Consistency

"Law practice is like delivering newspapers: it's not enough to be good one, or even most days.  You've got to be good consistently."

When my wife and I graduated from law school, her first job was as an associate in the litigation department of a large corporate law firm in Boston.  In the early weeks of her employment there she attended a firm-wide meeting where the senior partner explained to the assembled lawyers his theory on client service:  law practice is like delivering newspapers.

The reason that lesson (which, I am embarrassed to say, took years for me to appreciate) came to mind today is because of some trouble I am having with a piece of software.  For the past several days, my RSS feed reader of choice (Google Reader) has been acting up due to a recent upgrade.  I am a Google loyalist and I love and use nearly all of Google's apps (mail, calendar, analytics, maps, Picasa, etc, etc) regularly.  In particular, I have been using Google Reader steadily for several years now. 

After the past few days of it only working inconsistently, though, I am very nearly ready to toss it overboard in favor of a different solution.  After years of great free service from Google, I am getting fed up with the app not working after a pretty short time. I'm not saying that I'm right to be fed up, only that I'm not too different from most people in this regard. There is a lesson here for anyone who serves clients for living:  the speed at which goodwill is earned is entirely disporportionate to the speed at which it is spent. After all, how long would you keep subscribing to a newspaper that isn't delivered on time?