ï»żE82 Transcript
I want to talk about a word that gets used so loosely it has almost lost all meaning. Or at the very least- it has become old school, not useful, or just plain out of date!
That word isâŠ
Excellence. People say it all the time. But they use it to describe expensive things. Complex things. Things that win awards or get into shows or sell for a lot of money.
And I think most of that is incorrect. Donât get me wrong â those things may well be excellent! But NOT because of the expense, the attention, or the fame. I think we've been pointing at the wrong thing for so long that a lot of serious makers have lost track of what excellence actually is.
So today that's what we're doing. Getting back to the real definition. The one that has nothing to do with the surface things or what anyone else thinks of the work.
Let me start with something that might be a bit of a hot topic.
Excellence isnât necessarily about price. It has virtually nothing to do with complexity. Nothing to do with the materials you use (although they help) or the credentials you hold or whether the work gets recognized by anyone whose opinion you respect. While all that is nice â itâs not the driving force of excellence. Itâs the result of excellence!
I know that sounds like it can't be right. We've been trained to associate excellence with all those things - the expensive material, the technical complexity, the award, the show acceptance, the price tag. Now, those things can be present in excellent work. But they're not what makes it excellent. Plenty of work that has all of those things is not excellent at all. And plenty of work that has none of them can be.
So what is it actually?
I want to answer that with a story about my cat.
Cosmo is healthy. Genuinely healthy. He gets excellent care and has an excellent quality of life. And it's not because I'm spending my mortgage payment at the vet every month. I spend what I can, where it matters most. But here's the thing - what makes his care excellent has nothing to do with the dollar amount.
It's the attention. I notice things. I pay attention to whether something seems slightly off before it becomes a real problem. I troubleshoot when something changes. I show up consistently and reliably, and with genuine care for what's actually happening rather than what I assumed would be happening.
That's it. That's the whole definition. Excellence in practice is awareness, self-direction, and self-responsibility applied consistently to something that matters to you.
It's not a price point. It's a quality of engagement. As per the dictionary â it means the quality of being outstanding or extremely good.
Let me break that down because I think each of those three things is worth spending a little time on.
Letâs talk awareness first. This is the one that gets lost fastest in a low-standard environment. Awareness means actually noticing what's happening - in your work, in the materials, in the fit, in the space between what you intended to do and what you produced. Not what you assumed would happen. What is actually happening right now, in front of you, in this piece. We used to call this âpaying attention.â And with a noisy world fueled by social media, paying attention to what truly matters is getting rare these days.
A maker operating with genuine awareness catches the grain issue before the piece is cut. Notices the ease problem before the seam is sewn. Sees the pressing problem before the surface is set. That awareness is not a talent some people are born with. It's a skill developed through sustained attention over time. And it atrophies when the environment stops asking for it. When good enough is accepted long enough, the capacity to see the difference between good enough and genuinely right, quietly fades.
We touched on this a few weeks ago - the depletion that happens below the threshold of notice. The awareness is the first thing to go. And rebuilding it requires deliberately practicing the âart of paying attentionâ again even when the environment around you isn't rewarding it.
Next, letâs talk about self-direction. This is the internal compass that tells you what your standard is regardless of what the environment around you is holding. We talked in episode 79 about the external pressure to lower the bar - the well-meaning voices that tell you nobody will notice and good enough is fine and asks why you work so hard in the first place. Self-direction is the answer to that pressure. It's knowing what you're building toward independently of whether anyone else in the room can see it or even does it themselves. Thatâs why itâs called âselfâ direction.
This does not mean ignoring feedback. It means knowing the difference between feedback that serves the work and pressure that serves the comfort of other people who'd rather not watch you hold a standard they arenât holding themselves. Self-directed makers are not arrogant. But they are clear about what they stand for. They know what they're doing and why and they don't need the room to agree with them before they proceed.
