Chase Parnell reminds us to pair effort with analysis of how things could be done better next time.
Now sure, working hard is admirable, but there are a lot of people out there that work their ass off but never progress to the next level because they don’t take that critical next step of pairing their hard work with taking actual concrete corrective action.
At the end of every project, for clients, for yourself, for anything, you should be doing some sort of review of the ways that it wasn’t as smooth as it could have been and then…figure out how to fix it. Even if it’s just a guess and it takes you a few tries to nail down how to fix the issue, you’re at least taking a step towards getting better at your work