In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna presents the concept of 'svadharma' — the idea that doing your own work with full integrity is more valuable than imperfectly performing someone else's. For a welder or pipefitter, this lands with unusual force: the anonymous bead you lay inside a pressure vessel at 3am, never to be seen again, is either right or it isn't. No one may ever inspect it. Metallurgist-philosopher Cyril Stanley Smith observed that materials science itself advanced not through grand theory but through the accumulated tacit knowledge of craftsmen who simply refused to do shoddy work. Your standards, held in the absence of oversight, are your actual character — not a performance of it.

Is there a part of your work where your standard shifts depending on who's watching — and what would it take to close that gap entirely?

Drawing from Indian Philosophy (Bhagavad Gita) — Krishna / Vyasa (Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 3 & 18), with reference to Cyril Stanley Smith