Good Quality Requires Good Investment

You Can't Create Good Things Without Putting in the Necessary Resources

Sugar cookies are one of my favorite desserts. For most holidays, my family has made sugar cookies since I was a kid. We have a specific recipe we use and it is my absolute favorite. Just the right level of sweetness, cut extra thick, baked to perfection. It’s a science for us.

A few years ago, during the pandemic, we weren’t able to purchase the usual brand of ingredients for our Christmas sugar cookies. So we ended up buying some off-brand items, assuming they’d be fine.

They were not fine.

As soon as we made the dough, there was a noticeable difference the taste and texture. I, being slightly eccentric about the quality of sugar cookies, couldn’t stand for that. So we threw the dough away and we went to the store to search for the better ingredients.

Investing

If you want quality, you have to start with investing.

This feels axiomatic, yet we so often believe we can get good quality—whether outcomes or products—without the necessary investment.

In the case of our sugar cookies, we believed we could use lower quality ingredients and get the same outcome. That wasn’t correct. So we had to put in the extra work to find the better ingredients since many stores at the time had very limited supply.

Learning a Skill

We often have this debate of investment with our kids as well.

If you want to be good at something, you have to invest the time into it. Very few of us are born with innate skills. We all have to practice to become good.

But with deliberate, guided practice, most of us can learn new skills.

It’s likely you’ve heard of the 10,000 hour rule, popularized in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The main premise of the rule is that it takes about 10,000 hours or 10 years of practice to become world-class at something. The book gives a number of examples of how this happens. There are some issues with this, but overall it’s not a bad guide.

Of course, we don’t have to dedicate 10,000 hours to everything, which is why I like the 20 hour rule as well. By dedicating 45 minutes a day for a month, you can pick up a new skill.

With our kids, we’ve extrapolated that to the 100 hour rule, where we encourage 15-20 minutes of practice every day over the course of a year, which is roughly 100 hours.

The point of all of this, whether learning a new skill or becoming the best in the world, is that it all takes investment. You cannot sit down at a piano and begin to play. It will take daily, guided practice to become good at it. That’s the investment. The same goes for any skill from writing to coding to creating content for social media. It takes investment to do good work.

It’s often easier to see this in some areas, but more difficult in others.

Education

Investment in education is as controversial a topic as any.

Many people, like me, believe that we’ve chronically underfunded and underinvested in education in the United States. While others believe that more money spent on education would be wasted because schools are wasting money.