Lower the floor, raise the ceiling

On the difference between having high standards and enforcing them too early

Watch what happens when someone presents their first attempt at something new. The room goes quiet. Not because the work is bad, but because it's not polished. Someone clears their throat. "I think we need another pass at this." The meeting ends. The work goes back in the queue.

Your team talks constantly about high standards. They've absorbed the Jeff Bezos memos, built cultures of excellence, internalized what great looks like. But nothing ships anymore. The AI experiments stop after the first underwhelming prompt. The bold redesign gets killed before users see it. The new framework sits in a branch forever.

Even your best people, the ones who've shipped successfully before, now present everything with an apology. "This is rough, but..." "Still needs work, obviously..." "Just a first pass..." The work gets buried before it has a chance to breathe.

Here's what broke: You set the bar so high that reaching it requires already being good at the thing you're trying to learn. By the time version one meets your standards, the opportunity is gone and the team has stopped trying.

So teams optimize for safety. Three rounds of review before anything goes live. Rubrics and quality gates. Debates about what "good" means before building anything users can touch. Weeks perfecting positioning for features that don't exist yet.

I've watched this spread everywhere. Engineers won't experiment with AI tools because their prompts aren't sophisticated enough. Designers won't share early concepts. Writers keep rewriting the first paragraph. Everyone is optimizing, but nothing ships.

The logic makes sense: we can't ship bad work. What if customers see something rough? What if the team thinks mediocre is acceptable? What if lowering standards becomes the new standard?

So the review gets tighter. The bar stays high. The work stays in draft.

Six months ago, I thought this was about discipline. Push harder. Demand more. Excellence requires sacrifice.

Then I looked at what actually shipped. Almost nothing. And what did ship came from the people who ignored the process entirely.

Here's the trap you built: Your team knows exactly what elite looks like. You've shown them. Praised it. Held it up as the standard. Now they won't ship anything that falls short.

When work does ship, it's safe. Incremental. Already proven. You wanted bold experiments and got careful iterations. You wanted people to try new things and taught them that trying means risking rejection.

The standards work perfectly. You just designed them to prevent the behavior you're demanding.

I watched a founder reject their designer's first three attempts at a new feature. "Not at our quality bar." By attempt four, the designer stopped suggesting anything new. Only refinements of existing patterns. Safe. Approved. Dead.

This is the cost: You're asking for ceiling-level quality on attempt one. But attempt one is how you discover where the ceiling should be.

The rough draft teaches you what the polished version needs. The bad prompt shows you how to write the good one. The clunky feature reveals what elegant should solve. You can't skip to the end.

Every rejected first attempt is practice for not starting.

Meanwhile, you're trying to prevent bad work from existing. Protect the brand. Maintain the standard. Keep the bar visible and high.

But bad work is how good work gets made. The first AI prompt is always awkward. The first iteration always misses something. The first attempt at anything new is definitionally rough.

You can either block it and prevent the learning, or ship it and use reality to teach what polish should fix.

The gap is here: Your workflow was designed for mature execution, not early exploration. You're asking "does this meet our bar?" when the question should be "what did shipping this teach us?"

Same standards. Different timing.

You defined what elite looks like. Good. That's the ceiling. Everyone can see where you're headed.

The mistake comes next: You demand they start there.

Standards used to be gates. You set the bar, people clear it, and clearing it earns the right to ship. That works when you're executing something mature. You already know what good looks like because you've shipped it before.

But early-stage work requires different sequencing. Show people the ceiling. Let them start at the floor. Build momentum through progressive improvement rather than demanding perfection upfront.

The ceiling defines the destination. The floor creates the motion to reach it.

Notice the language difference. Teams with high standards talk about excellence. Teams that actually ship talk about versions.

Version one. Version two. Version ten. Each one better than the last because each one shipped and revealed what the next one needed.

Your review process assumes you already know what quality means. Your quality gates test for completeness before reality has shown you what complete should include. Every "send it back for another pass" decision postpones the only feedback that matters: what happens when users touch it.

You've built frameworks for defining quality upfront. Success metrics before there's a product. User journey maps before there are users. Edge case polish before anyone's hit the main case.

But quality emerges from the collision between your assumptions and reality. You can't define it accurately in advance. You discover it through repeated exposure to what breaks, what works, and what users actually need versus what you thought they'd need.

The people who ship constantly aren't less rigorous than you. They're just more comfortable being bad at something before they get great at it.

Here's the assumption that's breaking everything: That standards precede shipping. That you define excellence upfront, then build to meet it. That lowering the floor means abandoning any hope of reaching the ceiling.

But look at what's actually happening. The biggest barrier to shipping is no longer capability. It's your review process. Your quality gates. Your insistence that version one look like version ten.

The teams making progress have figured out something uncomfortable: You have to be willing to look bad before you can be great. Ship something rough. Let it be premature. Iterate while people watch. Accept that the momentum to reach your ceiling comes from shipping work that's nowhere near it yet.

Define the ceiling clearly. Then give people permission to start at the floor. Otherwise, the ceiling is just theory.

Countless teams are about to talk themselves out of their best work. Not because it's too difficult. Because they're waiting for attempt one to be excellent.

Be clear about who this matters for: If you're building products, creating content, learning new skills, and you want to reach elite levels, you need to know what elite looks like. Abandoning standards entirely is just choosing to be mediocre. That's not what this is about.

And if you genuinely don't care about quality? If you're happy shipping garbage? You're not in this conversation anyway. Most people should be spectators to this game.

The people stuck are the ones in between. You want the ceiling. You can see it clearly. But you're enforcing those ceiling-level standards at the floor, before anyone's learned enough to reach them.

You're reviewing first attempts like they're final versions. Killing momentum before it has a chance to build. Preventing the iterations that would actually teach your team how to reach the standards you care about.

In work that requires momentum, there's no middle ground. You're either shipping and improving, or you're perfecting and stalling.

The few who figure this out will do something uncomfortable: Define the ceiling. Ship the floor. Watch what breaks. Then raise expectations based on what reality taught them, not what they assumed upfront.

Everyone else will still be perfecting version one when these teams are already at version ten.

The answer turns out to be simple. They shipped something bad. Then they made it better. Then they made it better again.

The standards evolved with the work instead of strangling it before it started.

The only question is whether you'll lower your floor before perfectionism makes the ceiling irrelevant.