Seth Godin: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do you find helps? So Wes learned from watching you that she realized, okay, my standards are not nearly as high as they could be. Other than working with you, maybe that's the answer is work with people like you that have really high standards. Just what do you find is most helpful in helping people build taste and also just increase their standards? Standards, it's worth understanding what quality is and the people who listen to this podcast know better than most. Quality is not luxury. Quality is not perfection. Quality means meeting spec, and if you meet spec, you're done. If you don't think the spec is good enough, make a better spec. But if you meet spec, you're done. And so what it means to have high standards is that you relentlessly improve the spec in service of the people you're working with and for. And what it doesn't mean is that you take something that meets spec and refuse to ship it because you're a perfectionist. That's hiding. And so what I learned at Spinnaker where I had my first job, real job as a product manager, was this idea that we weren't there to make perfect for us. We were there to delight the person who was buying the software. And our standards were untouchable. We said, "If that person, the one we're describing is delighted with what we shipped, it's good. And if they're not, it doesn't matter what kind of excuses we have. " This is the opposite of what most people in this job do, which is they say, how do I please my boss? And if you're just doing your job, then don't expect to get rewarded for more than just doing your job because we can find lots of people who can just do your job. That reminds me of one of your other really powerful pieces of advice about how no matter your job, this is a tangent, but it really stuck with me once I read your advice here is no matter what job you have, you couldn't love it, enjoy it, be amazing at it, even if you're just like a waitress or whatever. Can you just talk through that? Because that's so powerful.…

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