Something is shifting in my job, and it took me a while to notice because it happened gradually. I'm becoming a manager. A leader, if you want the nicer word. And the definition of success in that role is strange when you say it out loud.
I'm not responsible for doing the things anymore. I'm responsible for making sure the right things get done. How long they take. How good they are when they're finished. And — this is the part nobody puts in the job description — how the people doing them feel about it, the whole way through.
So I'm looking at people from the other side of the table now. And that made me look at myself, because I sat on their side for a long time and I know exactly what kind of person was sitting there.
Here's the honest version. I have a problem with authority. Not with people — with the act of being told what to do. Somebody says "do this," and something in me tenses up before I've even heard the reasoning. It's been like that my whole life. I always filed it under my flaws. Big ego. Hard to work with. Not a team player, whatever the HR word is.
But I've been getting older, and getting older mostly means noticing things about yourself that were sitting there the whole time. And the big one is something I already wrote in chapter three, in a completely different context: I am not special.
I'm not special. I just have more information about myself than I have about anyone else.
That's the whole difference. I have the full log of my own reactions and only the edited highlights of everyone else's. So it's not a stupid idea to use myself as the model for other people — not for taste, not for the specific stuff, but for the general mechanics. How a human being reacts to being told to do something they don't believe in. That mechanic is probably the same in most of us. It's just that I can hear mine loudly.
And here's the mechanic, as observed in me, with what I'd call a very solid sample size.
If someone tells me to do something, and I don't believe it's valuable — I don't believe it'll be useful, I don't believe it's worth the time — there's friction. A lot of it. Sometimes I do it anyway. Whether I do or not isn't a clean decision. It's some multidimensional thing in my head with a part I control and a part that sits much deeper and votes without asking me. But when I do do it, the result is the same every time.
It's shit.
Not a bit worse. Genuinely low quality, especially next to the things I actually believed in. I've watched this happen enough times that it stopped being a feeling and became data.
And no, it's not that I only believe in ideas that come out of my own head. Although — I'm not going to lie — those are the tier one ideas. Those are the ones I execute. And I'd argue I execute all of them, because step one of executing an idea is finding out whether it makes sense. Some die at step one. The ones that survive it get everything I have.
So for years the story I told myself was: this is a disadvantage. Fix it. Learn to just do the thing.
The new interpretation is different. Everyone is like this. Everyone does a worse job on the thing they don't believe in. I'm just vocal about it, and I'm aware of it — and the awareness is exactly why I don't take on things I'm not bought into. I'm not being difficult. I'm declining to produce shit.
Everyone works like this. I just have the self-awareness to say it out loud and the stubbornness to act on it.
Now put that back in the context of organizations, because that's where it matters. We always live inside one. Society is an organization. A family is one. Your team at work is one. And in every one of them, ideas get handed to people who didn't ask for them.
If my responsibility is the final outcome — and as a manager, it is — then the best thing I can do with an idea I don't believe in is say no. Early. At the beginning, before it has my name on it.
Because that no isn't the end of the idea. It's the opposite. It frees the idea to go find someone who actually believes in it. And an idea in the hands of someone who believes in it has a completely different chance of surviving than the same idea in the hands of someone who's just complying.
A no from me at the start is worth more to the idea than a half-hearted yes. Say it early, and the idea gets to go find its believer.
That's the part I'm now fully convinced of. Internal motivation — the drive, that feeling of being genuinely inspired by a thing — is at least as important as your current skills and knowledge. Maybe more. Especially now. Especially in the area I work in, where the skills half of the equation gets cheaper every month and the wanting-to half does not.
So I feel good about this. I think being aware of it is a real tool, and it becomes a bigger tool the moment you're leading people instead of just being one. Because now I'm the one handing out the ideas. And if I know what it did to me to be handed something I didn't believe in, I know exactly what I'm doing to someone else when I do it to them.
For me this is a big thought. Nothing about me changed. The friction is still there. The allergy to being told what to do is still there. What changed is the label.
I took something I always saw as a disadvantage and turned it into an advantage. Nothing moved except the interpretation.
Turns out that's enough.