Why Caring about your work changes the Results you get

My take and experience with caring when it comes to work is a bit spiritual but hear me out.

Caring about your work means going beyond the bare minimum. It's not just about doing the task in front of you, but owning the results as if your name is stamped on them.

Outside of my work at Daakye Digital, where I handle product development operations, I also lead the team at Insights Lab, the creators of Building Bytes, Ghana's most relevant tech platform.

Back in November, through the support of Hubtel Academy, we started publishing videos from our podcast episodes. For two months, the views were average. At the start of this year, we decided to push harder. We changed our publishing format, introduced a rule that every episode must have three thumbnail options, and experimented with catchphrases. By the second video of this experiment, we had our first 1k+ views.

What we changed on YouTube

A snapshot of published videos from Building Bytes.

If we didn't care, we would have just blamed the algorithm and kept doing the same thing. But by putting in extra effort, even to the point of doing ten iterations for a single thumbnail, we saw results. I believe the universe has a way of rewarding that kind of effort.

The same applied in my day job. Earlier this year, I was tasked with researching an emerging fintech vertical. Desk research gave me the basics, but no concrete numbers. It would have been easy to stop there. Instead, I reached out to multiple sources, had conversations with leaders in the space, and eventually got the data I needed not from a report, but a casual chat with one of those leaders. Again, caring pushed me further, and the answers came.

So what does caring about your work look like in practice?

Hold yourself to a higher standard. Make sure anything with your name on it reflects your best effort.

Don't settle for the first draft. Iterate, refine, and improve before you ship.

Go beyond the minimum. Not because you can't stop, but because you care about the outcome.

When you care deeply about your work, you'll find that the universe responds, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ones. But the results always change.