🪚Reality has a surprising amount of detail

Any task that looks simple from a distance is made of a great many small details, and they are not noise: getting them wrong breaks the thing. You cannot see them in advance. You meet them only by doing the work. Once you have dealt with a detail it becomes invisible to you, part of how the world obviously is, which is why people stuck on a problem are usually missing a detail they have no way of noticing, and why experts and beginners talk past each other.

• Sent by Priya on Saturday 15 March with no message, only the link. Four days after the launch, three after the rollback at 02:40.
• Read it on the tram home from Chalkline with my left hand in my pocket, because an hour earlier a finger had gone pop on a yellow crimp. It was a day with a lot of detail in it.
• It starts with a man building a flight of stairs and ends as a theory of why clever people get stuck. Ten minutes.
• I took it first as consolation: nobody could have seen the duplicates coming. On the second reading it is harder than that. Somebody could have, if they had been close enough.
• I thanked her on Monday. She said she had sent it to herself first.
• Franklin's 💬 Well done is better than well said is the quote I keep with it: the plan is the saying, and the detail only turns up in the doing.
• 🏛️ Taiichi Ohno would have had no patience with my surprise. Go to the floor and look is the whole of his method.