12th January 2026
The start of the New Year usually is also the start of many new resolutions & new projects.
Most start well, few finish, and fewer still really finish with excellent work.
The idea should be not only to finish but to create something extraordinary.
Steve Jobs once described the difference between good work and great work with a simple image:
“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
That idea has always stuck with me. It captures something deeply unintuitive about how exceptional quality is created.
We tend to assume that effort and results go hand in hand. That more energy input reliably produces higher quality output. That the relationship between energy and output quality is linear, stable, and fixed.
But here’s the truth: It isn’t.
At the beginning of any project, there’s an initial surge. The activation input of energy is rewarded disproportionately. You get a huge gain in output quality for a relatively small investment of energy. This is the activation phase. It’s exciting. It creates momentum, because the rewards to additional energy feel obvious. Progress is easy. Fast.
Then comes the long, slow, grinding middle. The valley phase. A stretch of increasingly diminishing returns, where each additional unit of energy input produces smaller and less noticeable output quality improvements. The work becomes less stimulating. The dopamine drip starts to run dry.
Most people endure the valley for a little while, but stop somewhere in it.
Not because they lack ambition, but because they’re too focused on the outcomes. The extrinsic rewards for their efforts have become less compelling. The effort starts to feel unjustified. It becomes easy to conclude that you’ve reached the ceiling. That anything more would be inefficient or unnecessary.
But that conclusion is wrong—because the curve doesn’t end there.
With that final 5% energy input, something remarkable happens. Output quality breaks from the diminishing trend and surges again. The willingness to lean in when others pull away, to invest that “unreasonable” final 5%, is rewarded.
The final 5% is where good work becomes great work.
Paraphrasing Steve Jobs, for people who achieve great work, to sleep well at night, the work has to be carried all the way through.
Be a last 5 percenter & stay blessed forever.