Now last is self-responsibility. Okay- before we all have a Hissy-fit â this one has had a lot of bad press lately. It has almost become a dirty word. And that is whatâs wrong with the world today, Iâm afraid.
This is the hardest one, but itâs also the most important. Self-responsibility means owning the result. Yes- I said it. Own your mistakes as well as your successes! Not the customer's fault. Not the material's fault. Not the time constraint's fault. If the work didn't meet the standard, something in your process didn't serve it - and that's yours to examine and address. Not as punishment. As information. Helpful information. We talked about the craft conscience in episode 80 - the internal signal that fires when you know you didn't meet your own standard. Self-responsibility is what you do with that signal. You take it seriously. You let it change something. You don't explain it away.
This is the only position from which genuine improvement is actually possible. A maker who blames the material or the customer or the time pressure for work that didn't reach the standard has no mechanism for making the next piece better. The responsibility has to sit somewhere useful. And the only place it's useful is with the person making the decisions.
Now I want to bring in something from a conversation I heard on another podcast that I think puts this in the sharpest possible context.
Carey Nieuwhof - author, podcaster, someone who speaks on culture and leadership - made an observation recently that I think is one of the most important things I've heard said about this moment we're in. He said that right now, mastery is the strategy. While the world is zigging toward surface stuff, shallow, fast and easy, he's zagging toward depth. Toward genuine expertise. Toward the kind of thinking and work that takes real time and sustained effort to develop. And his prediction is that the people who can engage in deep thought, who aim for genuine mastery, who do the hard work of actually getting excellent at something rather than good enough to appear that way - those people are going to be increasingly rare. And increasingly sought after. Because rare is valuable in a way that common never can be.
I want to tell you that I see this every single week in the classroom and it confirms everything he's saying. The capacity for deep thinking - the ability to hold a complexity long enough to actually work through it, to sit with ambiguity rather than demanding an instant answer, to develop a real skill rather than a surface familiarity with it - that capacity is genuinely eroding in the broader culture. Not in every person. But in enough of a majority that it's visible and it's measurable. I watch students struggle to think through a problem that requires holding more than one variable in mind at once. Not because they're not intelligent. Because the environment they've been living in has trained them to expect the answer in sixty seconds or less. And that training has a cost.
The short attention span, the 140-character conversation, the quick text, the over-consumption of surface content and not enough sustained deep thought - these things are doing a genuine disservice to human intelligence. And itâs not because the people experiencing them are incapable. The capacity was always there. It just stopped getting used. The capacity for depth atrophies the same way any other capacity atrophies. Through sustained disuse. Through an environment that never asks for it. Through a too busy life to go that deep.
Which means the maker who deliberately cultivates depth - who practices the sustained focused attention that excellent work requires, who resists the pull toward surface and fast and good enough - that maker is not just making better work. They're developing a capacity that is becoming genuinely rare. And Nieuwhof's prediction is that rarity will matter enormously on the other side of this. I think he's right. I think I'm already watching it happen.
So what does striving for excellence actually look like in practice? Because awareness, self-direction, and self-responsibility are useful words but I want you to be able to recognize this in your own studio.
It looks like asking why before you ask how. A maker who understands why a dart is placed where it is can adapt when the pattern doesn't work for a particular body. A maker who only knows where to put it from watching a video has no tools when something goes wrong. The why is where the mastery lives. The how is just the execution of it.
It looks like slowing down at the decision points that actually matter. Not every step in a process carries equal weight. Excellence means knowing which ones do - and giving those moments the attention they deserve rather than moving through them at the same pace as everything else.
It looks like finishing things you could get away with not finishing. The inside of a garment nobody will ever see. The back of a piece of fiber art that will hang against a wall. The edge that will be hidden in a seam. You know it's there. And how you treat the parts nobody else sees tells you more about your standard than the parts everyone does.
It looks like staying in a problem until you actually understand it rather than finding a workaround that gets you past it. Workarounds accumulate. Understanding compounds. One of those builds a skill deeply and one of them builds a habit of avoiding the thing you still don't understand.
