Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Eleventh Draft
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The 11th Draft. Here we go. I want to start with something small. A founder is still at her desk on a Saturday afternoon, long after the rest of her team logged off. The office is quiet. Everyone else went home hours ago. She's rewriting the same product description for the eleventh time. The tenth version already worked. Customers would have understood it fine. Nobody would have noticed if she stopped there. She keeps going anyway, because something about it still isn't quite right to her. Here's a quote that explains what she's doing. Comes from Steve Jobs. He said The only way to do great work is to love what you do. Jobs said this in 2005 during a commencement speech at Stanford. Just before that, he had walked the crowd through getting fired from Apple, the company he started in a garage. He was 30 years old, and the company he built was suddenly not his to run anymore. He talked about losing something that had defined his whole adult life. In between, he started over more than once at companies most people don't even connect to his name today. A few years after that speech, he was living with a cancer diagnosis. None of this was the easy version of a career. He was not describing a feeling that shows up when things go well. He was describing the reason he kept building anyway after being pushed out of his own company and later while he was sick. Bring that back to the founder at her desk. Nobody's grading her on the eleventh draft. No investor is checking word choice in a product description. She's doing it because she cares whether the sentence is actually good, not just acceptable. That caring is the whole leadership moment here. It rarely shows up as passion or energy. It shows up as someone willing to sit with a small, unglamorous task past the point where most people would call it finished. Now here's where this gets misread constantly. People here love what you do and turn it into permission. Follow your passion. Chase what excites you. Quit the moment a job stops feeling fun. Sounds inspiring on a poster. Sounds a lot less inspiring when the job stops being fun for the third year running, and you're still showing up anyway. It also skips the part of Jobs' own story where loving the work meant showing up through getting fired, through years of long odds, through being sick. None of that felt good in the moment. He kept going anyway. The reframe is simpler than the misread and harder to live by. Excitement is what gets someone to start something. It rarely survives past the third draft, the third quarter, or The third hard year. What's left after the excitement fades is either love or it isn't. And love, in practice, looks less like enthusiasm and more like willingness. Willingness to redo the part that's already good enough. Willingness to notice a small flaw that nobody else would catch. Willingness to show up on the day it isn't fun at all. That's a quieter kind of love than the word usually implies. Now here's something worth naming plainly. An AI tool can hand you a competent tenth draft before your coffee gets cold. It has no attachment to whether an 11th version would be better, because it is not the one who has to stand behind the result. It cannot tell the difference between something that's merely acceptable and something that's actually great. Making that call requires caring about the outcome in the first place, and the tool has nothing at stake. Deciding whether work is genuinely good, not just done. is still a judgment that belongs to a person who loves it enough to notice the gap. So here's something to carry this week. Notice what you keep circling back to, revising, adjusting, even when nobody asked you to touch it again. It's usually not a productivity problem. It's usually where the love actually is, quietly, underneath the deadline. Go back to that founder one more time. She didn't publish the 10th draft. She wrote an 11th on a Saturday, with nobody watching and nothing forcing her to. That spirit is the whole quote. Not a poster about passion, a person who loved the work enough to stay with it a little longer than she had to.