How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything. (Care is the craft )

I love going to restaurants. During COVID, I really missed that experience. So, the moment restrictions were lifted, you can only imagine how excited I was to finally break bread with my family at one of my favorite restaurants. Friday night came, and we arrived. Had to wait. Anticipation growing. Our name was called (finally). We sat at our table. The waiter handed us our menus, which I enthusiastically took hoping to see their signature Pasta Amatriciana listed. I opened the menu, still savoring the expectation, until I saw it. Faint, translucent blotches of olive oil spread across the page. The kind you can’t unsee. Without saying a word, I turned the menu toward my son Jack. He glanced down, then up at me, simply shook his head and said, “I guess they don’t care.”

That moment stuck with me, clearly. On the surface, it was such a small thing, just a few stains on a piece of paper. I should stop over-reacting. I mean, who really cares? Well, he should. And the restaurant should. Because instead of enjoying the moment, I was suddenly fixated on what wasn’t right. It pulled me out of the experience. I just wasn’t in it anymore. And that’s the danger. One careless detail can break the spell. It’s now the story I tell about this restaurant.

Sometimes I joke that the best experience designers all have a touch of their own OCD — a kind of Outsized Care for the Details. It’s that instinct to straighten the crooked chair, lower the music by a single decibel so the conversation flows, hide the cable that breaks the illusion, make sure no guest ever has to ask where to go, or protect a guest from an oil stain on the menu.

Some might argue those things are too small to matter. But the truth is, the small things shape everything. The details don’t sit outside the design — they define it. As Charles Eames believes, “The details are not the details. They make the design.”

It's so important to design experiences with what Daniel Khaneman calls the “remembering self” in mind. Because when an experience ends—and they all do—all we have, is the memory of it. And we don’t want people remembering the wrong things—the moments we didn’t care enough to make right. Sometimes it’s that small thing that sticks, that becomes the emotional peak. Kahneman’s peak-end rule reminds us that a negative peak can carry as much, or even more, weight than a positive one and these peaks are more heavily weighted in how that experience is remembered. That’s why every choice, every interaction, every conscious or subconscious detail matters. It’s either infused with care—or drained of it.

A great example is sound. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about sound as part of experience design, When it’s right, it’s transformational— it transports you deeper into the moment. But when it’s not heard right (hat tip to Meyer Sound), even for a second, the fan is forced to think about hearing, the spell shatters and the flow state collapses. The small detail becomes the bridge to the biggest impact. When you care about the “small,” you elevate the “big.”

The same principle applies beyond experience design — it applies to how we live. Each of us creates an experience in the world every day through how we show up. Call it reputation, or simply the feeling people have after being around you. How you respond, how you follow through, how you care — these are the details that define the experience of you. Reputation isn’t built through big moments; it’s shaped by the countless small, consistent, caring ones. Emerson said it best: “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

So true, it is with experiences.

It’s tempting to think only the headline moments matter — the keynote that stirs the crowd, the dramatic Insta moment everyone shares, the orchestrated crescendo. But every one of those moments is held up by the quiet details most people never notice. The line between big and small doesn’t exist. One creates the other.

In the end, it always comes back to this: you either care, or you don’t.

That stained menu was never really about the menu. It was about caring — or the absence of it. The truth is, the little things aren’t little. They become the peaks, the memories, the reputation. And caring about them is what sets the whole experience apart; Care is more than a detail — care is the craft.

Because how you do anything is, indeed, how you do everything.

And if you truly believe that, you’ll ensure the memory that stays with the people you touch, is the one you want them to remember.

What about you? We’ve all had our own “oil stain” moments — those tiny signals that reveal whether care was present or missing. Take a moment to think about yours. What small detail has stayed with you, long after the experience ended? Those are the moments that teach us how deeply the little things matter — not just in what we design, but in how we live.