Years ago I used to climb in the Alps.
When I visited, particularly when in Switzerland, what I tended to photograph – often more that the mountains themselves – were the immaculately stacked logs outside people’s homes.
Swiss log stores are a thing of beauty. Each log carefully stacked by size, neatly aligned and with just the right amount of space to allow airflow whilst maximizing the amount the store can hold. Beauty with efficiency thrown in.
Of course, in a country renowned for it’s neatness, punctuality and efficiency the state of the Swiss log stacks is hardly surprising. Yet to those of us more used to viewing wood as simply food for the fire it’s difficult to understand the motivation behind such fastidiousness of stacking. Surely they can’t all have OCD? Surely they’ve got better things to do?
But when it comes down to it, surely the single biggest factor in the success of anything or anyone lies in doing the job the best it can possibly be done? Not in cutting corners, or leaving things undone, even where those things will never be seen.
Steve Jobs famously was as concerned with the inside of the Apple Computer cases as he was with the outside. He insisted on the interior of Apple’s products being beautifully designed and signed by his engineers, despite that fact that the cases were designed never to be opened. This attention to even unseen and certainly unnecessary (from the point of usability) detail is arguably what has resulted in Apple becoming one of the most valuable companies on the planet.
My late father used to say “If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” And by that he meant not just doing a thing adequately, but doing it as best it could be done.
It’s not about perfectionism. It’s about care.
I’d like to think that if we care about things then in some small way, what goes around comes around.
I’d like to think that maybe, just maybe, the Swiss logs give out just a little bit more heat?
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