One of my dad’s favorite sayings is, “It’s not a piano.” He says this when we’re working on a project that doesn’t require a great deal of precision, such as building something that doesn’t need to look good. There’s a threshold of functionality that’s good enough, and once that’s crossed, any extra effort is wasted.
But some things in life are pianos. Okay, very few things are literally pianos, but there are a great deal of situations where the details matter, and there are many careers where precision is important:
- Law
- Medicine
- Architecture
- Coding
- Engineering
- Electrical work
- The wording of a contract
- The visuals of a marketing campaign
- A tax return
- Painting a cabinet
- Buying a new fridge that will fit into your kitchen
School (you knew I was going to talk about school, right?) rewards you for being detail-oriented. It demands that you pay close attention to the details, and it punishes you with bad grades if you aren’t precise:
- Sig figs in chemistry
- The minutiae of punctuation and grammar
- Using proper notation to describe the domain of a function
- The format of a bibliography
When a teacher docks you points for getting these things wrong, they’re not being nitpicky jerks; they’re training you to be detail-oriented. It’s not that the details of this particular problem for this particular class matter (they don’t). It’s that, in the future, you’ll encounter many situations where the details really do matter.
And since school is all about brain training, one of its jobs is to train your mind to pay attention to details, to be careful, to be precise. So when the time comes to build a piano, whether real or metaphorical, you’ll be ready.
P.S. There’s a fine line between being detail-oriented and being perfectionistic. First, focus on accuracy by getting the big picture right. Then worry about getting the details right. But keep in mind that you’re practicing being detail-oriented, so you probably won’t get all of the details right, and that’s okay.
Chris Loper has been working as a tutor and academic coach since 2014, racking up over 13,000 hours of experience supporting students.
Along with Greg Smith, Chris is the co-creator of Parenting for Academic Success, a series of classes that create empowered parents, confident students, and harmonious families.
Chris writes the popular self-improvement blog Becoming Better, where he also offers habit coaching, helping busy adults with habit formation and productivity.
Chris’s most recent endeavor combines his academic and habit-formation expertise to help students thrive in college. Visit SmartCollegeHabits.com to learn more.
In 2021, he published a humorous memoir titled Wood Floats and Other Brilliant Observations, a book that blends crazy stories with practical life lessons.
He lives in Issaquah, WA, where he is the owner of South Cove Tutoring.