Quality is what makes your work stand out.
I would rather do one single thing every day, and do it well, than be the most productive person in the world.
Because quality is my north fucking star.
I publish a lot, and I write a lot. That sometimes blows people away, and they ask me if they should try and push out a blog post every single day.
…the answer is, no.
The most important part of what you do should never be quantity. I publish a lot because I want to. But my focus is on quality.
My focus is always on making sure that what I do is done to the best of my ability. That’s what matters more than anything else.
Quality isn’t set by your competitors.
Quality is set by you. It’s set by you determining what you will and won’t stand for. What is and isn’t important. Quality stems from you and you alone, because if all you do is try and match what your competitors are doing, you’re only going to be screwing your audience or your customers.
Make quality your hill to die on.
Your audience and customers want to know that you care about them, and the best way to do that is to ensure that quality is your hill to die on.
That means that you’ll sacrifice whatever you need to, in order to make sure that you aren’t sacrificing the quality of your services or products.
This means that you can’t cut costs, and try to squeeze your margins. Not now. Not ever.
Even if nobody else can tell you’re not focused on quality…
…you’ll know. Believe me, you’ll know when quality isn’t important, and it will start to affect almost every element and area of your business and what you do.
When you know that you aren’t putting your best foot forward or putting your heart into what you do, through quality itself, it’s going to cheapen the way you look at your business in your own eyes, and when that happens – you might as well quit, because your own quality as a founder is going to be damaged.
[This post by Jon Westenberg first appeared on Medium and has been reproduced with permission.]
