Refusing to Save the World
Our correspondent has a choice: Save the company, or save the world. Bend over, everybody, and kiss your butts goodbye.
Note: My posts are meant to be entertaining/informative. The stories are fictional or composite. They do not relate to my work or my employer.
This is a confidential message to one of my readers. You know who you are. The rest of you can listen in if you like. There’s a chance it could affect you, too.
Dear reader: As we discussed today, you are fucking amazing. Your work is outstanding. Everybody knows it. You exude competence, and you inspire trust. That’s what led to the success you’ve had in your career, and it’s caused you to gain increasing responsibility in your current role.
In that role, you are gathering responsibility, and you are smashing expectations. You are doing the work of several people, and managing several more. You’re delivering results that are noticed by management.
The managers, in turn, recognize and praise you using their famous love language — they raise their expectations of you.
There’s a cycle here, and it’s vicious. If you continue taking on more responsibility, executing competently against ever higher expectations… what will happen?
If this continues, the cycle will repeat. You will execute more, better, faster, and management’s expectations will rise even farther. And you’ll earn more of their recognition and praise, which they’ll communicate by raising their expectations yet again.
Over time, this cycle will accelerate. The mathematical limits of your work output will be tested against the biological limits of your mortal vessel. Eventually, you’ll collapse in a cosmic singularity of infinite productivity. Your work achieves Platonic perfection at exactly the same moment that management’s expectations transcend the known planes of existence.
At that moment — poof! — you, your manager, and your customers will all be instantaneously converted into pure productive cosmic energy, exploding in a supernova of ultra-abundant milestone achievement. This explosion, unfortunately, will destroy the universe including your management, their disappointed investors, and their carefully constructed OKRs.
And nobody wants any of that.
So how can we break this cycle of hyper-execution and ever-rising expectations for your under-appreciated efforts?
You already well understand that the answer is for you to say “no” when “no” needs to be said. That sounds easy, but it’s really hard work. It’s going to take some courage, and some skill, and it will take some practice to get it right.
But you, my dear reader, are the hero of this story! And our hero has to save themself before they can save the world. Or the project. Or whatever, you know what I mean.
Save us, hero, and save yourself! The fate of the universe hangs in the balance.