Where nearly right is fine

A woman in Riyadh sells knitted baby blankets from her living room, through a page and a phone number.

Her photographs are good, not perfect. The evening ones are a little yellow. Her captions carry the odd typo. Her packaging is a paper bag with a hand-tied ribbon that is never quite centred. None of it matters. A blanket shown almost as well as it could be still delights the person who buys it, and the hours it would take to close that last gap are hours she does not have.

The delivery details are different. A phone number with one digit wrong is not nearly a delivery. It is no delivery. The driver calls a stranger, the parcel comes back, the gift for a newborn arrives a week late or not at all, and the customer remembers her for that and nothing else. The same goes for the size promised for a cot, or a wool described as soft enough for a baby's skin.

Most work falls into one of two kinds. In the first, ordinary care gets you nearly all the way, and the final stretch costs more than it returns. In the second, anything short of exactly right counts as wrong.

The mistake is treating them alike. Polish the photographs to perfection and the evenings disappear. Treat the phone number with the same easy standard and the customer disappears instead.

The skill is in the sorting. Pour effort into the work that pays it back, and simply meet the standard everywhere the standard is not optional.