Meticulous Road to Success

I posed an employee at Merriam Webster beside a bust of Noah Webster.

    Imagine learning twenty-six languages.
    Noah Webster undertook that challenge. Meticulousness drive him to that extreme. Over the course of two-and-a-half decades, he researched the etymology of words. In the 1828, he published ‘An American Dictionary of the English Language.’ It was our nation's first dictionary.
   The novelist J.R.R. Tolkein was meticulous. He rewrote parts of his novel, The Lord of the Rings, after it had been published. He changed the phases of the moon. They weren’t correctly sequenced in the first edition.
    Guitarist Jimi Hendrix was meticulous in the studio. Days before recording, he would write voluminous amounts of information on yellow legal pads. These writings specified plans for how each song would be recorded. This meticulousness continued inside the studio. Rolling Stone Magazine quoted a former recording engineer: “He (Jimi) would do take after take, then want the gear moved around if he wasn’t getting the right sound.”
    Meticulousness is a time hog. It requires patience and perseverance. But in the end, meticulousness contributes to success.