It is still hard, and the result may not be much different.
Tuesday evening. There’s a knock at my office door. “Hey”, she said. “We are going to the cocktail bar down the street. Would you like to come? Have a mojito or something?”
“Sorry, I can’t”, I said.
“Oh, come on”, she said. “You’re here for how long now? Two months?”
I nodded.
“So, don’t you think it’s time to socialize a bit?”
I shook my head. I really couldn’t. I was glad I had survived the first two months. But now I was responsible for something that looked (at least to me) like a super important project. “As soon as I am done with that”, I said. “I will join you. I promise.”
She shrugged and closed the door.
I kept working until late at night. It was hard. This project was my first real test here. I really wanted it to work. I couldn’t risk failing.
A week later, she knocked at my door again. “How about today?”
“To be honest”, I said. “Today is worse than last time.”
“How did that happen?”, she asked. She worked in another department and couldn’t understand the specifics of my work.
“Well”, I said. “Let’s say, I opened Pandora’s Box. There are so many details here I didn’t consider.”
“Hmm. Sounds bad”, she said. “And you look stressed out, you know that?”
“Oh, I am stressed out. But … well. That’s life, isn’t it?”
She shrugged. Closed the door.
I kept working. That evening I came across another Pandora’s Box that I naively opened. How was that even possible? In the beginning, I had thought the project was easy. The way my boss spoke about it sounded easy too. But there was so much that didn’t add up. Everything was illogical. Everything was stuck.
I didn’t finish anything that evening. And neither on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. I took work home for the weekend. On Monday I felt like throwing up.
Knock, knock. It was Tuesday evening again.
My colleague peeked in. “Today!”, she said. “There are no excuses!”
I put my face in my palms. “I can’t”, I said. “This thing gets worse and worse. Please, stop asking me!”
She looked at me. “You know what happens when you are trying too hard?”
Oh, great, I thought. Smart-ass advice is exactly what I need right now.
“You will work like crazy, and come out with half-baked results”, she said.
I didn’t say anything.
She didn’t seem to notice my anger. She kept smiling as if things weren’t totally out of control. “But do you know what happens, when you look for the easiest way to finish something?”, she said.
“Tell me!”, I said dryly.
“You will work like crazy, and come out with half-baked results”, she said.
I leapt up from my chair. “For God’s sake! So there is no difference”, I shouted. I looked at her. She looked at me. Then I noticed what I had just said. I wanted to add something, but I couldn’t.
She smiled. “You are right”, she said and turned around. In the doorway, she stopped and said: “Well, there is a tiny difference.”
“What is it?”, I said.
“If you looked for an easy way to finish this, maybe you would still have a little bit of energy left to have a mojito with me.”
I watched her close the door. I was shaken. Her words hurt and I didn’t know why. It didn’t matter if I tried hard, or looked for the easiest way, the results were the same.
I stared at the figures, tables, and numbers on my screen. The easiest way, I thought. And suddenly, I understood.
I understood why I was working so hard.
It wasn’t perfectionism. I knew that I wouldn’t come to a perfect result. And to be honest, I didn’t care. The reason was a different one.
It also wasn’t because the task was hard. Now thinking about it, it was quite a trivial one.
The real reason was that I was desperate to do “real work”. I wanted to work hard, because it gave me a reason to be here, to have “an excuse”, if you like, to be part of this organization. I identified with my work.
And there was that subtle fear that I might run out of work. In fact, I felt that I was afraid to finish the project. Not because I thought my results wouldn’t be good enough, but because I was afraid of what would come next. I was afraid that when I got this done, that there was nothing left for me to do. On a deeper level: that I wasn’t needed anymore.
That was, of course, ridiculous. I looked in my email inbox. During the last 8 hours, my boss had sent me a bunch of emails and each of them included a task of the same size as the one I was working on. And quite clearly I saw a simple rule of reality. It struck me, like a flash: there will always be enough work. Don’t worry, you will not run out of it.
And the same moment, another thought came to me. If there is always enough or too much work, there is only one way to deal with it: keep the work as small as possible. Don’t make it bigger as it is. In other words …
“Look for any easy way”, I said loudly. It was ridiculously simple. It couldn’t be true. But then again, I felt how my stomach rebelled against it. That was fear. Maybe it isn’t that simple after all, I thought.
That evening I went home early. The next day, I didn’t work on the project at all, neither the rest of the week. Instead I worked on other things, emails mostly. A part of me was scared to death that my boss would show up to ask me for a report. But that didn’t happen.
Instead, I went into the weekend with a clear email inbox, and a plan for the next week.
On Monday, I looked at the project again. Find the easiest way!, I thought. I started working.
At around 1pm I noticed that I had been working on the project for almost half a day. I was exhausted, but not miserable. Something was different. In fact, it felt like a completely different task. There were a lot of problems to solve, but they came from the project itself, not from myself. Those problems were challenges that appeared naturally as a sequence of tiny steps. They were all necessary to get it done the easy way. And there were more than I expected.
An hour later, I decided that it was enough and I didn’t look at it again for the rest of the day.
“So, how about the project”, she asked me on Tuesday.
“Well”, I said. “It is done.”
“Congratulations. Did you try it the hard way?”
“No, the easy one”, I said.
“And how was it?”
“Still hard.”
“I told you.”
“But different.”
“Different in which way?”, she asked.
“I will show you”, I said and smiled. I turned around and said to the bartender: “Two mojitos, please!”
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