Quotes About Detail

Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution

It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. "He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn't see.

I always understood the beauty of things made by hand. I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it.

From his father, Jobs had learned that a hallmark of a passionate craftmanship is making sure that even the aspects that remain hidden are done beautifully. A great carpenter isn't gonna use a lousy wood for the back of the cabinet even though nobody's gonna see it.

look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word. Deep observation must be done in steps: "If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory."23

Jobs's father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough.

is an unflinching biography of a manifestly great man. . . . Steve Jobs's life was a great story with a near mythic arc, and Isaacson captures it well . . . the book moves at a fast pace with a great eye for detail. . . . Isaacson is perceptive and original.

Leonardo was not content merely to measure every aspect of every body part. In addition, he felt compelled to record what occurs when each of these parts moves.

Eckert, with his passion for detail and perfection, was the chief engineer. Eckert became so dedicated to the project that he would sometimes sleep next to the machine. Once, as a joke, two engineers picked up his cot and gently moved him to an identical room one floor up; when he awoke he briefly feared the machine had been stolen.

Jobs obsessed over every aspect of the new building, from the overall concept to the tiniest detail regarding materials and construction. Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture, said Pixar's president Ed Catmull. Jobs controlled the creation of the building as if he were a director sweating each scene of a film. The PIxar building was Steve's own movie, Lasseter said.

Talking to Time Magazine a few years back, Peter Drucker got to the heart of things: "I will tell you a secret: Dealmaking beats working. Dealmaking is exciting and fun, and working is grubby. Running anything is primarily an enormous amount of grubby detail work . . . dealmaking is romantic, sexy. That's why you have deals that make no sense.

Puzzles forced me to look at something from several angles before I moved on, to look again, and again, and possibly again because each piece—no matter how small or seemingly insignificant—was critical to the whole.

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick.

Descriptive statistics exist to simplify, which always implies some loss of nuance or detail.

Everybody knows 'technically' is the best kind of correct.

Include just enough detail for flavor and interest but not enough to emphasize or single out a particular item above the importance it deserves. In other words, don't describe the shovel hanging on the garage wall unless someone is going to dig a grave with it later. An exception would be if your character is a neat freak and the garden tools on the garage wall are alphabetized—this would characterize.

In China our professional artists or craftsman used to carve large pieces of white ivory into models of famous buildings, such as the Peking Palace or the Temple of Heaven, with streets and people to the minutest detail. I have been fortunate enough to see a few of theses, and the snow-covered Oxford High, with its yellow stone, resembled one of these exquisite ivory carvings, yellowed with age. I was happy to have discovered such affinity between Oxford and Ancient China.

Virgo: "You missed a spot."

But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.

I doubt that Fleming could have obtained a grant for the discovery of penicillin on that basis [a requirement for highly detailed research plans] because he could not have said, 'I propose to have an accident in a culture so that it will be spoiled by a mould falling on it, and I propose to recognize the possibility of extracting an antibiotic from this mould.

The ability to observe, and the ability to see the little things that seem trivial at first, may become amazingly important and meaningful.

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

Un plan se convirtió en una serie de propuestas detalladas sobre cómo alcanzar un objetivo.

When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.