It looks like being genuinely curious about what went wrong rather than just taping over it and moving on. The piece that didn't work the way you expected is the most useful piece you made that day if you stop long enough to find out why.
None of this requires expensive materials or a special credential or a particular technique. It requires the quality of attention we've been talking about. Consistently. Over time. And the collected effect of those choices - made piece after piece, decision after decision - is what a serious body of work actually is. Not one exceptional piece. A standard held and practiced and deepened over years.
And here is the thing about excellence that I think gets missed almost entirely in every conversation about it.
It is not a destination.
You do not arrive at excellence. You do not achieve it and then possess it. You practice it. You maintain it through deliberate continued use the way you maintain any other capacity. And it is possible to lose it - not permanently, but gradually, below the threshold of notice, through the accumulated small permissions to care a little less that we talked about earlier in this podcast.
The maker who was excellent last year is not guaranteed to be excellent this year if the year in between was spent in a low-standard environment, overriding the internal signal consistently, accepting good enough as the default.
But the reverse is also true and this is the more important thing. The maker who has drifted can come back. The capacity doesn't disappear. The habit of reaching for it does. And habits can be rebuilt through exactly the same mechanism they're built in the first place. One deliberate choice at a time. Look closely. Ask the harder question instead of taking the easy answer. Stay in the problem long enough to actually understand it. Finish the thing you could get away with not finishing. Care about the why, not just the how.
Excellence is not a fixed address. It's the direction you're traveling.
There is research that speaks directly to what I've been describing, and I want to bring it up here because I think it clarifies something important about this moment we're in.
Psychologist Carol Dweck - whose work on mindset you may already be familiar with - and researchers building on her work, identified two distinct orientations toward achievement. They called them performance orientation and mastery orientation.
Performance orientation is focused entirely on the external. How the work compares to others. Whether it gets recognized. Whether it wins. Whether it sells. Whether the number of followers goes up. It's all about the surface level accolades and how that result looks to the outside world. Important for the ego, but not much substance there.
Mastery orientation is something else entirely. It's focused on the process. Whether you're genuinely getting better. Whether the space between what you envision and what you actually did is closing. Whether today's work reflects something you learned that yesterday's work didn't yet know.
Here's what I want you to notice about those two descriptions. One of them maps almost perfectly onto what the current cultural environment rewards and amplifies. The likes, the followers, the algorithm, the quick validation, the external measure of whether something landed. That's performance orientation at scale and it is everywhere right now. But itâs fragile. Itâs like a shallow rooted lawn. At the first drought it will wither and die because there is no depth underneath it. It cannot survive even the slightest of attack.
The other one - mastery orientation - is the one that's going quiet. Not because people don't value it. Because the fast-paced, easy-win environment is skipping right over it, isn't rewarding it and the noise of the performance-oriented conversation is drowning it out.
And what the research shows consistently is that mastery orientation produces better outcomes over time. Not always faster. Not always louder. But deeper, more durable, more genuinely skilled outcomes. The maker who is oriented toward mastery - who measures progress by whether the gap is closing rather than whether the work is getting likes - builds something that compounds over years in a way that performance orientation simply cannot replicate. This type of orientation is strong, deeply rooted, and can survive almost all challenges, droughts, and can weather almost anything the environment throws at it.
Excellence in the way I mean it is entirely mastery oriented. You can make excellent work that doesn't sell. You can make mediocre work that does. You can be overlooked by shows and galleries and markets while doing genuinely excellent work. And you can be celebrated while producing work that doesn't meet your own honest standard.
Now I can hear some of you saying - but who cares? If it sells, if they like it, if the market rewards it, does the excellence actually matter?
And here's my honest answer. In the short term, maybe not. The market will reward plenty of things that aren't excellent and overlook plenty of things that are. That's just true and pretending otherwise doesn't serve anybody.
