I have thought about a problem related to this very often. There was an Amazon shareholders letter written by Jeff Bezos that elaborates on their culture of high standards. In particular, it talks about the cost of high standards when writing Amazon’s “six-page memos.” The idea of having teams with high standards on their written memos resonated with me, but I have not been able to apply it that much in my professional career.
My standards are higher than those of the organization around me, and when it came down to spending the relationship capital to criticize people’t documents to the level I felt would make them really high-quality, I just can’t do it. Some documents achieve the standard already, so it’s not unachievable in general. What it really is is that to provide criticism that feels specific and kind, it feels like I would have to understand the underlying issue at the depth that I want that person to explain to me.
Basically, to get to that level of quality, I have to put in a large fraction of the effort of drafting the document, which I don’t have time to do. In some cases, I can point out areas that I feel could offer more elaboration, but sometimes the document feels inadequate and I can’t explain why without several hours of concentrated effort.
I feel the same issue could come up here. You can tell a really high quality post because it offers insights that are brilliant but unexpected, or it uncovers primary source data that is neglected and unknown, or it’s just a really compelling written explanation. But explaining how to create that out of an average post feels like it requires me to become the expert I want the author to be.
I have thought about a problem related to this very often. There was an Amazon shareholders letter written by Jeff Bezos that elaborates on their culture of high standards. In particular, it talks about the cost of high standards when writing Amazon’s “six-page memos.” The idea of having teams with high standards on their written memos resonated with me, but I have not been able to apply it that much in my professional career.
My standards are higher than those of the organization around me, and when it came down to spending the relationship capital to criticize people’t documents to the level I felt would make them really high-quality, I just can’t do it. Some documents achieve the standard already, so it’s not unachievable in general. What it really is is that to provide criticism that feels specific and kind, it feels like I would have to understand the underlying issue at the depth that I want that person to explain to me.
Basically, to get to that level of quality, I have to put in a large fraction of the effort of drafting the document, which I don’t have time to do. In some cases, I can point out areas that I feel could offer more elaboration, but sometimes the document feels inadequate and I can’t explain why without several hours of concentrated effort.
I feel the same issue could come up here. You can tell a really high quality post because it offers insights that are brilliant but unexpected, or it uncovers primary source data that is neglected and unknown, or it’s just a really compelling written explanation. But explaining how to create that out of an average post feels like it requires me to become the expert I want the author to be.