We often define the quality of our output by the attention it receives or the work it inspires. Not all good work gets attention, but it often inspires others to create pieces that manage to captivate the people or some group of them.
We appreciate originality and the surprise it can yield in our lives. The pieces that require a lot of work to produce, we can appreciate those for their efforts and the dedication it takes to see them through. But there is no formula for what will catch people off guard and have them genuinely interested.
A hunt for this golden heuristic seems to be a top item for a lot of people and a lot of companies. Employ psychologists to engineer our attention and addiction to some form of produce.
Any work of high quality needs passionate people to produce them. They will put work into some form of quality, be it the overall thematic expression, detailed craftsmanship or some sort of captivating punchline. You will not remove the effort from quality no matter how much you wish for it.
What gets labeled as what is up to contemporary critics, their reach and their willingness to further echo your output. Everyone is biased, and don’t be naive in thinking that critique is purely about the absolute quality of what is produced.
You define what you think is good and you bet on that with hard work and dedication. Don’t cater to an army of critics, because you will end as a filler for template items where they need to put little effort into tearing your work apart. If you are original and don’t fit the mold, the critics will have to work for their words and actually digest what you have produced.
Any work of good quality needs someone to appreciate it. It is cheap to be a consumer and a critic, it takes nerve to open yourself up for critique and judgement. When you do make an effort to produce something, your efforts, bias, opinions and resulting quality will get its label.
What is good or bad, has nothing to do with true or false.
Efforts are always appreciated, but the labels they live under are many and most are the results of our instinctual cataloging obsession. We need to label and to squeeze similar items into fewer so that we think we control our surroundings better. A pack of wolfs with colored boxes. And often, we mislabel intentionally to trick the pack into interacting with it in a certain way.
Observe the world, learn to appreciate hard work and to work hard.
V 