“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
Steve Jobs
Quality speaks loudly to what we care about. That goes for things we create and the things we enjoy as consumers.
Even movies that are ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ are only so-bad-it’s-good because of the amount of dedication and care put in them. Pretty much everyone can smell inauthenticity like a rank sewer.
Of course, there’s a lot of low-quality things we can buy, like cheap jeans or a mattress from a “going out of business” sale, but that’s more about large companies making things affordable to the masses. These things are designed to be cheap and replaced frequently. It’s wasteful, but it’s not necessarily low quality.
The big contributor to low quality is lack of care. Meaning, not caring in general (because you prioritize other things) or lack of motivation to care in moments when you are called too.
But in order to create something worthwhile and impactful, we have to give a d🎄mn about what we are doing and have a continuous desire to learn and improve as we do it.
The ‘what’ and the ‘why’ will look different from each of us, but the ‘how’ flourishes in giving our creative work everything we’ve got in the moment.
Care comes from:
- Genuine interest.
- Time given.
- Attention given.
- Curiosity given.
- Playfulness.
- And a desire to see it through.
Sometimes that means just trying a little bit more than you normally would (or think you could).
Usually, that means saying no to a lot of things, so you can say yes to this right thing.
And high quality always means caring about what you put your name on.
STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #786
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