On the Hidden Back of the Drawer, and Other Places Nobody Looks But You

The other day I watched a guy at my local coffee shop wipe down a table. Or, more accurately, I watched him perform a kind of abbreviated pantomime of wiping down a table, the rag making contact with maybe forty percent of the surface area before he moved on to the next one, his face wearing the particular expression of someone who has decided, consciously or not, that this task does not warrant his full attention or effort. And look, I'm not here to condemn this barista. I don't know his life. Maybe he was working a double shift. Maybe his girlfriend had just broken up with him via text message. Maybe he'd received genuinely terrible news about a family member and was simply trying to hold himself together long enough to finish his shift and fall apart in private. I don't know.¹

But watching him, I found myself thinking about something my father told me once when I was maybe eleven or twelve, a story he'd heard from his own father about a carpenter who'd spent decades building houses for other people. The carpenter was ready to retire, but his boss asked him to stick around for one final job, one last house. The carpenter, already mentally checked out, agreed, figuring he could coast through it. He cut corners. He used cheaper materials. He rushed. And when the house was finished, his boss handed him the keys. "This is your house," the boss said. "My retirement gift to you."²

The story is obviously a parable. It's the kind of thing you might find in a corporate training manual or one of those motivational posters with an eagle on it. And yet I find I can't stop thinking about it, about the way the carpenter must have felt standing in a house he'd built but hadn't really built, a structure whose every crack and shortcut he knew intimately because he'd made them, because he'd chosen them, because at some point he'd decided that this particular thing wasn't worth his full attention.

There's a concept in ancient Greek philosophy called arete, which gets translated as "virtue" or "excellence" but really means something closer to the full realization of one's potential, the idea that everything has a function and performs excellently when it fulfills that function well. A knife achieves arete when it cuts cleanly. A person achieves arete when they do what humans are supposed to do, and do it well. Aristotle spent a lot of time thinking about this, about how excellence isn't something you achieve once and then possess forever but rather a practice, a way of being, something that gets built through countless small choices.³

What strikes me about arete is its lack of exemptions. The knife doesn't cut well only when someone important is watching. The excellent person doesn't reserve their excellence for high-stakes situations and then phone it in the rest of the time. The whole point is that excellence becomes habitual, becomes (in some sense) automatic, becomes who you are rather than something you perform.

This is harder than it sounds. We live in a culture that loves the highlight reel, the big moment, the performance under pressure. We celebrate the clutch shot, the decisive presentation, the interview that lands the job. And those things matter, obviously. But Aristotle would have pointed out (and did point out, at considerable length) that the clutch shot is only possible because of thousands of shots nobody saw, that the decisive presentation emerges from a hundred smaller conversations and preparations, that the person who shows up strong when it matters is the same person who showed up strong when it didn't seem to matter at all. Excellence in the visible moments is the residue of excellence in the invisible ones.

William James, writing in his 1890 Principles of Psychology, observed that humans are "bundles of habits," that "any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself."⁴ We become what we repeatedly do, which sounds nice and inspirational until you realize it means we also become what we repeatedly don't do, what we repeatedly half-do, what we repeatedly do while our minds are elsewhere and our attention is fractured and our commitment is, shall we say, partial.

The barista wiping forty percent of the table isn't just making a choice about tables. He's making a choice about who he is, about the kind of person who wipes tables, about the level of attention and care he brings to tasks he deems unworthy.⁵ And maybe this sounds harsh, or maybe it sounds obvious, or maybe it sounds like the kind of thing a person says when they have too much time on their hands and not enough real problems. But I think there's something here, something about the relationship between small actions and large identities, between invisible choices and visible outcomes.

I once heard someone (an internet guru, the kind of person who has opinions about "leveraging" things and "optimizing" various aspects of human experience) recommend what he called "strategic incompetence." The idea was simple: be deliberately bad at things you don't want to do, and people will stop asking you to do them. Can't figure out the copy machine? Great. Now you'll never be asked to make copies. Send one truly terrible email and suddenly you're off the communication chain.⁶

This might be the single worst piece of advice I have ever encountered.

Not because it's ineffective (it probably works quite well) but because it fundamentally misunderstands what we're actually doing when we do things. The strategic incompetence advocate assumes that tasks exist in isolation, that you can be bad at making copies while remaining excellent at everything else, that there's a clean separation between the things that matter and the things that don't.