But here's what the market cannot give you and cannot take away. The knowledge that you're actually getting better. The compounding effect of a standard held and practiced over years. The body of work that tells a story because you, a talented, worthwhile person, made increasingly informed decisions across all of it. The deeply rooted system that holds when the drought comes - and it always comes.
Here's the piece that I think gets lost completely in the performance orientation conversation of today.
Even if nobody else ever knows. Even if it never sells. Even if the market doesn't recognize it and the algorithm buries it and the show doesn't accept it.
You know. And more importantly - you know what kind of maker you are.
Here's what I've come to know after thirty years in this work. Excellence isn't just about the piece in front of you. It's about the person you're becoming through the choices you make about the piece in front of you. Every time you do the harder thing when the easier thing was available, you're not just making better work. You're reinforcing who you are. You're saying - this is the kind of maker I am. This is what I do. This is what I stand for.
And the reverse is equally true. Every time you accept less than you know you're capable of - even when nobody else knows the difference - you're saying something about yourself too. Not out loud. But you hear it. I am the type of person who is okay with shortcuts. I am not trying to excel.
Over time those quiet statements accumulate into an identity. Either you are the kind of maker who holds the standard when nobody is watching. Or you are the kind of maker who holds it only when someone might notice. Those are genuinely different people. And the work reflects it eventually even when the individual choices didn't seem to.
So the real answer to "who cares if itâs good" is this. You care. Or you should. Not because of the piece. Because of who you're deciding to be through the making of it.
Are you being true to what you actually stand for? Or are you performing to someone else's idea of what you should be making and how much effort it deserves?
That question is worth sitting with. Because the answer tells you more about where your work is headed than any market trend ever could.
Excellence isn't a strategy for selling more. It's a strategy for becoming someone whose work means something. To you first. And then, over time, to the people who can tell the difference. And those people exist. They're just quieter than the algorithm right now.
The excellence is in the making. Not necessarily the result. And that means it's available to you right now regardless of where the market is or what the algorithm is doing or whether the environment around you recognizes what you're building.
So letâs circle back to where we started.
This episode was never really about a single word. It was about reclaiming what that word actually means and what it asks of you.
The world right now is producing surface at scale. Fast, shallow, good enough, externally validated, performance oriented. And some of that will sell and some of it will get likes and some of it will look very successful for a while.
But Nieuwhof's prediction isn't wishful thinking. It's arithmetic. Supply and demand. The supply of makers who can think deeply, work carefully, hold a standard regardless of what the environment is doing, and produce work that reflects genuine expertise - that supply is shrinking. The demand for it, from the people who can actually tell the difference, is not.
The maker doing that work right now - who asks why before how, who stays in the problem until they understand it, who cares whether it's actually right - that maker is building something the environment cannot produce for them and cannot take away.
But more than that. They're becoming someone. Someone who works that way. Someone whose identity is built on a standard held consistently over time rather than on whatever the market rewarded this week.
Excellence is the deviation from average made by someone who cared enough and lived enough to make a non-obvious choice on purpose. We landed on that definition in episode 81. This episode is what that sentence actually means in practice.
It's awareness. Self-direction. Self-responsibility. Applied consistently. Not to achieve something. To become someone who works that way.
If that kind of environment is something youâre looking for - one where the standard is held collectively and the work of developing that standard is taken seriously - the Fabric and Fiber Studio might be worth a look. We do that together because that's what serious development actually requires. Not more talent. Not another expensive materials. Not a new credential. That quality of engagement with the work.
Excellence is not a price point. It's not a material or a technique or an award or an acceptance letter from a show.
It's who you decide to beâŠin the roomâŠwhen nobody is watching. When the easier choice is right there and you choose the deeper one anyway. Not because someone else will notice. But because you will. You will feel it. You will know. You will grow.
That's the whole thing. That's what this episode has been about underneath everything else.
Not what excellence produces. Who it makes you.
Start there. Start today. With whatever is on your table right now.
I'll see you next week.
