Again, specificity makes character. Turgenev has the contractor sing in a specific way (he’s a “shredder,” in guitar terms, amazing his audience via technical prowess), and through this, the contractor became a particular guy, and now stands for something.

I’ve sometimes wondered if this effect was intentional: a sort of apologia from Turgenev for his own lack of craft. If we are moved, Turgenev has, via this story that claims that emotional power is the highest aim of art and can be obtained even in the face of clumsy craft, demonstrated that very thing.

Which would be, you know—pretty great craft.

Our present theory is that devotion to a task at hand puts us in harmony with our creative source. We dedicate ourselves to work itself, not to a false personality.

I [Jeff Killeen] found I had to be precise and resist my natural temptation to use too many superlatives when describing the accomplishments in the business. John would say, ‘You spin things all the time. You make everything sound good.’ I’d say, ‘John, that was good.’ And he would say, ‘But you make it sound like it’s even better than it is. We’re engineers. We don’t use words like terrific and outstanding. We say, “You did your job.” When you say that the team did a terrific job, they don’t believe you.’ We finally agreed that whenever he thought I was spinning, he would tell me. And whenever I thought he was underwhelming, I would tell him.”

Killeen elaborates on how he learned to communicate in an engineering culture. “The perspective from which John comes to the business is obsessive in a wonderful way. He harks back to the philosophy that he’s building a bridge and that a bridge cannot fail. I said, ‘John, but we’re not building a bridge, and failure is okay if we fail fast and incorporate that learning so that we can grow as fast as possible. It’s preferable to me to get eight things done well and fail a two versus doing three or four things to perfection.’ John said, ‘We’re not trained to accept a lot of failure or welcome it into the process.’ I said, ‘That’s a management concept we have to work on.

Barry’s attack hits home. I had once been an engineer, and I know an engineer doesn’t design a bridge that might hold its load. An engineer starts with complexity and crafts certainty. I knew what it was like to be careful, to balance literally thousands of considerations in making a system work.