, really, don’t you find yourself waking up every morning, full of energy, raring to go, and saying to yourself, “Wow–I’m going to go produce adequate results today! Seriously, this is the day I go out and do absolutely average work! My customers are going to be blown away by my tolerable service and passable products!” Wow is right. You are truly a rock star.

So what does “average, adequate, fair, all right, tolerable, passable” look like? It looks like 4% annual growth. It looks like a $65,000 a year income. It looks like finishing third out of seven. And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with these results. They’re perfectly fine. They’re good enough. They’re better than a lot of people are doing.

They’re just not very exciting.

So if 4% annual growth is reasonable, what’s unreasonable? 30% growth? 50%? 100%? Getting exciting, isn’t it? If a $65,000 income is reasonable, what’s unreasonable? $250,000? $650,000? $1,000,000? Yep, all unreasonable.

Except that there are people out there who are doing it. People out there are already producing these results. People in your industry, and in this economy. Here’s something I want you to remember:

Unreasonable does not equal unachievable.

What are unreasonable results? Results that make customers, colleagues, and the competition stand up and take notice. Results that are beyond average, beyond predictable, beyond what’s expected. Results that change the game.

It wasn’t reasonable for John F. Kennedy to tell the world that we’d put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. But we did it. It wasn’t reasonable for the Beatles to, on April 4, 1964, have the number one, two, three, four, and five songs on the American charts…as well as another seven songs in the top 100…as well as the top two albums in the Billboard albums chart…as well as the number one record in the British singles chart…as well as the top two positions in the British albums chart. That’s not a reasonable result. But the Beatles did it.

Unreasonable does not equal unachievable.

Unreasonable results will excite you and scare you. They’ll excite and scare your team. And they’ll definitely scare (though not necessarily excite) your competition.

So what would an unreasonable result look like in your business? How about in your personal life? Don’t settle for average. Don’t settle for adequate. Don’t settle for passable. Those are boring.

Instead, produce unreasonable results.