Test whether what you're doing is good enough

From the New York Times interview of Pegasystems founder Alan Trefler:

I used to play pretty serious chess when I was young. It's very easy for me - though I find it is difficult for a lot of folks - to recognize that a lot of the things you do are mistakes.

One of the things, at least for me, that was very important to becoming a good chess player was losing a lot of games. And you get to the point where, when you lose a game or when you make a mistake, you don't go beat yourself up. You try to learn something from it.

So we try to encourage, though it is difficult, an attitude that things can be better, and you'd better be learning from what you're doing as well. If you're going to be successful and really do something meaningful, you need to constantly be testing whether what you're doing is good enough.