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Figure out what matters to you
If we don’t have an alternative, we get really nervous about not being busy. If this is what we know as the main way to show that we’re useful is that we are visibly active, it is very scary to walk away from this activity. But when you give yourself an alternative that you believe in, a particular type of work that you’re trying to get better at and you are getting better at and you can actually see the results and have pride in it, whatever that core thing is you start pursuing when you obsess over quality makes the pseudo-productivity freneticism begin to seem almost silly. And you begin to see all of those meetings and the email and the overstuffed task list not as a mark of productivity, but as obstacles to what you’re really trying to do.
We often underestimate how difficult that is. In a lot of jobs, it’s not immediately clear what is the core thing you do that is most valuable. So any quest towards obsessing over quality has to start with a perhaps pretty thorough investigation of your own job. What is it that’s most important in what I do? If that answer is not clear, something that’s useful is to begin talking to people within your same organization or field who are farther ahead than you and figure out from their story what actually was valuable. Take them out for coffee. And don’t just say, hey. What’s your advice? Instead, say, what’s your story? I want to hear beat-by-beat from your entry-level position to how you got to where you are today. And in every step you took, I’m going to ask you, what was it that was critical about you making that step forward? What were you doing there that was recognized? What were you doing there that maybe other people that didn’t take that step at the same time weren’t doing? So you really want to do the work to figure out what matters. And then once you figure that out, start giving that activity as much attention as you can.
Improve your taste
So once you’ve identified what you want to get good at, it could be tempting to say, let me just jump right into practicing. I want to get really good at this. I want to get better at this. But sometimes there’s an intermediate step that has to happen first, which is improving your taste. And by taste, what I mean is your understanding of what it actually means to be good at this thing. That is also nontrivial. How do I understand what it means to be good? Because if you don’t know what that is, it’s hard for you to get better. Now there’s a lot of ways that you could improve your taste. One of the more perhaps unexpected ways is to study unrelated activities that are very creative and skill-based. For example, in my own life, writing is one of the core activities I do. But something that really helped me improve my taste and my ambition to get better was looking towards film. So I began studying the great filmmakers, trying to understand what made a great movie great, what made a gifted director gifted. Now this has nothing directly to do with my main pursuit as a writer, but what it gave me was new creative inspiration that translated over to my sense of taste in writing. So sometimes the way to get a better understanding of what good means in your field is to actually study some other fields, to treat the pursuit of goodness as a general thing that you can become more motivated and understanding of.
Beware perfectionism
So probably the the biggest danger when you begin to care more and more about quality is perfectionism. How do we care about the value of what we do without caring too much about the details? One of the ideas that really helps is to put a stake in the ground. So tell someone, tell your boss, tell your client, I’m going to ship this to you at this point. And then try really hard to make it as good as possible during that time. But you know, when you get to that stake in the ground, you have to deliver. So you want to try to produce really good work, but you also want to give yourselves a very reasonable schedule with which to produce it.