For those who live backward
About 4 years ago, age 30, I noticed a sensation of recession in my life. While I’d become used to being in the top 10% of most groups I was in, I was suddenly scoring in lower percentiles. These measures are mostly qualitative and subjective, though they occasionally were quantitative—for example, I scored in 99th percentiles in standardized testing in elementary school, and probably high school.
But in my 30s I started to notice I was behind on all the things that actually started mattering. I noticed this when I saw people I had run circles around as a kid were passing me by. Life was falling apart. Net worth was very very negative. Family was collapsing. Career had fragmented and evaporated. Others were buying homes and I was renting. Others had tools in their garage and I did not. I had not developed habits that allowed me to build a stable life. And nobody wanted to hire me for anything. I didn’t know where my birth certificate was, I hadn’t filed my taxes on time, etc.
This wasn’t a self pitying depression, it was a somewhat objective recognition that the demands of life had caught up with me, and that the slow but steady life builders were lapping me.
And I began to think of myself has having lived my first 35 years backward. It became clear to me that I was going to have to work in foundational concepts and skills that others took for granted, or I’d end up like some of the people I see on the street who remind me a bit of myself. Sometimes I think the biggest difference between me and them is that I just didn’t give up in trying to find my birth certificate that one time and then I found it and was able to re apply for the drivers license i had lost, and then I was able to get the next thing in order and the next thing and the next thing. Meanwhile, they are still looking for their birth certificate.
I recently wrote about how my friend recommended I work at 70% capacity (http://tinyletter.com/danceattakjg/letters/slower). And I realized this morning that doing so is a shortcut toward building foundational skills in traditional order. I’ve been working at 70%, and I’ve started to realize that as a result I’ve been gaining all kinds of knowledge of how this simple job works, how it can be done more effectively, all the resources available, etc.
I would normally have homed in on the most important things and executed them at 110%, and ignored the 80% of work that doesn’t seem to matter. I’ve generally been able to tell what will be on the test, I’ve always been able to find the stuff that matters for the company and maximize it, and I’ve never been any good at following the checklist of things that includes stuff that actually “doesn’t matter.” But in applying myself at 70%, I have noticed that I am able to protect my work security by checking off all the boxes, while building slowly.
And I think there are some other valuable places that my attention flows in such a constrained (70%) environment which help me optimize at that level. Today I tested out doing a bit of my work with my eyes almost literally closed. Technically I just didn’t look at the shelves and focused only on the data on the screen I’m working off in order to count where things ought to be, and I was able to do the work in one section without looking.
The 70% rule is hard for me to follow because it leaves me feeling vulnerable for standard critiques. I usually get away with mistakes by being impressive in other ways. Since I’m not being impressive in other ways, I have to just nod and say okay when a manager tells me I did something wrong.
But ultimately I can see this strategy as a way of sort of inverting my backward living tendency so that I build foundational skills first and have them in place. Within the 70% frame I have the right to ask for time off, to take vacations, to be late every once in a while, to make sure I’m taking care of home life things, etc. In fact It was very hard for me to put in a request for two days off this summer (because I have my kids those days). In my 110% work career I’ve never actually requested a day off.
Working 70% leaves me feeling very average and vulnerable, which is I guess a normal type sensation for an average employee who is basically just new and learning the basics of stuff and doesn’t have anything particularly notable about them. That’s me at work!
So, if you have a living backward problem, you might try it.