Excellence Has No Finish Line

Even elite tennis players are still refining their serve, and jazz musicians are still finding new dimensions in scales they've played for decades. The same is true of the human skills that make our knowledge of others accurate, such as active listening, intellectual humility, empathy, and more.

This episode gets personal. Leslie Ferry shares two moments from her own career where skills she believed were already strong still had real room to grow, and what changed once she noticed the gap.

Transcript

Welcome the Career Edge, where we unpack how work actually works. I'm Leslie Ferry. Some of the best tennis players in the world are still refining their serve. Not because it's weak, but because at the level they play, there's always something more. More precision to find, more range to develop, more ways to make something they've done a million times even more effective against a specific opponent in a specific moment.

That refinement never stops.

A jazz musician does the same thing with improvisation. At the highest level, improvisation isn't spontaneous invention. It's the product of thousands of hours of deliberate practice, scales, theory, listening, playing alongside musicians who hear things differently. The musician who assumes their ear is fully developed stops hearing what the music could become. The one who stays curious

keeps finding new dimensions and something they've been doing for decades. The same is true of the human skills that gather human knowledge, one of the three kinds of knowledge that matter in the upsurge era. Alongside technical and situational knowledge we covered last episode. Active listening, intellectual humility, empathy, critical thinking, accountability, and others are what make human knowledge accurate in the first place.

The stronger they are, the more powerful everything else becomes. You already have these skills. You've been using them your entire professional life. This moment, simply ask for even more precision from them and for knowing how to develop them with the specific person in front of you at the specific moment that matters. Active listening sounds like something any attentive person does.

Intellectual humility sounds like something any thoughtful person has. Empathy sounds like something any caring person extends naturally. And there's truth to each of those. The deeper question is whether the version we're drawing on is precise enough and deep enough for the specific person we're with and in the specific moment we're in.

I know this from my own experience. Intellectual humility was one I believed I had, and in many ways I do. I'm genuinely curious. I ask questions. I don't think I have all the answers, but I also make decisions quickly once I feel I have enough information. And my own wiring, specifically a fear of appearing incapable, was quietly preventing that form of humility from fully developing. When someone challenged a direction I had already committed to.

My instinct was to defend it rather than genuinely consider what they were offering. Moving past their point quickly rather than considering the parts that were different from my own thinking. The desire for intellectual humility was real. The fear of appearing incapable was quietly overriding it. What changed wasn't the fear itself. What changed was building a small pause into the moment a challenge was presented.

Instead of responding right away, I started asking one genuine question before saying anything else. What specifically are you seeing that I might not be? Some of the best adjustments I've made to decisions came directly out of that pause. Not because I stopped being decisive, but because I gave the other person's perspective intentional thought before I moved forward.

Demonstrating empathy in a way others could feel.

Was something I had to actively develop. I grew up in a generation where emotion wasn't something you talked about openly. That shaped how I showed up at work for a long time. What I've come to understand is that empathy at work includes recognizing what others need from you and offering it in a form that they can receive. That's a more specific and more demanding practice. Here's what that looked like in practice.

Someone on my team, I led, once came to me clearly frustrated after a project didn't go the way they had hoped. My instinct, and for years, would have been to move straight into problem solving. Here's what we do differently next time. And that instinct comes from a very genuine place of wanting to help. But it wasn't what that individual needed. What they needed first was simply to be heard, to have the frustration acknowledged.

Before any fix got offered, once I learned to notice that difference between what I wanted to offer and what the individual called for, the relationship changed, becoming stronger. The problem solving still happened, but after what the person needed, not instead of it. Developing this deliberately, not just as a value I held, but as a skill I actively worked on.

Changed how I show up with the people around me in ways I'm still discovering. Getting curious about where these skills are already strong and where they might have more depth to find is some of the most valuable work we can do. And it's work that never really finishes. Every interaction with someone wired differently than we are is a moment where our own version of these skills get tested. And every time we notice the gap.

Between what we offered and what was needed, we found exactly the place where the skill can grow.

This is worth watching for specifically because these skills already work well enough most of the time. There's rarely an obvious signal that more precision was available. No field test or no red flag. The evidence is quieter than that. A conversation that could have gone better. A decision that could have been sharper with one more honest question asked first. Staying curious means noticing those moments on purpose.

Rather than waiting for something to go visibly wrong before we look closer. That growth doesn't have a finish line. The best tennis players are still refining their serve. The best jazz musicians is still finding new things in the scales. And we're still finding new depth in skills we've been practicing for years. That's what excellence looks like.

So this week, pick one of these two moments to watch for.

If it's intellectual humility, notice what happens the next time someone challenges a decision you've already made. Is your first instinct to defend it or to pause and ask what they're seeing that you might not be? If it's empathy, notice what happened the next time someone comes to you frustrated. Is your first instinct to fix it or to acknowledge what they're feeling before you offer anything else? Either one is a real specific moment.

to catch yourself in, not a general skill to rate. That's where a career edge comes from. Not from having a skill, from staying curious about how much further it can go.

Thanks for listening to the Career Edge. I'll see you next time.