I was going to be an international engineer-architect. I studied civil engineering and graduated summa cum laude on a full scholarship, got minors in Japanese and International Studies, and genuinely loved engineering school. So much. It felt good to box an answer and check the back of the book and find out 234.5mm or whatever the answer was was spot on. The rigor and discipline of sitting down and actually getting to the end of a 4 or 10 page calculation on engineering paper with my old pencils that I grew to feel as attached to as the TI-81, now I am definitely dating myself, here, helped me build so many things.
But, I felt like seeing what else I could do alongside finding out how thermodynamics works and structures go together and bridges are built and formulas, texts, and tables. So, I designed. I wrote. I published. I took myself around the world several times because I wanted to go and see what else was going on, way out there, in the world.
An architecture of quality
From all this, I have discovered something important for myself.
If you really want a thing you’re making to be good, if you want for it to have quality, then you need to care.