THE LEAFLET

April 10 2025

good vs excellent (with help from AI), underestimating self and team, habits and aging well

GOOD VS EXCELLENT (WITH HELP FROM AI)

A useful question at the outset of a venture, whether you’re starting a whole company, shipping an early draft of an artifact, or baking a cake for your nephew’s birthday is: what is the difference between a good version and a truly excellent version of this thing?

I like using this as a prompt for Claude or GPT. It’s also a good question to ask customers, collaborators, and mentors or experts in your field. A follow-up prompt for your AI is: “Thanks! Please give me a step by step plan [or recipe, if you are in fact baking a cake] for making the excellent version you just described.”

As you gather information in responses to this prompt, remember that you don’t have to do the excellent thing in every instance. Sometimes that excellence is more costly than it’s worth in the early going. Sometimes you can build an audience or secure a deal that lets you move forward and build more without doing that excellent thing at all. Your cake might not need icing piped in perfect calligraphy across the top. Your podcast might not need an original score that enhances each emotional beat of the pilot episode. 

This good-vs-excellent question can also be useful when you’re delegating. The kind of people you want to hire may be predisposed to doing the excellent version of things by default. You may need to help them develop good judgment about when to ship something shitty, or shabby, or shiny. Specifying the difference between those levels of performance can help you and your delegate select a clear and shared definition of success. 

-eric

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UNDERESTIMATING SELF AND TEAM

Across the organizations I’ve led and advised, people naturally underestimate what they can do when they don’t have a goal to shoot for. Each of us individually can be the worst judges of our max capacities. 

A great leader confronts this tendency and changes the very identity of teammates. With a leader’s direct prompting, individuals who previously sold themselves short develop powerful beliefs about what they can do and overcome. Those beliefs deepen when these individuals hit goals they might not have had the confidence or ambition to set for themselves. 

The unintentionally low expectations we have for ourselves often apply to the team around us as well. Unless you are super lucky, you have probably had more experiences of mundane dysfunction on teams than experiences of big, improbable success. Most of the people you lead have first-hand experience that informs their skepticism of leader talk in general and leader-issued goals in particular. 

These two patterns can converge and constrain, like the jaws of a handcuff. My low expectations for myself apply at scale to my team; plus, I haven’t often seen a team hit a big ambitious goal.

When you’re setting a big goal for the team, then, it can help to do it as a description of success instead of a prescription of belief. You’re getting the team to say with you “this is what success looks like” rather than “this is what you, skeptical teammate, predict will happen, based on your work history and analysis of our circumstances.” Clarity about the outcome you’re chasing will serve you and your team better than debates about the probability of achieving that outcome.

-ben

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HABITS, PRACTICES, AND AGING WELL

One of the things I like in James Clear’s Atomic Habits (and his associated writing) is his attention on the power of time. I was very ready to chuck that book into the pile of faddish self-help slop when I was judging it by its cover (and coverage). But there’s a humane, no-hacks worldview in many parts of it that elevates it for me. 

One way Clear talks about habits is making time work for you instead of against you. In his account, a habit harnesses the power of compounding interest. Little, consistent contributions of time become far larger than the sum of their parts.

Financially, the greatest gains from compound interest occur in the latest years. This can be true, also, with your practices. So it can be useful for individuals and organizations to look for practices they can continue to get better at deep into their maturity.

A thing I’m increasingly finding among the leaders and teams I admire most - the things they can keep getting better at, even after decades of practice, are often things that make them better, beyond that practice, as people and teams. 

All of your practice earns you proficiency (and maybe, with some luck, praise and profit). It also enriches your soul. With the right practice, you’re ever closer to being good at something; you’re also closer to being good. No preposition, full stop.  

-eric

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COMPELLING QUOTES

Habits guy James Clear on compounding interest:

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.

Novelist Rachel Cusk on violence:

It was a violence that he already knew he contained: he had inherited it, could answer it, was occasionally its victim; what he did not desire was to become it.

Innovation thinker Jeff Dyer on learning through heroes:

If you don’t know somebody very well, you can ask them, ‘Who are your heroes?’ You can learn a lot about people by hearing who their heroes are.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric