Whose Criteria

I was recently going through a few journal entries, and I stopped on one. And the date was January 7 2007. And this period of my life can best be described as a transition period. It was the transition game I was recently leaving a situation and entering in another so it required a different kind of psychology and required a level of grit and determination in order to get the ball moving in a new direction. That’s going to be a future episode of halftime talks transition game. But in conversation with a friend that this this injury is talking about. I was talking about trying to meet the expectation for clients trying to satisfy the creative product that I had believed, or I had built up in my mind and my friend, he’s looking at me and he can easily see the conversation going on.

And he reached over and just put his hand on my shoulder and asked me a question, a question that I want to ask you. Whose criteria are you using? To determine what the output should be? I’ll be honest, I had to pause I had to let it begin to sink in. And the change was radically quick. So I asked you this question. Whose criteria are you using to judge yourself? Who’s criteria this idea of who’s criteria brought me to an understanding that I was offering more resistance. And it was preventing me from completion of whatever project I was dealing with. It was more about my own criteria and my own personal standards that were standing between me and my desire to complete the project. Because I realized that the client didn’t have as many expectations as I do.

I’ve built up a sophisticated palette of understanding so much that I was letting my own standards elevated standards interrupt the path to completion. Really, it feels like I’m shooting for exceptional when acceptable, would be just enough, just enough that is needed, because completion feels more rewarding than perfection. And that component of time that is required to get to that state of perfection is only exponentially I want to say only it is exponentially larger than completion. So what criteria are you using to club yourself over the head and delay the completion of a project of a segment of a particular point in your life that you know, you want to get to? The criteria and the standards we use are applicable, but sometimes we may not have access to the resources, or the project may not necessarily demand it.

Whose criteria are you using? It’s a simple question, whose criteria? Is the criteria that you’re currently using empowering you? Or is it limiting you? And really what this conversation of who’s criteria is all about? Is that internal dialogue? What are we using as the barometer to measure the temperature of our work that measures the temperature of our output? Can we be a little bit more forgiving on the incline, then we will be when we’re at our peak, are we letting high standards or overly complicated standards get in the way of progress is completion and progress as important as perfection? I was listening to an interview recently, and a gentleman was talking about coming off the bench. And he realized that if he is only going to get 10 minutes a game, how do you stay hot?

How do you measure progress? And how do you have the most impact, even under the constraint of limited time and limited resources? That’s progress. We measure growth in terms of progress. And when you have too high of a criteria, especially from the gate, it becomes paralyzing. And that paralysis can extend the amount of time it takes to really begin to see the rewards. There was a quote that I’ve been told lower the standards at first, to get over it to lower the bar first, to hurdle over it. And then on output raise the standards, because that momentum, that that progress, those dominoes, as they fall require a little bit of momentum. A streak is called a streak because it is a streak it is a successive pattern is a trend.

But in order to get that trend, and get in that space, we have to create a conducive environment for it to begin. And I bring up this topic of whose criteria. So when you get into a moment or an impasse, when you get the writer’s block, or you realize that it’s been a while since you’ve done that X, Y or Z that you really want to complete, that you lower the criteria instead of running that five miles that you used to run just run one, just move just move, just move just begin to take the steps because you can ratchet up the standards at any time. But I asked you, whose criteria are you using to judge yourself and if it’s your own, be a little bit more forgiving. I have this quote. It’s one of my favorite authors. He says, if at first you don’t succeed and it’s time to redefine success