Giving a shit
There is no superpower greater than giving a shit consistently for long periods of time.
I’ve watched people with similar intelligence, experience, and opportunity end up in very different places after a few years. The difference was not hustle or grinding or raw talent. It was whether they cared about the quality of what they produced when no one was watching.
Not hustle culture. Not grinding. Just caring about the work, day after day, year after year.
Default Mode
Some people have their default mode set to “giving a shit.” They don’t need to be motivated or incentivized. Caring about their work is just how they operate.
Others need external pressure to care. Deadlines. Managers checking in. Performance reviews. The moment that pressure disappears, so does the quality of their output.
You want people in the first category. You can’t quickly train someone into having a different default mode. Either caring is how they operate, or it isn’t.
The Two Questions
Here’s a simple test for whether you’re in a good situation at work. Look at your colleagues and ask yourself:
- Is everyone competent?
- Does everyone give a shit?
If the answer to both is yes, you’re in a winning situation. Protect it.
If the answer to either is no, you have a problem. And honestly, the second question matters more than the first. Competence can be developed. Caring rarely is, and never quickly. Teams without it slow down, trust erodes, and small issues turn into recurring fires.
Craft Has No Forcing Function
There’s nothing in the world that forces craft. Nobody has to care about the details. You can ship mediocre work and often get away with it. The market doesn’t always punish low quality, at least not immediately.
That’s exactly why caring matters. It’s a choice. The people who make that choice consistently, who care when they don’t have to, produce fundamentally different work. Not because they are better at the start, but because they notice more, fix more, and improve faster over time.
Why It Matters More at Small Companies
At a small company, you’re always resource constrained. You can’t throw bodies at problems. You have to be ruthless about what you work on.
This is where giving a shit becomes essential. When everyone cares, problems become visible early. People notice when something isn’t right. They flag it, fix it, or at least don’t pretend it doesn’t exist.
When people don’t care, problems hide. They compound quietly. By the time they surface, they are much harder and more expensive to fix.
My Only Hiring Advice
If I had to boil down everything I’ve learned about hiring into one sentence:
Optimize for people who give a shit.
Not pedigree. Not years of experience. Not technical skills. Those can be learned. Find people whose default mode is caring about their work.
How do you spot them? It’s in the details. How they talk about past projects. The questions they ask. Whether they take ownership of failures or blame external factors. Be careful of people who perform caring in interviews. Real caring shows up in specifics and scars.
You know it when you see it.
The Superpower
Caring isn’t glamorous. Nobody writes blog posts about “10x engineers who gave a shit.” But it’s the closest thing to a cheat code I’ve found.
The best people I’ve worked with weren’t necessarily the smartest or most talented. They were the ones who cared deeply and consistently for years. That consistency compounds into something that looks like talent but is really sustained attention applied over time.
Give a shit. Keep giving a shit. Over years, it quietly turns into an unfair advantage.