Honest Comparison: Good Work Versus Adequate

Exposure alone isn't enough. You need to actively compare. The accelerant is putting genuinely excellent examples side by side with adequate work in the same category and asking: what's different? Where's the gap? What can I see when I look at them together that I can't see when I look at them separately?

This is uncomfortable because it requires naming inadequacy—often, your own. When you compare your work against excellent work, you're confronting the gap between what you're currently producing and what's possible. That's a hard conversation with yourself. Many people avoid it. Instead of comparing, they convince themselves that their work is fine, or that the excellent work is "too fancy," or that it doesn't apply to their context. All of these are defensive moves. They're also stunting development.

The practice is simpler: find a piece of excellent work in your domain. Find a piece of adequate work on the same topic. Read them both. Write down what's different. Not in a high-level way—specifically. Is the excellent piece clearer? Why? What sentences are doing work? How is the idea structured? Where does adequate fall short? What's missing?

If you can't do this exercise, your taste isn't developed yet. That's okay. The point is to do the exercise anyway. Do it repeatedly. Over time, what was unclear becomes clear. What requires analysis becomes intuitive. You start to see patterns in what makes work good.

The other version of this practice is to do it prospectively: identify a piece of work you're about to do. Find a piece of excellent work in that category. Before you start, study it. Ask yourself what you notice. Then do your own work trying to hit the same standard. Afterward, compare. What worked? What fell short? Why?