Is what you are doing right now less emotionally fulfilling than moving large bags of rat feces?
A useful metric for judging your current course of action.
It's easy to get lost in the hustle and bustle of particularly chaotic industries and end up devoting large amounts of time and energy to prejects without actually considering whether or not they are, in fact, slowly crushing your soul.
Fortunately, I have a foolproof metric by which to judge any endeavor mid-undertaking:
Is what I'm doing right now less emotionally fulfilling than moving large bags of rat feces?
The answer is sometimes surprising.
You see, back in the halcyon days of my youth, I once took up a job at a national pet store chain which shall remain anonymous. (Never draw the ire of an entity with access to infinite malevolent, inbred gerbils*.)
*Infinite in number and malevolence ...and inbreeding.
My logic was as follows: "I like animals. I would also like a job. What if both?"
Ah, the folly of youth.
I no longer like animals.*
*Except the ferrets. The ferrets were okay. I used to spend my lunch times with an injured baby ferret who had been placed in quarantine because he had a prolapsed anus. (He was much better company than the mice, who possessed perfectly functional anuses and regularly used them while at full sprint on the mouse wheel to ensure 360° coverage of their entire habitat, or the hamsters, who sometimes ate each other's faces, or the rats, who sometimes chewed holes in each other's stomachs and trailed intestines around like thin, gray linguine.)
Anyways, other than giving the occasional giggling butt-wounded baby ferret a ride around in my apron, it was a grim place full of grim things.
The animal kingdom, red in tooth and claw (and anus) was only a small portion of what made the job a hazy, waking nightmare. An exhaustive list would be far too long a digression (see Appendix A: Kid, I Have Seen Some Things… *takes drag on clove cigarette*), but suffice it to say that corporate had designated our leaking warehouse as a "problem store" and set about rectifying the issue with the precision falling-piano-to-the-head that is CORPORATE PROCEDURE. ...A morning began with "pulling dead," transitioned to a day of attempting to coerce customers into purchasing store-brand products through a variety of YouTube Seduction Channel level tactics (like simply putting items they didn't want into the customer's cart because a large percentage of people would rather purchase said item than go through the social awkwardness of pulling it out and sticking it back on the shelf – our training called it "making the cart," and it was the final fallback if our telemarketer-esque "overcoming objections" conversation tree had failed to convince the beleaguered customer), and might finally end with, oh, say SCRUBBING RED-PEPPER-HOBO-DIARRHEA OFF THE BATHROOM WALLS.
Anyways, it was a lively time. (Well, except for a certain percentage of animals every morning.)
(Random aside: DO NOT bring your small pet into the store unless you plan on holding them securely the entire time. Yes, the store has happy signs slathered everywhere informing you that you are more than welcome to bring your pet into the store. The store also has spring-loaded rat traps placed under all of the shelves. Pro tip: rat traps are also surprisingly effective on kittens, ferrets, guinea pigs, dachshund puppies, the fingers of the employee attempting to retrieve them, etc.)
ANYWAYS, to really get us into the right frame of mind, the first thing that greeted us morning shifters was a 12 foot tall mountain of garbage which sat in the hallway that led to the employee break room, forcing us each – like offering a pinch of incense to Caesar – to squeeze through the bulging sacks of broken aquarium glass and rat feces in order to swipe in.
You see, for reasons known only to corporate and whatever Archduke of Hell issued their orders, the big warehouse door in the back of the store was only allowed to be opened under the direct supervision of a manager. Now, managers do a lot of things (those 3 hour Skype meetings aren't going to attend themselves), but one of the things that they don't do is work the night shift.
The night shift also happened to be the time when the store was cleaned and all of the garbage was collected.
Tragically, the only way to access the gigantic dumpster where all of these things were supposed to end up was… through the arcane portal which could only be opened under direct, constant managerial supervision. So, the beleaguered night crew stacked all of their collected garbage (dozens and dozens and dozens of bags) up in front of the door in a kind of towering monument to corporate policy. (And then we morning shifters spent the rest of the day squeezing past it, because there were only 2 of us in the whole store, one being a manager with a 3 hour Skype meeting to attend, and it was more important to clean up the rat linguine before customers arrived and saw it than it was to tackle something as frivolous as the disease-free traversability of the employee break room hallway.)
One day – spurred by some deep, primal, human urge to leave an enduring mark on the world (or perhaps just a desire to postpone my daily battle with the screaming cannibal hamsters for the right to scoop the poop out of their cages whilst retaining possession of all of my fingers) – I stopped at the foot of the towering garbage pyramid, gazed at the summit far above my head, and said the following words:
"Can I throw this out?"
