When I interviewed for my current company, they gave me an Excel test.
It was the kind of exercise you might expect for someone who works with employee benefits and financial reviews: a spreadsheet with mistakes hidden throughout it. Some numbers were wrong. Some formulas were wrong. The assignment was to find them.
I don't remember whether they told me there were ten mistakes or twenty. I remember there being a number.
I found about fifty.
I found the financial errors, of course. Those were the point of the exercise. But once I started looking, I found spelling errors too. Capitalization. Punctuation. Formatting that changed for no apparent reason. Tabs that weren't named consistently. Little things that had nothing to do with whether I understood the financial review and everything to do with the fact that they were sitting there in front of me.
When we went over the test afterward, they thought it was funny.
Apparently nobody had done that before.
I hadn't been trying to make a point. I wasn't attempting to demonstrate extraordinary attention to detail or invent some clever way to distinguish myself from the other candidates.
They had given me a spreadsheet and asked me to find the mistakes.
So I found the mistakes.
I've been thinking about that test lately because I have started to understand something about myself that I used to describe much less precisely.
I've always said that I don't half-ass things.
That's mostly true. But it makes the behavior sound like a decision about effort, as though I look at an ordinary assignment and consciously decide to give it 150 percent.
I'm not sure that's what happens.
I think I just keep noticing things.
The assignment may ask for ten errors, but then I see the eleventh. Once I've seen it, I'm not particularly good at pretending I didn't. Leaving it there because I had technically completed the assignment would feel stranger than fixing it.
Then I see the twelfth.
And the thirteenth.
This can get out of hand.
I've watched the same thing happen in much less professional settings. A hobby turns into a system. A small project develops documentation. Something I intended to learn casually becomes something I apparently need to understand from first principles. Recently I returned to a card game I hadn't played in twenty years and, with alarming speed, ended up with a field manual.
None of these escalations feels ridiculous while I'm inside them.
That's the important part.
There is rarely a moment when I decide, You know what this really needs? An operating system.
Each next step makes sense.
If we're fixing this, we should probably fix that too.
These two things overlap.
There has to be a cleaner way to organize this.
If we're going to keep doing it, we should write the process down.
Now that I understand how this part works, I can see why that other part isn't working as well as it could.
And suddenly the thing is three times the size it was when I started.
For years I thought the explanation was simply that I had high standards.
There is some truth to that. One of the questions I ask most naturally is:
How good can we make it?
I like that question.
It has served me well.
At work, it means I rarely assume that something is finished just because it functions. If an explanation confused someone, I want to know why. If a handoff created unnecessary work, I want to fix the handoff. If a document technically contains the right information but makes the reader hunt for it, then the document isn't as good as it could be.
The first version working is useful information.
It is not necessarily the end.
But I have started to see the shadow side of that instinct too.
Starting things can be strangely difficult for me.
That has always seemed contradictory. Once I'm moving, I can work on something for hours. Complexity doesn't bother me much. Difficult problems are often the ones I find most interesting. I have spent a lot of my life believing that hard things can be learned and confusing things can be figured out.
The hesitation comes before that.
I think I understand why now.
I know what happens when I open the door.
The stated size of a task has very little relationship to the size it may become once I start paying attention to it.
Reading something can become researching it. Researching it can become organizing it. Organizing it exposes another question. Answering that question changes the original thing. Now I want to go back and improve that too.
The project I was avoiding for an hour may genuinely take twenty minutes.
Or it may annex the weekend.
History has provided evidence for both.
The problem isn't usually the first ten mistakes.
It's eleven through fifty.
There are obvious advantages to operating this way. That Excel test probably told my future colleagues more about how I would actually work than the test designers intended.
Give me something to review and I am unlikely to stop thinking simply because I reached the bottom of the assignment.
If I understand a system well enough to see where it is failing, I want to improve it. If I can make something easier to use, clearer, more reliable, more complete, I have a hard time finding a compelling reason not to.
But noticing creates a strange kind of responsibility if you let it.
You see the typo, so now the typo is yours.
You notice the process problem, so now the process problem is yours.
You can imagine a better structure, a better explanation, a better tool, a better version, and suddenly the existence of that better version starts to feel like an obligation.
That is where a useful instinct can become indiscriminate.
Not everything deserves a field manual.
Not every hobby needs infrastructure.
Not every imperfection becomes my responsibility merely because I happened to notice it.
And not every additional improvement makes the thing meaningfully better for the person it is supposed to serve.
That last part has taken me longer to learn.
There is a difference between excellence and indiscriminate optimization.
One asks us to care deeply about the things that matter.
The other can quietly make everything matter.
I don't want to lose the instinct. That's important.
I don't want to become the person who finds the requested ten mistakes, closes the spreadsheet, and ignores the obvious eleventh one sitting two cells away because nobody explicitly assigned it to me.
That isn't the lesson.
The lesson is that attention creates choices, not obligations.
Seeing another possible improvement is not the same thing as proving that the improvement deserves my time.
Sometimes the right question really is, How good can we make it?
Sometimes the better question is, What is this improvement actually for?
Those questions need each other.
Without the first, "good enough" can become an excuse for carelessness.
Without the second, improvement becomes its own game.
I've realized lately that several phrases I repeat to myself fit together this way.
We do hard things.
That is about willingness. Difficulty does not get to make the decision for us.
Everything is figureoutable.
That is about method. Confusion is not a permanent condition. Learn the system. Break the problem apart. Figure out what can actually be done from here.
And then:
How good can we make it?
That is about standards. Once something works, don't assume there is nothing left to notice.
For a long time, I think I treated those three ideas as if they only pointed forward.
Do the hard thing.
Figure the thing out.
Make it better.
Again.
Again.
Again.
The part I understand better now is that judgment has to sit inside the loop.
Not because caring too much is embarrassing.
Not because excellence needs to be moderated into mediocrity.
Because care is finite.
Time is finite.
Attention is finite.
And if you apply the same standard of refinement to everything you can possibly notice, you eventually spend enormous amounts of care on things that never asked for it.
I still think "How good can we make it?" is one of the best questions I know.
It is curious rather than anxious. It assumes the current version can teach you something about the next one. It turns competence into a beginning instead of a finish line.
I just don't think it gets to operate alone anymore.
There has to be another question nearby:
What is better for?
I don't think I will ever become the person who finds ten requested mistakes and closes the spreadsheet.
Honestly, I don't particularly want to.
I'll probably still find number eleven.
And twelve.
And, if we're being realistic, somewhere around forty-seven I will begin questioning the naming convention on the tabs.
But maybe the work now is learning that noticing mistake number eleven does not automatically make mistake number eleven mine.
Sometimes it should be fixed.
Sometimes it is the beginning of something worth making much, much better.
And sometimes I can notice the capitalization, smile to myself, and close the spreadsheet.