There is a saying "If you're going to do something. Do it right", which can be immediately countered with "Never do your best work because they will come to expect it." Quality is an interesting concept. Not everything in the world can be great. In fact it seems as though there are a great many things that only serve as a measure of how good something else is. I was thinking about Fruit Stripe gum the other day and it got me wondering about the whole idea. Did the makers of that cheap gum simply not care that their product was substandard? Maybe they thought it was good enough and stopped at that. I guess either answer just shows that people have different standards on even the smallest things.
The thing is that no one always does their best work all the time. It's an impossible standard to maintain. Sure there will be times when you get it your all and really try to make sure that there is a special quality to whatever you've put your mind to. They say the character of a person is measured by what they do when no one is looking. I believe that most people out there are generally good and if not good then simply not looking to be overtly bad. With that said most of the time though people will do what they think they can get away with. Driving down the road we know what the speed limit is and yet we go over. We do this and justify it in our mind because don't the cops have better things to do than chase us down for going 5-10 mph over the limit? We continue this behavior because we know that most of the time we can get away with it. That's why a car pulled over by a cop car with flashing lights is the strongest deterrent to prevent speeding. That little warning that if you're not careful then maybe it'll be you on the side of the road while people drive by staring at your embarrassment. The effort we put into things tends to be very similar. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying everyone out there is doing just the bare minimum, but let's be honest, if everyone put forth their best effort all the time this world may be a very different place.
What's strange about quality is that it's not always the best thing that's the most successful. Look at McDonald's or Starbucks or Coca Cola. Their products aren't superior to what's around them. They just happen to be very successful in being in the top of their class. One could argue about taste for those various companies, but a McDonald's hamburger isn't known for its great quality. While you may enjoy Starbucks coffee, there are several alternatives out there that could be labeled as "better" in price or overall taste. Somehow those companies have taken average products and skipped past quality and gone straight for quantity. They have saturated the market with whatever they're selling in hopes that no one else stands against them. There is a problem with that though. Without competition there is no need to become better. If everyone is already buying your hamburgers or sodas then why change anything for the better? Unfortunately in a lot of cases the only true form of competition comes from those who simply attempt to match the marketing blitz because that's what we as a society have shown we respond to. So it's hard to blame the large companies for glossing over their quality when we've shown that we don't really care one way or another. Sure we say that we what better quality, but the line to the drive-thru is always crowded.
Now I know that with today's modern family it's getting harder to simply take time for really anything. The world always feels like it's blasting forward and if you're not running at top speed you're not just going to get left behind, but you're going to get run over in the process. Mom and dad are both working and by the time they get home from a day in the world there may be very little energy left to do something like cook a full meal for the family. Instead it just becomes easier to pick up our phone and dial for someone to bring us something. Or we stop by that drive-thru on the way home because it's there. We don't always have time or the energy to be concerned with the quality of something. Sometimes we just have to take what's easiest and move on. It would be easy to judge someone when they do this, but we've all been there. We know that the path of least resistance isn't always the best path. There are more and more moments in life where we put away our standards because standing up for them just seems too exhausting.
Maybe part of the whole issue comes from the fact that we as a society have put so much emphasis on everything that eventually something is going to fall through the cracks. There comes a breaking point where we ourselves stop trying as hard as we used to. It could be that the world smacked us around or maybe it simply stopped recognizing the fact that we put forth extra effort. When we look around and see that putting in 100% will get you the same reward as someone who only put in 70% it gets to be disheartening and given enough time one will eventually throttle back. Then that 70% becomes the new standard until it too drops down from overwhelming apathy. So it becomes understandable for those large companies who are successful at putting out a massive amount of low quality goods. They wouldn't keep making money if our own standards were raised. I guess the question is though how do we raise our standards when sometimes it feels like success is measured by the fact that you simply survived to the weekend?
