Leave it better than you found it

At work, you hear it all the time: “This is my predecessor’s mess. I’m still cleaning it up.”

After hearing it enough times, I started asking a different question. What will the next person say about my work?

That question became my guide. It’s simple: leave something better than how I got it.

It’s easy to say and hard to do. The hard part isn’t fixing someone else’s mess. That one feels righteous. The hard part is the mistake I know I made, the one nobody has noticed.

Ignoring it feels like saving time, but really I’m handing a small piece of it to whoever sits in my chair next. So, now I fix those too, even when no one would ever know.

I don’t want to be remembered for being the smartest person in the room. I’d rather be remembered for how easy I made life for the people around me.

Fewer “who knows how this works?” moments. Fewer escalations. A cleaner handover than the one I got.

That’s the legacy I’m aiming for, one small fix at a time.