“Mr. Scott. Have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?”

“Certainly, Sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?”

…Be careful about trying to build a “reputation as a miracle worker” in the same way Scotty did.

He built his reputation. But, functionally, in that reputation, “miracle worker” meant “someone who always ends up being able to do more than he originally claimed was possible.”

This isn’t a good reputation to have, most of the time.

Functionally, it’s the same as “someone you can’t believe when he says he’s unable to do something… he totally can, so just tell him to do it anyway.”

The only way to avoid making that impression would have been to actually stick to his initial statement of what he could do.

And, in his line of work, that’s not really an option. He ended up in a lot of situations where the choices were “exceed initial promised workload” or “die in an exploding starship.”

So, I really can’t imagine wanting a reputation like that. And I like to think (TNG notwithstanding) that his claim about how he built that reputation was mostly a joke.

I like to think his process, most of the time, was “give reasonable, accurate initial estimate… then, later, sometimes, fueled by adrenaline, in sufficiently dire cases, experience sudden unplanned strokes of genius that permit exceeding initial guess of what was possible.”

Not a strategy you can exactly plan to have.

But I guess it worked for him.