Don’t look it in the eye

📸 Photo by Petra Nesti on Pexels

For anyone whose high standards have quietly stopped them starting

She’s knocking them down as fast as I can write them…

Time - yes, this will take time she doesn’t really have.

Money - yes, it needs investment, and not a small amount.

Experience - yes, she’s never built exactly this kind of thing before.

All true.

None of it sticks.

She’s run a business for years, she’s recognised for what she does, and she’s far too canny to be stopped by any of these. The thing she wants to build sits right next to the work she’s known for. It should be the easy bit.

Then she says it herself.

‘These are just excuses…’

She knows the next step. Build the bones of it. Get a rough version in front of real people, see who’s interested, then build some more.

So why isn’t she doing it?

The creature in the corner

I think she looked the creature we call excellence in the eye.

Excellence is fine in the corner of your vision. If you have high standards and can keep it there, it does useful work. It’s why the things you make are good.

Look straight at it, though, and you freeze. Sometimes for a long time.

When she looked, she found a story from a long way back. As a child, her family called her ‘messy’. Her thinking jumped sideways and made connections nobody else around her was making, and nobody saw that as a skill.

Now, it’s the skill she’s built her business on. From the outside, her ‘messy’ looks like creative, non-linear, entrepreneurial thinking, which is exactly the edge you’d want in anyone designing something innovative and new.

But excellence had dazzled her. Underneath the experienced professional was a ‘messy’ little girl who didn’t think she had what it takes.

Looking back down the mountain

So we stopped talking about the product. We made a list of everything she’d already done on it.

She talked about the research. How she knows the sector and its needs inside out. Chipping away at the structure of the product, refining ideas for a long time. How it led to a two-hour focused creative sprint - she was in full flow with the ideas and it had felt great. She didn’t want to stop.

Laid out on the page, she’d come a long way up the slope. Much further than the version she’d been carrying in her head.

You can’t look up at the summit without the risk of catching excellence’s eye. It lives up there. But you can look back down at how far you’ve already climbed. It doesn’t follow you down.

That’s what celebration is for. It gives you somewhere safe to look. Excellence asks ‘what if I can’t?’ The fear pushes you away from getting it wrong, and burns energy doing it. Celebration pulls you towards the thing that felt good - that two-hour sprint - and wants more of it.

By the end of the session, she was talking about why she’d wanted to build it in the first place. And she could see how far up the mountain she already was. She got practical, planning when she could pick up where that sprint left off - the energy was back.

I looked it in the eye

I’m writing a book about the tool of iteration. Its working title is (drumroll)… Iteration.

If you work with me, it will have come up in our conversations. It’s the punchline to the question: how do you get good shit done?

Recently, I found out a book on the same idea is a bestseller. Tiny Experiments, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Different branding, different science behind it, the same heart: treat things as experiments, and the fear of getting them wrong loosens its grip.

My book is barely half written. I don’t have a publisher. And hers is doing what I’d quietly hoped mine might.

I looked excellence straight in the eye, and I froze.

I’ve been telling myself, well - the idea was clearly right for the moment. That’s true. It doesn’t help much.

So I did what I’d asked her to do. I stopped looking up and made the list.

An eleven-chapter map. Four of those chapters already tested here, as rough versions, with real readers. A phrase, ‘always in beta’, that a client still uses every day, three years after it came out of a session with him.

It’s longer than I expected, too.

The frozen version of me would have kept this piece in drafts until it could stand next to hers. It goes out today instead, a rough section of a chapter about high standards, written the week I found out someone else got there first.

Excellence can get back in the corner.