> But it’s hard to have the patience to wrap your head around a disorganized mess that you don’t care about. Only if the disorganized mess is your responsibility, something that means more to you than a case study, can you wrap your head around it and appreciate improvements.

This really hit home for me. I personally find it very difficult to get emotionally invested and therefore effective when working on a codebase that I don't personally like. But that's not very professional, so I tend to phone it in when in that situation, at the expense of really using my talents or dedication. But I know that other professional coders do better than me and somehow find a way to be very interested or invested in things they don't care about, perhaps because for many coders, the code itself is enough to warrant the personal interest, and less so what the actual code is used for? If I don't have a big-picture appreciation of a project, I don't enjoy the small stuff either. Perhaps that means I'm in the wrong profession.