i was a salaried employee from 2013 to mid-2018. i learned a lot, and generally had a great time. then i left my job and i’ve been a free agent ever since. i’ve now been a free agent longer than i was ever an employee.
when i first left my job, i had accumulated some “job fatigue”. In hindsight, I think most of this was to do with the fact that I wasn’t very good at managing my own time, setting boundaries for myself, prioritizing, taking breaks and vacations and so on. I’m still not very good at those things. That said, after I left my job I was determined to avoid all of the trappings of employment as much as possible. No calendars, no schedules, no emails, no meetings, no reports and so on. It was glorious for a couple of months, but then I think I actually went too far with it, and found myself in a state of disorientation. I went weeks without any clarity about what I had accomplished. Some people have the view that you shouldn’t care about your accomplishments in the broadest sense. I think this is a difficult ideal to strive for, as finite mortals with limited resources. And I think that, in practice, it’s actually easier to “not care about your accomplishments” say 80% of the time, if you DO care about your accomplishments 20% of the time. It’s roughly akin to, if you’re fit, healthy and active, you don’t have to worry so much about what you eat. If you’re financially well-off, you don’t have to worry so much about money. If you have a great social life, there’s all sorts of social anxieties you don’t need to have.
There are of course extreme cases where people have unhealthy relationships with some or all of those things. There are people who are extremely fit and healthy and active, because they’re anxiously obsessive about their diet and exercise. There are people who are anxiously obsessive about their accomplishments maybe because they feel like they’re worthless without them.
So in my model we have something like, 0.1% high-functioning fanatics at the top, then a chill top 20% who win the games they play and are also chill about it, then there’s a big mix of people ranging from generally anxious about not winning, not knowing if they even want to be playing the games they’re playing, and so on. I’m not super invested right now in developing a really precise model of the big messy middle. I’ve always been curious about the fanatics, and am always wondering how close to peak performance one can get, in varying domains, without the anxiety. It’s always striking to me how many action star physiques were built by men with abusive dads. Arnold, Stallone, Lundgren, Crews, The Rock all have similar stories on that front. Does anybody get that big (both literally and figuratively) without deep pain driving it? Can they get to a point where they transmute the pain such that they don’t need to go so hard anymore? Would they still want to?
My minor version of this has always been to do with social skills, interpersonal skills, writing skills, performance skills. I wonder if it might have anything do with me being the youngest kid, my immediate older brother being 7 years older and substantially bigger than me, and me being a picky eater, skinny, etc, that getting swole and winning a fistfight never felt like a serious possibility for me. I certainly tried, repeatedly, but I never really got the results I was looking for on that front. I got much better results trying to be charming, clever, witty, and that’s where I ended up investing my time and energy. I posted a lot on forums, I tweeted and blogged my way into kinship and some semblance of significance. I used to be quite neurotic about it. There was a time where it would eat me up inside if somebody said something negative about me, or misunderstood my point, and I would feel a surge of emotion within me that would practically hijack my behavior to make me explain myself. I spent many, many hours on that over the years. And that process did make me better with words, better with arguments. I could still do it if I really wanted to. But I don’t really care to do it very much anymore. It’s just not really a priority for me anymore now. I’m okay being misunderstood, because I have people in my life who do understand me. I’m okay with people who don’t know me thinking bad things about me. I’ve come to see over time that those people are almost always unserious. Serious people take the time to get to know things, including other people. They might be mistaken in their interpretations, since perception is a mess and comms are lossy etc etc, but they know this about themselves and they’re open to revision. I’ve come to accept that I can’t be friends with everyone, and that’s not even particularly desirable. So I’ve settled for wanting to be friends with serious people, people that I respect and admire, and I don’t worry to much about the rest, most of the time. Many people come around over time eventually, and they’re likelier to if you’re at least moderately chill about being misunderstood and misrepresented. There are of course exceptions to this, but I’m now layers deep into a digression from what I actually wanted to be writing about…
Lets go back to talking about accomplishments. When I say accomplishments I don’t mean accolades or trinkets. I mean doing the things you want to do. Writing the books you want to write. Having goals and achieving them. Feeling a sense of your own power. Being able to provide for yourself, and better still, being able to provide for your family. As long as we still live in a world where one needs to earn a living, it makes sense to care at least somewhat about one’s earning power. And I say this as someone who is generally not a fan of the world of jobs and corporations etc, which I characterize as LinkedIn World. I want nothing to do with LinkedIn World. I don’t want to pick anybody’s brains and so on.
Ugh, I’m getting tired, lol. I had originally intended this post to be a status update, and I started out trying to write some backstory about how one of the things I learned from my job was the utility of having good meetings that get everyone aligned and updated on what’s going on, what’s working, what’s not working, what the next steps are. Without that clarity, things get murky. Sometimes murky can be fun, like an interesting puzzle where you’re exploring and don’t quite know where you’re going. But sometimes murky can be hell. There’s also another failure mode where the clarity is misplaced, and I think I’ve spent a lot of my time and energy actually trying to avoid that failure mode. I’ll stop here and hopefully pick up where I left off after I wake up.