How to make something great
Greatness begins with stick-to-itiveness. It’s about iteration and repetition. One-shotting something superb is rare. The more common path to quality is mundane but effective: an endless commitment to the doing-and-assessing feedback loop. It’s producing five beats a day for three summers; it’s drawing a hundred owls.
There’s that famous parable from Art and Fear of the ceramics class teacher who split the class into two, instructing one group to perfect a single art piece over the entire semester, and another to create as many pieces as possible. As you might expect, the group who created more created a better final piece. They discarded more, but they had more data points, more trails explored, more dead ends met. They knew the tricks and snags, and most importantly, they knew where to exert that extra 50% of effort that creates the last mile of quality and an order of magnitude better result. Like Will Smith said, “the great thing about being at 90% is at least you know you’re half way there.”
Excellence is at the intersection of iteration, time, and meticulousness. How many years or decades are you willing to grapple with the craft? How many times are you willing to try and fail? How many minute details can you pick up on that others gloss over or don’t even know exist? And how long can you sustain commitment when “aha moments” are fewer and farther between?
The question then becomes, how do you stick with something so long? And the answer is pretty straightforward. You have two options: discipline or curiosity. In my experience, discipline is self-coercion - it’s forcing yourself to do something you inherently don’t want to. Genuine interest and curiosity yield greatness as a byproduct, not an end. This is where everything drives toward: greatness is the interplay of interest and care. These are a compounding pair. If you are interested in something to a degree that others are not, then you will care more and do it for longer. You’ll be more willing to invest time, effort, reps. You’ll be willing to sweat the details because it’s for the sake of straining for perfection - for the sake of living Zeno’s Paradox, cutting the distance between the one-yard line and the end zone over and over and over again, halving the asymptote, knowing you’ll never get there - but because pursuit is enough; to demonstrate sustained care is enough.
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Art: The Fountain - John Singer Sargent (1907)