Dear Future Pedro,
This reflection emerged through a Socratic dialogue with Claude, where questions helped me articulate beliefs I held but couldn't fully express. Sometimes clarity comes not from solitary thinking, but from the right questions asked at the right moment—questions that help us excavate convictions we carry but struggle to put into words.
Recently, I encountered Karri Saarinen's profound question: "Why is quality so rare?" His exploration of this question through Linear's philosophy sparked a deeper reflection on something I've been grappling with throughout my career—how our principles evolve to become not just preferences, but fundamental guides for the most important decisions we make.
The Compass Within: When External Systems Lack Direction
In the absence of clear organizational principles, our personal convictions become the only reliable compass. I've observed this pattern across multiple environments: when companies lack a strong core philosophy, progress gets measured by deliveries rather than customer happiness. People stay perpetually busy with urgent but unimportant tasks, while complex, valuable work gets deprioritized.
In these moments of organizational drift, something interesting happens. Those with strong principles begin to feel like outsiders—not because their skills are lacking, but because their internal compass points toward a different kind of North Star. The question becomes: do you adjust your compass to match the prevailing winds, or do you trust that your direction is sound?
This tension reveals something fundamental about professional identity. We are not just collections of skills and experiences; we are the accumulated weight of our principles under pressure. The choices we make when those principles conflict with convenience define not just our careers, but who we become as craftspeople.
Belief as the Foundation of Meaningful Work
What struck me most about Saarinen's framework—Belief + Care + Craft = Quality—is how it positions belief as the foundational element. This isn't mere optimism or wishful thinking. It's conviction about what's possible when we refuse to accept "good enough" as the final answer.
Without belief, we default to accepting whatever system we find ourselves in. We recognize poor quality—most people do—but we choose the path of least resistance rather than the friction of fighting for something better. Belief is what separates craftspeople from mere executors. It's the difference between someone who sees broken user flows and shrugs, and someone who feels compelled to fix them.
Meaningful work, I've come to understand, requires this kind of conviction. Not the belief that we're always right, but the belief that there's always a better way worth discovering. It's belief that creates the energy to care about details when others don't, to experiment when others follow known paths, to craft when others merely deliver.
The Evolution of Professional Principles
Principles aren't static. They evolve through testing, refinement, and application. Mine have been shaped by environments that valued different things—some that celebrated craft, others that prioritized speed, still others that confused busyness with progress.
Each environment tested my convictions in different ways. In quality-focused cultures, my principles felt natural and were broadly accepted. In others, they created friction, made me feel like an outsider, forced me to develop strategies for advocating change while preparing for the possibility that some cultures simply can't be changed.
This evolution taught me something crucial: principles aren't just personal preferences—they're predictors of cultural compatibility. The degree to which your core convictions align with an organization's actual (not stated) values determines whether you'll thrive or merely survive.
The Moment of Alignment Recognition
There's a profound moment when you discover that your principles aren't outliers—when you realize you're not alone in believing that software should be beautiful, that details matter, that customer happiness is the only metric that truly counts. It's the moment when conviction meets community.
This recognition changes how you evaluate opportunities. Instead of asking "Can I do this job?" you start asking "Will this environment nurture or suppress what I believe about quality work?" It's a shift from optimization to alignment, from fitting in to finding home.
When Saarinen articulated his philosophy about quality, I experienced this recognition. Not because he told me something new, but because he gave language to convictions I'd carried but couldn't fully express. This is what happens when belief finds its philosophical foundation—it becomes not just personal conviction but a framework for making life-changing decisions.
The Long-term Wisdom of Principled Choices
Here's what I've learned about choosing alignment over convenience: short-term friction from principled choices compounds into long-term fulfillment in ways that convenience-based decisions never can.
When you compromise core principles for immediate comfort—accepting a role that conflicts with your values, staying in an environment that suppresses your craft, choosing the path of least resistance when your convictions demand more—you trade temporary ease for lasting dissatisfaction. The cost of fighting misaligned cultures, I've discovered, is often higher than the cost of finding aligned ones.
Principled choices create what I think of as "compound authenticity." Each decision made from conviction builds toward a career that feels genuinely yours rather than one that happened to you. The friction is real, but it's the kind of friction that shapes rather than wears down.
The Philosophical Foundation for Professional Life
What does this mean practically? It means recognizing that career decisions aren't just economic calculations—they're philosophical choices about who you want to become. It means understanding that belief is not naive optimism but the catalyst for all meaningful change.
Most importantly, it means accepting that maintaining strong principles in environments that don't share them requires courage, but abandoning those principles for convenience requires living with the long-term consequences of that compromise.
Saarinen's question—"Why is quality so rare?"—has a simple answer: because belief is rare. Not because people don't recognize quality when they see it, but because they're unwilling to do the hard work of building environments where quality can flourish.
For those of us who refuse to accept this scarcity as permanent, the path forward is clear: find or create the conditions where belief, care, and craft can combine. The short-term friction of this choice is nothing compared to the long-term fulfillment of work that aligns with who you are and what you believe is possible.
This reflection was inspired by Karri Saarinen's exploration of quality and his framework for building environments where craft can flourish. Sometimes the most important insights come not from learning something new, but from finding the words for what we've always known to be true.