151. WHY WE CAN'T SEE OUR MOST VALUABLE THING

Let's start with a moment that I bet you'll probably recognize.

You've handed something over or a finished piece of work and someone looks at it or they feel it or experience it and they say, how on earth did you know to do that? Or how did you do this so quickly? And you find yourself giving a slightly awkward shrug, almost like you're a little bit embarrassed.

You don't want the attention to be drawn to you.

And you end up saying something like, oh, I don't really know.

I just did it.

Because to you, it did feel like nothing.

It was so obvious.

It was just how you work.

And what I've come to believe after watching this happen again and again, specifically with incredible creatives, is that the very thing you just shrugged off is often the most valuable thing you do.

And there's a reason it hides from you so well.

When something comes to you so easily, we assume as a creative, it comes easily pretty much to everybody else as well.

It just feels so natural that we can't quite believe that it's worth anything.

So often we discount it, we decide it's nothing special and we leave it outside of being anything worth attaching a value to or even really acknowledging it as a thing at all.

It's left out of our website, it's left out of how we talk about our work, it's left out of everything that we have any attention to, we draw any attention to.

We show people the finished thing.

We're happy to do that.

So it might be the beautiful arrangement or the finished brand or a room we've designed or the finished collection.

But never the years of judgment and the taste sitting underneath every single small decision that made it what it is.

Perhaps it's your process.

Perhaps it's the particular way you prepare before you even begin whatever your work is.

Perhaps it's the questions that you ask a client or a customer right at the start when they're just in those sort of early, early stages of working with you.

They're the questions that nobody else would think to ask.

Perhaps it's your standards, your high level of standards.

Perhaps it's the things that you'd quietly never let out of the door, even when no one else would ever have known.

Perhaps it's your eye.