On accountability - Part 4
Part 4: Defining what quality means to you.
-How do you define quality? Depends on what we are discussing I suppose.. But how do you define quality of your efforts? Of your input? Of your work?
I often find people are lost after school and, one of the main reasons I believe this to be is no one learnt how to judge their own efforts. We are told what is good and what is bad by others, not on our own. We get graded A - D, but what does that mean? It is just transactional to many - I did this, you graded it that. We are hardly given the chance to argue our grades, compare our efforts, track our work throughout a year, experiment by resubmitting the same piece of work with critical feedback - and the list goes on.
We aren’t taught to stand on our own two feet because we only allow ourselves to be judged by someone else AND to a very specific set of standards. Part of growing up and becoming accountable, to me, stems from learning to judge yourself and your work honestly and accurately. Did you really try your best? If not, why? If you did your best, would the outcome have changed? If you don’t know how to effectively ‘grade’ yourself across all aspects in life, then you are missing the opportunity to improve and grow - to become motivated to achieve more and try harder. I think this is the main reason that many people hit a plateau after school.
If you are going to truly hold yourself accountable, you have to learn to be your harshest critic. Who says you can rely on your bosses standards, or even your partners? Just because they don’t know any better, or don’t have the full picture, should you sit back and only meet their expectations. Of course, if you are evading their standards, then we have a larger problem at hand and I urge you to take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror.
By being your biggest critic, you must be aware of how harsh you are on yourself. You must be able to reflect, but you must be able to let things go and move forward also. This can be a hard balance but, as a good friend taught me, life is like an ever changing race track and we are all race cars with our feet fully planted on the gas. You can’t slow the pace down, you can only take each turn and twist as it comes to meet you. Once through that completely unique corner, you will never meet it again. There is no point wasting time on calculating how you could have done it better too many times when you have another corner you are approaching extremely rapidly. Learn from the mistakes, apply the findings but don’t dwell on the past when the future is all that is yet to come.
So, dear reader, I ask you again, what does quality look like to you?
