Work with people who respect you and who you respect. No exceptions.Published inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min read7 hours ago-- Take a bow. You made it.Issue #208: How Thriller was made and Always Be FinishingTheres a quote I think about a lot: How you do anything is how you do everything.Its one of those quotes that gets thrown around a lot. It makes a great title. Its an effective subject line. As far as I can tell, it was popularized by Martha Beck, who was raised in the LDS Church and left to pursue transcendental meditation (itself a practice of doing one thing well so it bleeds out into the rest of your life).I love this maxim because it encourages me to think small. Subtle details matter. How you approach a seemingly unimportant task says a lot about who you are.Thats why I loved Nora Germains list of 110 lessons from her career as a jazz violinist. Shes performed and recorded with artists like Sam Smith and Jon Batiste. She sees jazz as a metaphor for living, and if you listen closely, many of these are life lessons in disguise. A few of my favorites:Contribute, dont rely.Work with people who respect you and who you respect. No exceptions.If people express limitations, those belong to them not to you!You can always give yourself a chance. Book your own show. Give yourself the first solo. Harris SockelFrom the archive: All Thriller, No FillerQuincy Jones, the late Grammy-award-winning producer and jazz conductor who passed away just a few weeks ago, was many things. His daughter Rashida Jones remembers him as a culture shifter who was nocturnal his whole life. He kept jazz hours, waking up in the middle of the night to compose music with a notebook and pen.One of his masterworks is Thriller, the top-selling album of all time (even now, 42 years later). Indie musician Daniel McClelland explains that Thriller began with a pool of 700 possible songs. Together, Jones and Jackson eliminated 691 of them, distilling the project down to nine bangers including its pice de rsistance: Billie Jean. What separates the scrapped songs (you can listen to one in the post) from those that made the cut? A feeling of forward momentum the sense that a song is taking you somewhere you havent been before.Its also a lesson in quality control. The songs that were cut are decent! But theyre not as distinctive as those that were kept. Fifteen good-enough songs wouldve been worse than nine outstanding songs.Your daily dose of practical wisdomIf you want to write something a book, a post, an email aim for the ending. Finish it badly. Just find an ending, as author Sophie Lucido Johnson advises. Its shocking how scared we can be to say something is done.