On excellence

“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

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“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

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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

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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

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“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

... See more