But the walls we build in our minds are porous. The person who decides that copy-making doesn't deserve effort has made a decision not just about copies but about effort itself, about the conditions under which effort is warranted, about the kind of person they're willing to be when nobody they care about is watching. And that decision doesn't stay confined to the copy room. It leaks. It generalizes. It becomes a pattern of thought, then a pattern of action, then (eventually) a pattern of being.

But there isn't. There can't be. Because you are the same person making the copies as writing the report, the same person wiping the table as serving the customer, the same person building this particular house as living your entire life. Anders Ericsson, the psychologist who pioneered research on expert performance (leading to "10,000 hours" and Outliers), found that what separates exceptional performers from everyone else isn't talent or even raw practice time but something he called "deliberate practice," a sustained, focused engagement with tasks at the edge of one's ability.⁷ Excellence comes from attention, from caring, from treating the thing in front of you as worthy of your full engagement.

Strategic incompetence is the opposite of deliberate practice. It's deliberate carelessness. And while it might free you from specific obligations, it does so at the cost of becoming a careless person, someone whose habits of inattention spread quietly from task to task, project to project, relationship to relationship.⁸

Steve Jobs, whatever else you might say about him, understood something about craftsmanship.⁹ In Walter Isaacson's biography, there's a quote I think about more than is probably healthy:

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.

The back of the drawer. The part nobody sees. The forty percent of the table that gets skipped.

Jobs was talking about products, about the inside of a Macintosh, but the principle extends outward in every direction. The email you dash off because it's "just internal." The conversation with your spouse when you're tired and distracted. The workout you cut short because you're not training for anything specific. The thing you do when you're certain nobody is watching or evaluating or keeping score.¹⁰

These are the materials you're building with. These are the bricks going into the house you'll eventually have to live in.

And I have yet another story (probably apocryphal, though the exact facticity matters less than the truth it contains) about three stonecutters working on a construction site.¹¹ A traveler asks each of them what they're doing. The first says, "I am cutting stone." The second says, "I am building a wall." The third says, "I am building a cathedral."

Same task. Same stones. Same physical movements. But entirely different relationships to the work, entirely different experiences of the work, and (one suspects) entirely different quality of work produced. The third stonecutter isn't just describing his job differently; he's doing his job differently. The cathedral-mindset changes everything: the attention paid to each cut, the care taken with alignment and fit, the willingness to do the invisible work that will matter only when the structure either stands for centuries or doesn't.¹²

Cal Newport, the computer scientist and writer, has argued that what he calls the "craftsman mindset" trumps the "passion mindset" when it comes to building a meaningful career. The passion mindset asks: What can the world offer me? What do I want? Am I fulfilled? The craftsman mindset asks: What can I offer the world? What value am I creating? How do I get better? The craftsman mindset treats work as a practice of continuous improvement rather than a transaction in which you trade time for compensation.

And here's what I keep coming back to: you don't get to switch between these mindsets selectively. You don't get to be a craftsman at the things you care about and a strategic incompetent at the things you don't. The mindset is the mindset. The habit is the habit. How you do anything is (at least partially, at least eventually) how you do everything.¹³

So where does this leave us? Or, more accurately, where does this leave me, sitting in a coffee shop with a table that's been adequately but not excellently cleaned, thinking about carpenters and stonecutters and the back of drawers?

I think it leaves me with something uncomfortable, which is the recognition that every action I take is simultaneously trivial and significant. Trivial because it's just this one email, just this one conversation, just this one workout, just this one moment in a life containing millions of moments. Significant because each of these moments is laying a brick, forming a habit, becoming part of the structure I'll eventually inhabit.¹⁴

The carpenter in the parable had to live in his own house. We all do. But "house" is a metaphor, and the thing it's a metaphor for is something like "self" or "character" or "the accumulated weight of every choice you've ever made."¹⁵ Which sounds impossibly heavy, the kind of realization that could paralyze you if you took it too seriously.

But maybe there's something liberating in it too.¹⁶ Because if every small choice matters, then every small choice is an opportunity. The table you wipe thoroughly is a vote for thoroughness. The email you craft carefully is a vote for carefulness. The conversation you show up fully for is a vote for presence. And these votes accumulate, James's habits forming, Aristotle's character taking shape through practice and repetition, until what once required effort becomes natural, until the beautiful wood on the back of the drawer isn't a sacrifice but a given, until the question isn't whether to do the thing well but simply how.

