When was the last time somebody was so good at their job that it made you want to be better at yours?
On Friday night my partner and I walked into one of those fancy-ass Japanese places in Rome. I had been there before, and all I remembered from last time was the food.
Then Alessandro started working our table.
I didn’t notice what he was doing right away, because there was nothing to notice, and that was the whole point.
The menus appeared in our hands. Water refilled while we kept talking. He took a complicated order and never once asked us to repeat it.
When the woman beside us had nowhere to put her bag, a stool arrived for it before she had finished looking around. He served every dish below our eye line so that nothing ever crossed our faces.
And when I tried to order something with onions in it, after I had told him earlier that I can’t have them, he pushed back on me firmly and to my face.
I’m Italian, and food here is basically religion, so understand what I mean when I say I have almost never been served with that kind of precision.
At the end of the meal we told him how impressed we were.
He nodded, and he said:
“That’s how it should be. If you’re going to do something, it’s important to do it right.”
Then he left to take care of the next table.
I walked out of there with my mouth open. I wrote him a five star review standing on the street, I looked up his manager and emailed the restaurant, and I half joked to my partner that we should hire him to run our retreat center one day.
A week later I am still thinking about him.
What I keep thinking about is this:
Alessandro was not doing more than the other waiters. He was not moving faster, working harder, or covering more tables. If anything he was doing less of all that, and yet it felt different.
What he had was a reason underneath what he was doing, and you could feel it in every small decision he made. When we asked him about it, he knew exactly what we were talking about.
And it made me think about how easy it is to become incredibly good at what you do while slowly losing touch with why you do it the way you do.
It reminded me of M.
She spent thirty years in tech and finished one chapter of her career as a Chief Revenue Officer. When she first sat down with me, she used a phrase I have not been able to put down since.
She said she did all the paint by numbers, and she finished it.
You know the kit, the shapes are drawn for you and every shape has a number telling you which colour goes inside it. You fill them all in and a picture appears, and it is a perfectly good picture, and you did not make a single decision about any of it.
M had done that with her career.
She had succeeded by almost every external measure, but had never really evaluated the thing she spent ninety percent of her life doing.
And now that she’d finished the picture, she wanted to align her career and purpose.
She didn’t want to tear down the life she’d spent thirty years building. She wanted to find herself inside it again.
So that became the work.
What actually mattered to her? What did she believe? What kind of person did she want to become? What did she want all of her experience, ambition and capability to be in service of?
Sixteen months later, her résumé hadn’t changed from the outside. She was still a C-level executive in tech, but this time, she’d landed a role in a company where she could design her absolute dream team and wake up every day to do work that made her feel alive.
What changed was that, in her search for the next role, she was DEEPLY connected to what she was supposed to be doing on this planet.
She knew what she wanted her work to be in service of. When two senior roles came along, she chose the one that would make her more fulfilled, negotiated for the conditions she wanted, and she was given the freedom and license straight from the CEO to build the kind of team and culture she actually believed in.
She was still ambitious. But now her ambition had somewhere meaningful to go.
Her capability hadn’t changed. What it was in service of had.
Which brings me back to the restaurant.
Alessandro knew what his work was in service of too.
“That’s how it should be. If you’re going to do something, do it right.”
He had a principle underneath his work, and his behaviour followed.
I think that’s what can quietly disappear when we spend years getting better and better at succeeding. We become incredibly competent at the doing and slowly disconnect from the reason underneath it.
So if you’ve been feeling successful on paper but strangely disconnected from your work, I wouldn’t immediately ask whether you need to quit, pivot, do more, or find a new purpose.
I’d start by looking for the principle underneath the doing again.
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What got you up in the morning when you first dreamed the big dream?
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What were you doing back when you would forget to eat, forget to pee?
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What do you want all of the experience and capability you’ve accumulated to be in service of now?
And here’s another question… maybe an even more revealing one:
If I asked you “why you do what you do, the way you do it?”, could you answer with the same certainty Alessandro did?
He didn’t need to think about it. He said it to two strangers on a Friday night while carrying plates:
“That’s how it should be.”
If you’re inside a career or business that works, but you’ve lost touch with what all of that work is ultimately in service of, Business by Soul® is where I help you find that again — without tearing down everything you’ve already built.
With love & courage,
Celinne 🤍
p.s. I did email the restaurant, and I have no idea whether Alessandro ever saw it. But I have thought about him every day for a week, which tells you how rare it is to watch somebody do an ordinary thing at full capacity, and how much we notice when they do.
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