Too little
Assume that a polished notice must be a workable notice.
Diligence
Give the details of a shared proposal enough care to notice who could be overlooked.
Readiness to sustain due care in worthwhile effort.
Diligence sustains due care in worthwhile effort. In common work, details connect an intention to another person’s experience: a date, a working link, a usable entrance, a clear handover. Care means attending to the details that matter rather than polishing whatever is most enjoyable to polish.
Try a practice
What Diligence means in shared life
The new collection point has a beautifully printed opening notice. In very small type, it sends visitors to a door that is locked on Saturdays—the only day some shift workers can come. You try the route before the first session and correct the notice. A five-minute walk serves those visitors better than another hour choosing its font.
Diligence gives…
A person using the result encounters fewer avoidable obstacles. Reliability grows through checking hours, routes and instructions that spare others repeated explanation or wasted journeys.
Finding the balance
A fitting response
Check the route, hours and essential information as a first-time visitor would use them.
Pursued too far
Keep refining decorative details until the corrected notice never appears.
Due care is proportionate to the task. The check should follow likely consequences, not the desire to remove every imaginable imperfection.
In ordinary life
A shared list
Check the contact details before passing the list on.
A handover
Leave the next volunteer the information needed to continue, rather than merely reporting that you have finished.
Nearby virtues, different work
Perseverance
Perseverance returns through setbacks; Diligence concerns the care present in each attempt.
Fairness
Fairness notices whose access matters; Diligence tests whether the arrangement works for them.
Recognizing a counterfeit
A counterfeit of Diligence: Ornamental busyness accumulates visible effort around the logo while the incorrect address remains. Direct care toward the purpose and the people who will use the result.
How to cultivate Diligence
- Identify the detail most likely to make the result unusable.
- Follow the instructions from a first-time user’s position.
- Pass on unresolved points explicitly.
Try it today
Check one piece of information in a shared task from its user’s perspective. Correct it or alert the responsible person if you find a problem. Choose a bounded task; do not take on specialist inspection or unsafe work.
Questions worth returning to
- Which error would waste someone else’s effort?
- What deserves checking before I spend more time polishing?
Choose your practice
The situations on these pages are illustrative. These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.
About these practicesQuotations and further reading
Read these passages in their original settings through the source links.
Of the many things you hear hold aloof from those that are doubtful, and speak guardedly with reference to the rest; your mistakes will then be few.
Confucius, The Analects of Confucius
Book Ii;
Chinese; English translation by William JenningsConfucius advises a student seeking office to distinguish doubtful reports from what can responsibly be said. Care with a public notice begins before its layout is polished.
The most careful laboratory work must be done to discover the conditions which make these interrelatings possible, which make these interrelatings fruitful.
Mary Parker Follett, The New State
I the group and the new psychologyFollett calls for careful inquiry into the conditions of cooperation; goodwill does not replace examining how people work together.
what is an artist but a workman who is determined that, whatever else happens, his work shall be excellent?
William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art
The Lesser ArtsMorris defines an artist through a workman’s commitment to excellence, bringing care into ordinary making.
Order would find a more suitable place among the conditions of Progress, since, if we would increase our sum of good, nothing is more indispensable than to take due care of what we already have.
John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government
Chapter II—The Criterion of a Good Form of Government.Taking care of an existing good is one condition of improvement. Maintenance belongs within progress.
It frequently happens, that applause abates diligence.
Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume III: The Rambler
No. 111Applause can tempt a group to relax its attention just when the promised service still needs work.
That every line in a pattern should have its due growth, and be traceable to its beginning, this, which you have doubtless heard before, is undoubtedly essential to the finest pattern work; equally so is it that no stem should be so far from its parent stock as to look weak or wavering.
William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art
Making The Best Of ItMorris’s account of pattern work asks each line to make a coherent connection; small details belong to the whole design.
The secretary of a Commission investigates a subject, is clever in mastering details, in drawing conclusions and in presenting them, perhaps far cleverer in these respects than any member of the Commission.
Mary Parker Follett, The New State
XIV the group principle at workFollett acknowledges the skilled detailed work behind a commission’s conclusions before examining how the group uses it.
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Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.