Through sheer luck and/or connectivity issues, the manager had not yet been able to start her daily Skype meeting. There was no choice but to acknowledge my existence.
She stared at me for a moment with the kind of eyebrow-tensing concern that I imagine Galileo's geocentric contemporaries used: a genuine shock with the faintest hint of an underlying, forbidden curiosity. "It's completely insane," they whisper in their heart of hearts, "but it just might work…"
2 minutes later, the back gate was open, and the manager was sequestered away in the office, wholly absorbed by the day's dire Skype responsibilities.
It was just me, the open dumpster, and the garbage mountain.
It was not an aromatically delightful task (and yes, sometimes a bag burst as I hoisted it over my head, and soiled rat litter poured down the collar of my shirt), but it was a simple, straightforward job with an immediate and appreciable impact on the world around me, and – unlike every other task in the workday – there was no corporate procedure attached to it. I was allowed to go about throwing out the garbage in whatever manner I saw fit.
12 minutes later, I sauntered inside, shook a few persistent bits of rat poop out of my hair, and stood in an entirely clear hallway. "I did this," I thought, "I created this."
The next morning, I ambushed the manager outside the office door.
"Can I take out the garbage mountain?" I asked, with a faint manic gleam in my eye.
And so, the highlight of my day became carrying out a 12 foot tall mountain of garbage every morning.
Yes, they were large bags of rat feces, but it offered the best task experience there was to be had:
1. A clear goal.
2. Visible progress.
3. An immediate positive impact.
4. Entirely self-directed.
5. No paperwork.
6. No hamsters.
It was worth dealing with large bags of rat feces to have those things.
Since then, I have worked many other jobs, many of them in ostensibly "fun" industries like video games, and rarely have they managed to check every single one of those bullet points.
I know the standard rhetoric is to tell ourselves that we merely need to believe in our passion and do the work, but passion is not an unerring compass drawing you toward success and happiness. Sometimes, passion is slowly crushing your soul.
Back in my student days, I took a couple of game design classes as an elective (because Creative Writing wasn't unemployable enough on its own), and we would sometimes get to go see presentations by industry professionals who were there to talk up their companies and plant seeds of interest in our growing, soon-to-be-entering-the-workforce minds.
At one particularly entertaining presentation by a charismatic developer from a rather successful and anonymous studio from Austin, the topic of contract work came up. They had just made a quite popular game of their own, but up to that point, what had really put food on the table was taking contract gigs to create the multiplayer modes of other people's games. This was 2008, and everything had to have a multiplayer mode, even story-driven single player games like Uncharted or Bioshock. Story-driven single player developers didn't want to spend development time learning multiplayer design and coding, so they outsourced the entire game mode to hired guns like the presenting developer. Oftentimes, these paychecks came with tight deadlines. One project (which he refused to name) had offered a hefty payment to create an entire multiplayer game mode in less than six months. The presenter paused for a moment, and then said:
That was the most divorces that I've ever had on any project.
This sentence has stuck with me ever since.
The really critical word here is "most." This especially stressful project didn't result in some people getting divorced, it resulted in MORE PEOPLE GETTING DIVORCED THAN NORMAL. I walked out of that presentation with a really uncomfortable realization:
The standard unit of measure for game development is the metric divorce.
...All of those people were there because they were following their passion.
So, let's take a little breath and run whatever we are currently working on through our checklist:
1. Unclear goals. What am I actually working towards? Does anyone know? Is there a final vision? Has anyone shared it with me?
2. Invisible progress. After 10 minutes of work, am I closer to anything? Is anything different? What about 30 minutes? Eight hours? A week? A month?
3. No impact. What did completing the task change? Can I see it? Can I feel it?
4. Procedure for everything. Am I trusted to figure out how to do my own work? If not, why am I here?
5. Paperwork. After finishing a task, how long do I have to spend declaring so in databases? How many times does it have to be approved?
6. Hamsters. JUST BECAUSE YOU PUT IT IN A BRIGHTLY COLORED BALL AND CALL IT THE OFFICE MASCOT DOES NOT CHANGE THE FACT THAT IT'S THE LITERAL SPAWN OF SATAN AND IS CURRENTLY LUSTING AFTER THE TASTE OF HUMAN FINGERS.
And, the final boss question:
Would I be more emotionally fulfilled if I were moving large bags of rat feces?
Sometimes, the answer is surprising.
Comments