The coffee shop barista has moved on to other tasks. The table is fine. It's probably fine. Nobody else will notice the parts he missed, and by tomorrow a hundred other hands will have touched it anyway, so what difference does any of it make?

I don't know. Maybe none. Maybe the difference between forty percent and a hundred percent is negligible on any individual table, any individual day. But I keep thinking about the carpenter, standing in his house, knowing what he knows about every corner and joint and shortcut. I keep thinking about what it would feel like to live with that knowledge, to wake up every morning in a structure built by a version of yourself that had given up, that had decided this particular thing wasn't worth the effort.¹⁷

We are building our houses. All the time, with every choice, whether we mean to or not. The only question is whether we're paying attention to the back of the drawer, or whether we're assuming nobody will ever look there.¹⁸

Spoiler: somebody will.

Footnotes

¹ I recognize that diagnosing a stranger's character based on thirty seconds of table-wiping is, at minimum, presumptuous. And yet we make these assessments constantly, often unconsciously, which is itself a reason to care about how we perform even mundane tasks. ↩︎

² I've since learned that this story appears in various forms across multiple cultures and time periods, which suggests either a common source or a universal human intuition about the relationship between effort and outcome. ↩︎

³ The Greeks called this eudaimonia, usually translated as "happiness" or "flourishing," but meaning something more like "the good life achieved through virtuous activity." It's not happiness as we typically use the word (feeling good) but happiness as being good. ↩︎

⁴ James also wrote that "the more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work." This cuts both ways: automatize good habits and you free yourself for higher things; automatize bad habits and you free yourself for nothing. ↩︎

⁵ I am aware that I'm placing a lot of philosophical weight on a guy who was probably just trying to get through his shift. ↩︎

⁶ The advice came from a podcast, I think, or maybe a LinkedIn post. ↩︎

⁷ Ericsson's research is often misrepresented as the "10,000 hour rule," thanks to Malcolm Gladwell. Ericsson himself was quite critical of this interpretation, pointing out that it's not the hours that matter but what you do with them. ↩︎

⁸ There's a word for this in psychology: generalization. Behaviors learned in one context tend to spread to other contexts. Strategic incompetence isn't compartmentalized; it's contagious. ↩︎

⁹ You can say many things about Steve Jobs, both positive and negative, and most of them would be true. The man was a complicated person. But his commitment to quality, often to the point of pathology, is not seriously disputed. ↩︎

¹⁰ The phrase "character is what you do when nobody's watching" has become a cliché, but clichés become clichés because they contain enough truth that people keep repeating them. I think this is also a cliché.↩︎

¹¹ The story's origins are murky. It's often attributed to the construction of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, but this seems to be retroactive myth-making. The truth is we don't know where it came from, which doesn't make it less useful. ↩︎

¹² There's something almost painfully earnest about the cathedral-minded stonecutter, something that invites cynicism. But earnestness, regardless of social costs, tends to produce better cathedrals. ↩︎

¹³ This is not to say that everything must be done with cathedral-level intensity. That way lies burnout and a certain kind of joylessness. The point is more about default settings, about what you do when you're not actively deciding how to do it. ↩︎

¹⁴ Virtue ethics, the philosophical tradition that flows from Aristotle through the Stoics and into various modern revivals, is basically the systematic study of this intuition. ↩︎

¹⁵ Or, if you prefer, "reputation," though that puts too much emphasis on external perception. The house you build is yours regardless of what anyone else thinks of it. ↩︎

¹⁶ I'm suspicious of my own attempt to find liberation here. The human capacity to reframe burdens as opportunities is both our greatest strength and a convenient way to avoid sitting with discomfort. ↩︎

¹⁷ This is not, I want to be clear, about perfectionism. Perfectionism is its own pathology, its own form of cutting corners (the corner being: finishing things, accepting imperfection, moving forward). The carpenter's problem wasn't that he didn't achieve perfection; it was that he didn't try. ↩︎

¹⁸ There's a version of this essay that ends with actionable tips, a numbered list of ways to cultivate the craftsman mindset. But that would be its own kind of strategic incompetence, a way of pretending the problem has a simple solution. It doesn't. It just has practice. ↩︎