Eternity Async Tutoring

I don’t think of myself as giving “amazing” tips or “super-helpful” advice most of the time. Those are strong words. Maybe I’d use them for the top 5% of my tips or advice or less. If I used terms like those for over 50% of my tips, what would I say about the best ones? “Super super amazing”?

A larger portion of my tips can be amazing from someone else’s perspective who knows less than me.

I think as my skill went up, so did my standards for what is “amazing”. I wouldn’t think of something I can reliably do every day as “amazing” because it’s also “normal” for me.

If you think of the top 5% of what you can do as “amazing”, and you want to do “amazing” stuff all the time (or for all your stuff in a particular area), that’s going to block you. You can’t get outcomes in your top 5% more than 5% of the time…

You need to relax and be OK doing an average job. Even a below average job. Some days I do stuff that is below average for me. I try to watch out for things that are bad and not use them, but below average stuff is often OK to use. There are high stakes contexts like building a space ship where you only want to use above average work in the final product, but for most projects, even important or valuable projects, you can include some average and below average work and it’s OK. For most projects, errors can be corrected a lot more easily than with space ships, so you don’t have to try super hard to avoid any errors. Instead, for most projects, you want your 20th percentile work to be good enough to use, and if even your 5th percentile work is usable that’s better.

If you want to be great, you need to raise your average, raise your below average, not just try to be above average every day. You’ll always have below average days but maybe, hopefully, 10 years from now some of your below average things will be better than your current best things.

@lmd

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