I love a teaching story. All too often, these stories end up being apocryphal, but sometimes they’re actually true.

Here’s a story I heard in law school. The version I heard was told with a lot of drama, which turned out not to be exactly accurate. But the actual story is very interesting.

As the story goes, it involves the Citicorp Center building here in Manhattan, not far from where I live. It’s a 59-story tower now known as 601 Lexington Avenue. The structural engineer for the building was William J. LeMessurier.

As the story goes, in the late 1970s, an engineering/architecture student called LeMessurier’s office, with a question about why the tower’s support columns were at the centers of the sides rather than at the corners.

Thinking about the student’s question got LeMessurier to consider the wind-bracing logic, and when he did, he found something alarming.

He worried because the tower’s unusual bracing system had been calculated mainly for perpendicular winds, “quartering” winds—that is, diagonal winds striking two faces—could put larger loads on some members.

This issue became much more worrisome because the joints had been changed from welded to bolted connections.

In LeMessurier’s analysis, he calculated that if the tuned mass damper lost power, a severe enough storm might have roughly a 1-in-16 annual chance of causing failure.

His concern was real enough that Citicorp and engineers arranged for steel plates to be welded over the vulnerable joints.

Here’s an interesting postscript: modern wind-engineering reassessments have challenged the traditional claim that the tower was actually in danger. So maybe the emergency retrofit wasn’t necessary after all.

For me, this story holds a few lessons.

First, we should be willing to hear and consider constructive criticism, no matter what the source.

Second—and this is important to me as a creative person—is never to feel that I’m finished with something, that it’s beyond editing or improvement. I might not be able to make a change to a published book, but in my mind and in my notes, I can continue to perfect my thoughts and words.