”If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well.”

This was the quote, printed in large font on a poster, in the class I used to study cookery in as a teenager.

Every time I cooked anything (well, attempted to), there it was, staring back at me, hinting that I could probably do better. It all boils down to quality, pun intended. That’s the theme of this blog.

There are three forms of quality in your (personal) daily life, not including your relationships with others etc. These are mental wellbeing, physical wellbeing, and vocational wellbeing. All three have to be proactively maintained in order for you to be at your best. If you’re reading this and feeling a little lost, ask yourself which of those three needs some attention. It might just be the pathway back to feeling positive again.

Here’s the thing though. You have to maintain each of these to a high standard of quality for everything to work. If you think about the cooking activity, you don’t want to cut any corners, undercook your food and end up feeling sick. The same goes for your mental wellbeing. Create some quiet time and rest properly, go for a walk to clear your mind, practice breathing exercises to get full intakes of oxygen.

And so the same goes for your vocational wellbeing. These are your career goals I’m talking about. If you are helping a business deliver to clients, don’t cut corners. In fact, do the exact opposite. Think to yourself: ”how can I add quality to this? What does high quality look like with this task?” Then go do it.

All jobs are worth doing so long as they do no harm. They are all worth doing as well as you possibly can do them, even if you are not getting paid to do them. The reason for that is because each job you do (or are seen as being involved with) makes an impression of you on other people. Just as the artist does not want to show a ”bad” painting to their audience, you’ll want to make sure every brushstroke of your work is just how you want it to be, even if it is probably not going to be noticed by anyone.

High quality, whatever that means to you, takes a long time. Sometimes, much longer than that. The clue is in the word ”worthwhile” – the value is proportional to the time invested in producing high quality work. This is nearly always because quality requires mastery of a niche skillset, the development of which requires time to make all the mistakes first and also includes the necessary reflection time to gain solutions to the problems caused by the mistakes. This is why becoming a Masterchef is incredibly challenging, and why mastery of anything is so difficult that many of us simply give up.

My last word on quality before heading off to enjoy Friday evening – the bedrock of cultivating quality is through disciplined, value oriented action. In plainer English, what I mean is doing small tasks in a meaningful way, regularly, even when you don’t feel like doing them, and even when you feel like you’re not getting any results. The progression is often so negligible and microscopic that we don’t notice the gains until much later than we had hoped for.

Right, that’s enough of that. To anyone out there who is solo and working on their lives and goals, keep going! You never know what incredible things are just around the corner, but trust me, they are there waiting for you.

See you in October…