A carpenter I know sands the underside of drawers. Nobody will ever see the underside of a drawer. When I asked him why, he looked at me as though I had asked why he washed his hands before eating. "Because I know it is there," he said.
I have thought about that answer for years. It suggests that craft is not mainly about the audience. It is a relationship between a person and a material, conducted in private, in which the reward is a kind of integrity: the thing is the same all the way through.
In knowledge work the underside of the drawer is easy to skip. The footnote nobody checks, the spreadsheet formula copied rather than understood, the paragraph that is fine but not right. The work gets accepted either way, and that is exactly the danger.
Care, practised in small unseen places, builds a habit that eventually shows up everywhere. It is not perfectionism, which is fear dressed up as standards. It is simply refusing to be the kind of person who leaves the underside rough because no one is looking.
