The big difference that little things can make

I started my working life as an electrician. Too lazy to pursue my original plan of becoming a doctor, I took the easier route: dropped out of school and did an electrical apprenticeship instead. One of my early managers, reflecting on my prospects, was fond of telling me:

“Ben, you won’t make an electrician’s ar$%hole. Oh wait, you will make an electrician’s ar$%hole.”

Rather than being crushed, I took it as a fairly accurate assessment of my abilities.

I’ve been thinking about electricians again after hearing that John Corbett, a colleague from my apprenticeship days, has passed away. John was everything I wasn’t. While I scraped through my apprenticeship and fled the trade at the first opportunity, John was the guy everyone pointed to as the best electrician they’d ever worked with.

He was the elder statesman of our group, about 25 years older than the rest of us. By the time we turned up as green apprentices, John had already made every mistake worth making, learned from it, and, crucially, worked out how to explain it to the rest of us. His specialty was the highly technical electrical work inside computer data centres, back when data centres were still slightly mysterious places full of expensive gear where a wrong move had real consequences. I remember plenty of weekend overtime shifts where John, chewing his gum in that unhurried way of his, would quietly talk the team through exactly what we were about to do and why.

There was nothing theatrical about him. He never told you he was good. He just was. He knew the detail, understood why it mattered, and had the patience to pass that on to a bunch of young idiots who knew a fraction of what he did.

Looking back, that’s the thing that separates real expertise from simply being competent. The best people don’t just know how to do the job: they know why it has to be done that way, and they’re willing to teach it. John was one of those people.

His death got me thinking about all the electricians who became better tradespeople because of him. Some will remember specific lessons. Most probably won’t; they’ll just have absorbed his standards without realising it, watching how he handled a tricky job and quietly folding a bit of that into their own approach.

That’s a pretty remarkable legacy.

We have a strange idea of who counts as a hero. We celebrate All Blacks, star surgeons, high-flying bankers, successful founders: people whose success is visible and countable. Fair enough, too. But there’s another kind of heroism that happens where nobody’s watching. It happens in workshops, on building sites, in kitchens and back offices. It’s the 30-year veteran taking time to teach the six-month rookie. It’s the experienced hand explaining something for the third time because they still remember not knowing it themselves. It’s someone setting the standard not through speeches or management frameworks, but simply by doing the job properly, every single time.

Nobody hands out an award for that. There’s no LinkedIn post. Nobody writes a case study about the old electrician who quietly made twenty younger sparkies better at their jobs. And yet it might be one of the most important contributions there is.

A trade, a profession, an organisation: none of it gets good just because it employs talented individuals. It gets good because knowledge moves from one generation to the next. The apprentice learns from the tradesman, becomes the tradesman, and eventually finds themselves explaining the same things to the next lot of apprentices. It’s an almost invisible process, but it’s exactly how capability compounds over time.

John was part of that chain for my generation: the older hand who’d already seen what we were encountering for the first time, who knew what mattered and what could go wrong, and who was generous enough to share it.

I’d wager there are electricians around New Zealand today who don’t think of themselves as anything special, but who are better at their jobs simply because John Corbett was once their colleague. Some will remember him clearly. Others will carry his standards without knowing where they came from.

That’s a pretty good definition of a life well lived. You don’t need fame, wealth or trophies. You can leave your mark just by making the people around you better, and passing something useful down the line.

There’s something fitting in that for a trade like electrical work: so much of it disappears once the walls go up. Nobody thinks about who ran the cable or checked the connections, precisely because it was done properly. Good mentorship might work the same way: invisible up close, and only obvious years later, in the standards someone else quietly carries forward.

So here’s to John, the calm guy with the gum, quietly explaining what needed to happen next. And to everyone whose contribution isn’t measured by how many people know their name, but by how many people are better because they once did.