On pride and improvements

So yesterday I wrote about being proud about what you do, but also improving yourself. It made me think about a pretty scary thing that happened to me a few months ago. I was attending this training where we were divided into four teams and worked together for a few days to create an application. At the end of the class at the retrospect I suggested that in future classes each team could present some part of their solution they were proud of and wanted to show to the rest of the class. I said this because I thought my team had learned something and had done a few smart things that I wanted to share. We had some time to spare so the trainer suggested I show what I was thinking about and then the other teams could do the same thing.

So I showed our stuff and then no other team wanted to show anything. Maybe I'm a little extreme in my search for improvements and maybe I'm over confident in the excellence of our solution but in a room of 25 people I would assume at least somebody felt the same way about something. I don't believe they were all shy. Instead the class went silent and everybody went home. The thing that really scares me is that I think that there is a good chance that the reason for not wanting to show anything actually was that the other teams didn't feel proud about their solution as a whole. Because there was an element of competition there and it's easy to get carried away because it's not real code in the class room...

Finally I must point out that I do not think you have to do the ultimate solution each time to be proud of your work. I'm sure a master chef sometimes throws together something fast when at home. But I think the mast chef quick lunch probably tastes better than my quick lunch. So the effort needed to be proud might be different for different situations but that hunger for improvements is definitely something I think differentiates the good from the great. So if you do not take pride in anything else, at least take pride in striving to be better and be proud of each improvement.