Lessons last: how one small idea helped shape my career

It is strange how a small lesson learnt early can last your whole life.

Forty years ago, I found myself staring at a piece of text which made no sense to me, wondering whether I had made a terrible mistake. My school offered Russian as a language and, attracted by difference and by the strangeness of the alphabet (and the prospect of a school trip to Moscow and Leningrad), it was the option I had selected. Now I felt like I was illiterate again: I could only recognise some of the characters in the alphabet, and even they didn’t sound like I thought they should sound.

That first lesson made a big impression on me. First, it helped me to decode text that was previously impenetrable: even if I couldn’t understand the words, I could start to figure out the sounds. More importantly, though, my Russian teacher, Mr Clark, pressed home on us the importance of being conscientious. He expected us not just to learn the alphabet, not just to write it, but to write it well. He would mark our work not just on grammar and spelling, but on the care and attention we took in writing. This wasn’t because he was an especially tough teacher: it was because he knew that time invested in the basics would embed the skills, and would help us develop habits of excellence and diliigence. To impress these habits in us, he asked us time and time again whether we were being conscientious, and let us know very clearly when we were not.

Sadly, like most languages that go unpracticed for a long time, I have forgotten almost all of my Russian vocabulary, and only have the barest memory of tenses and cases. I do, however, remember the alphabet. And, through Mr Clark’s repetition, I have acquired a tendency to feel guilty whenever I realise that I am not being conscientious in my work, to the extent that I even seem to have a small voice in my head which sounds very similar to Mr Clark’s voice from many years ago.

I hear this voice frequently in my home life, even in little domestic tasks such as clearing the work surfaces after cooking, or emptying the bins rather than squeezing in a bit more. Sometimes I will do the lazy thing and walk away, before that voice in my head reminds me to go back and get the job done. It sometimes feels odd: I don’t want to finish the unpleasant job, but I know that I have to, otherwise I will not be being conscientious, and that voice will keep prodding me.

At work, of course, I have even more opportunities to be conscientious, as well as many opportunities to fail to be conscientious. There are many reasons to do a job which is just about good enough, rather than the best job possible. After all, life is very busy, there are other tasks which take priority, many people don’t even care about the difference between an adequate and a great job, and, in any case, many people will have forgotten about it by this time next month.

And I cannot claim that I am immune from these reasons, that I don’t succumb to them, or that my work is always outstanding (that’s not for me to judge anyway). But I am fortunate in having this extra voice which keeps asking me whether I have been conscientious, which sends me back for another go, and which makes me try to do something which satisfies my standards (and those of the memory of a teacher from a long time ago).

I also think that this voice was a part of what led me to become a technology architect. Attention to detail and quality are a key part of many roles within the technology business, but there is something in the architecture trade which seems a particularly good fit. An inability to walk away from something that’s not quite right is a key trait. There are many times when I have looked at architectures, designs or investment proposals which have something wrong with them, but where there’s a strong temptation to accept them rather than disrupt planned work or disappoint a team of people who want to get on with it . At those times, it’s very helpful to have a voice from the past which prompts you to do the right thing, to point out the flaw, to have the argument, to try to make things that little bit better today so they won’t be much worse tomorrow.

And if I look at my team and the members of the HSBC architecture practice, I suspect that many of them have a similar voice in their head, a voice which won’t let them give up easily. I like to think that that’s why they are valued, but also recognise that that’s also why some people find them annoying (why can’t they just let it go?).

Having this little voice in my head also reminds me of the power of small lessons that last. I don’t know what the shape of my career would have been without Mr Clark emphasising conscientiousness all those years ago. Maybe it would have been much the same, but there are definitely decisions I would have made differently, actions I wouldn’t have taken, and work I did that would have been worse. We must also remember that these lessons don’t always happen at school: every day in our professional lives, those people with more experience teach those people with less experience (and often the other way round). These lessons can last a whole career: we should be conscientious about the habits and ideas that we are passing on.