On excellence

Excellence —> compounding

“Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.”

Richard Hamming - You and Your Research

What I did not account for was how my expectations would scale alongside my experience. As I got better at writing weekly pieces, I began to demand more of myself. I did not want to write as good a piece as I had written the week or month before but a considerably better one. In the quest to do that, I expanded the scope of my work. I found new res

“When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.”

— John T. Reed in Succee

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

— Steve Jobs

“Elevated standards create elevated results. You notice this whenever you work with an outlier. The bar they set for themselves and others is beyond what most people imagine. Standards apply not just to the quality of work you produce but the opportunities you work on. If you accept substandard work from yourself, you'll only get average work from

“Elevated standards create elevated results. You notice this whenever you work with an outlier. The bar they set for themselves and others is beyond what most people imagine. Standards apply not just to the quality of work you produce but the opportunities you work on. If you accept substandard work from yourself, you'll only get average work from

The very best don’t have to turn it on. It’s always on. They have to turn it off. via Farnam St