On excellence

“Excellence is an aesthetic: consistently showing up forces everyone else on the team to do the same.”
— Sam Gerstenzang, Four sayings that changed how we operate

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

“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

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

“I think one thing that is a really important thing to strive for is being internally driven, being driven to compete with yourself, not with other people. If you compete with other people, you end up in this mimetic trap, and you sort of play this tournament, and if you win, you lose. But if you’re competing with yourself, and all you’re trying to

“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

“There are some painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are other painters who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.”
— Picasso

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

Ad legend Bill Bernbach letter on creativity, written in 1947:

Dear ________:

Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too, and I don’t mind telling you I’m damned worried. I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance

“Once I went to a new dentist and he said, “That crown is beautiful. Which dentist did it?“ Most people wouldn’t think dentistry is art. But there’s opportunity for je ne sais quoi in every field.”
— Wesk Kao, Turning a yellow spot into the sun