A few days ago Agost Biro shared a video breaking down the tactics used by German football coach Julian Nagelsmann to the Football channel on Farcaster. The video ended up being so good that I spent some time watching more of their videos and this one about Brighton coach Roberto De Zerbi really held my attention for a good while.
Roberto De Zerbi, more than any other manager I've ever seen, strikes me as someone who is absolutely obsessed with the smallest tactical details of the game of football.
Whenever I watch a De Zerbi interview, or read an article, I know I'm almost always going to learn something new about the game of football, see the game in a slightly different light than before.
If you don't like football at all, don't worry, I'm not here to bore you with football tactics.
The point I really want to make is this: when I consider all the people who have inspired me by being really good at what they do, the Kanye's, Nolan's, and Steve's(SDV.eth not Jobs) of this world, one trait i think they all share in common is this obsession with the minute details of the work they do.
They tend to be people who care so much about the work they do that they put in a lot of effort into understanding their field in its minutiae.
Not content with just getting the work done, they are deeply interested in and knowledgeable about the medium they have to work with and the tools they use to work on that medium.
Kanye is probably a good example of someone so obsessed with detail that he took a deep knowledge of the medium(vocals, melodies) and tools(TR-808) of his craft and pushed his field in an entirely new direction with the 808s & Heartbreak album.
Another very good example of this phenomenon is David Perell. David is a writer and he runs the online writing school Write of Passage. I'd been writing for a while before I came across David Perell and would have considered myself a writer all that time. But I was still blown away by how much detail he went into when analysing what makes good writing good. Even talking about things like "varying the length of your sentences" that sounded like they belonged more to the world of scientific empirical analysis than the world of writing.
I could go on but I think you get the idea.
What I've noticed lately about this obsession over small details is that it arises almost naturally when people find and do work they love and care about.
When I do work I don't care about I am just glad to be done, whatever done looks like. But, when I genuinely care about the work, it's only natural that I want to do it very well. And wanting to do it very well then makes me more likely to go the extra mile in seeking to understand how to do the work well.
This is probably the reason why the best people in every field tend to know lots of seemingly random and small details about the field. Details that could only have arisen from trying to take things apart to truly understand how they work.
I don't think most football managers care that much about how their players put their foot on the ball. But Roberto De Zerbi does. He loves football and he cares, so he's a little bit obsessed.