Honor the work

This year, one of my resolutions is simply: honor the work.

It’s a small phrase. Only three words. But contained within it is a disproportionate amount of meaning.

It carries a tone that’s increasingly central to how I think about my life and work: an emphasis on beauty and craft, deep attention to detail, an appreciation of art, and a desire to create things with real staying power.

Things that feel considered, intentional, and durable.

Recently, a candidate asked me at the end of their interview process what it was that I was looking for, and I paused for a moment while thinking, wanting to give an answer that was both accurate and also didn’t pander to the tropes that CEOs commonly reach for.

What I landed on was this: I’m looking for people who just really care.

You’ve probably heard the famous Steve Jobs saying that, “the world was built by people no smarter than you”. And largely I believe that to be true. But the unspoken addendum I would add is that the world is not built by people who care equally about what they’re making.

Wherever a human-made object exists, there exists a long chain of decisions, or abdications of decision, about its form, utility, materiality, presence, and impact.

The curve of a door handle. The arrangement of pockets in a bag. The tolerance of the hinges on a pair of sunglasses.

Every interaction you have with the built world subtly shapes your experience of being in it. Even when you don’t consciously register these moments, their effects accumulate. They create friction or ease, delight or indifference.

Every decision encodes taste, effort, care, and respect: for the consumer, for the creator, and for the craft itself.

To honor the work is to recognize that every choice matters, even when they’re invisible. Especially when they’re invisible.

The best work often hides the labor that produced it, not because it was effortless, but because it was labored over so deliberately that the friction disappeared.

There is a quiet generosity in that. A willingness to spend more time than is strictly necessary so that someone else doesn’t have to.

It’s simply more enjoyable to live in a world where the things around you were created by someone who really, deeply and truly, cared about them.

Where you can feel, even if only subconsciously, that someone put that object into the world with intention, and with the desire for it to exist even past the creator's own physicality.

Caring deeply about the work is not the same as being a perfectionist, nor is it synonymous with over-engineering. It’s closer to a posture. A way of standing in relation to what you’re making.

It shows up as asking one more question when it would be easy not to. As resisting the urge to ship something you wouldn’t want your name quietly attached to. As feeling a slight, healthy discomfort when something is “fine” but not yet right.

This is rare. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s demanding in a way that doesn’t always come with immediate rewards.

Speed is visible. Volume is visible. Caring is not.

In environments optimized for output, honoring the work can look like inefficiency. It can even look like stubbornness. But over long enough time horizons, it compounds in a way almost nothing else does.

The things that endure are almost always downstream of someone, at some point, choosing to care more than was strictly required.

They chose materials thoughtfully. They argued about details others would have waved away. They treated the work as something worthy of respect, not just extraction.

I think this is what I was circling in that interview answer. Not intelligence. Not pedigree. Not even experience, necessarily. But a kind of seriousness. A reverence.

The sense that the work itself is not a means to an end, but an end deserving of dignity.

So “honor the work” becomes less of a resolution and more of a lens. A filter I run decisions through.

How would this look if I took it seriously? If I assumed it mattered? If I acted as though this small thing was, in fact, part of something much larger?

Because it is. Every decision is. And over a lifetime of making things, products, companies, relationships, ideas, those decisions quietly add up.