In the first chapter of Robert C. Martin's Clean Code—a book about writing software that is easy to read, understand, and maintain, he takes a few stabs at the definition of clean code through the lens of other engineers. Each engineer described useful properties of clean code using words like elegant, efficient, simple, direct, and readable. However, the definition I found most striking was Michael Feathers'.
"I could list all of the qualities that I notice in clean code, but there is one overarching quality that leads to all of them. Clean code always looks like it was written by someone who cares. There is nothing obvious that you can do to make it better. All of those things were thought about by the code's author, and if you try to imagine improvements, you're led back to where you are, sitting in appreciation of the code someone left for you—code left by someone who cares deeply about the craft." - Michael Feathers
Care is the keyword: "Clean Code always looks like it was written by someone who cares." The book's essence, then, is a lesson in caring for code. And although it is specifically about code, the lesson is transferrable to other aspects of life. I found myself asking how much care I put into the world: do I take care to do things? And you—are you full of care in the big things: your relationships, career, and health? Are you equally full of care in the little things—your conversations and routines? When you arrange saucers in the cupboard, do you stack them in order? When you write code and make a commit, is your commit message descriptive? How much care do you apply to things?
Your answer, like mine, is probably "not enough." Every single thing we do, whether painfully mundane or remarkably grand, presents us with an opportunity to be careful in execution. Yet, as engineers, artisans, friends, parents, vendors, designers, and whatnot, we often fall short of carefulness. One common reason for this is the need to be fast, to finish quickly. This could very well be the case, but more often than not, it simply betrays a lack of ability—a skill issue, one might say.
Carefulness, therefore, begins with intent and ends with competence. No amount of time will be enough if you do not intend to stack saucers in order, or if you do not know (and refuse to learn) how to do so. Yet intent and competence, even when joined, do not equal perfection; they merely make it possible. Perhaps this is where many of us stumble—we mistake carefulness for perfection, as though to care deeply is to get everything right and so we don't bother caring at all. That is false. Carefulness doesn't ask for perfection but for attention. We can tell when someone is giving us attention and when they're not. In the same vein, we can tell when a piece of work has been suffused with attention and when it's been starved of it. Perfection has little to do with it.
We should apply more care to the things we do. Since caring involves both intent and competence, we could learn to be better at it. How we care for people differs from how we care for code, which is different from how we might care for a spaceship, and so there is room for learning and growing. This is why books like Clean Code exist. Ultimately, in our march towards cleanliness—towards carefulness—in our code, paintings, writings, relationships, designs, and anything at all—we go only as far as our intent and competence allows us.