A few months ago my company decided to paint a bunch of the offices and I asked if they could include mine in the process. The person who had the office before me had it done as a tribute to his favorite baseball team-The Detroit Tigers. Needless to say, although I really liked Sparky Anderson when I was a kid, it was time for a change.
As a son of a construction foreman, I am more savvy than the average person when it comes to how things are built, etc. My office has 4 basic walls, 1 big window and a door. For two professional painters, this job should have been knocked out in just a few hours. Somehow the two men, who painted my office, managed to take 2 days. The painters worked by the hour, so they were in no hurry to finish it quickly. They were sandbagging. Covered in plastic, my office was very unproductive for 2 days. They were able to stretch, a 2 hour job into 16 hours, so they could make it till Friday. This is not an assumption-they actually shared this with me. Admittedly so, they were sandbagging. In their line of work, in the short term, sometimes sandbagging is necessary in order to have somewhere to go each day. Yet, sandbagging too much and too often could cause their employer to seek out more efficient painters.
In case you are not familiar with the term "sandbagging"...
Definition according to Urban Dictionary: "When a player in any game chooses (on purpose) to not play their best. Normally this is because they are too superior, they want to hustle you, or they are too lazy to play their best with nothing on the line".
We all have our sandbag moments. We all have days where we could do more, crush a goal and raise the bar, but decide to sandbag. Maybe it's because we are lazy, because we have accomplished a lot already or we're like the painters and just "stretching" our job. We have all had days where we have had to look busy while we are waiting for the clock to hit 5:00pm.
It's a matter of how much and how often we are sandbagging. If you are spending each day at work devising ways to stretch your workweek till Friday, you are sandbagging. By doing this, you are not living up to your potential. You are not breaking records, raising the bar, dictating expectations or changing the game. You are just existing and not growing. Shame on you.
If you have the ability to work and create at a high level, why would you want to slow down? Where's the fun in laying off the accelerator and not running up the score? All of us should live life like we are playing a video game! You can't put your initials in (or the letters A-S-S) if you don't try to crush the previous person's score. If you are willing to dump more quarters in on a silly game, then you should be able to dig deeper and look to accomplish more.
By raising the bar of expectations in you career, you will be less likely to get questioned about your productivity. For the most part, we are doing jobs that have been done before. You aren't kidding anyone by sandbagging. Employers or peers are not going to buy for a minute that the bar, of the role you play, suddenly got lowered. The contractor, that employs the painters, was probably once a painter himself and knows that an office like mine doesn't take 16 hours to paint.
By raising the bar in life and career, you set expectations. By setting the expectation you are in control of your future.
Be honest with yourself. Are you sandbagging or running up the score?
Confidence is a crazy thing. In order to be truly successful, you need it. Yet, there are times when confidence is the thing that sets you up for failure.
When you are successful, it's easy to get into a confidence rut. This rut can breed laziness and eventually failure. When you have a history of being successful, it is easy to lean too heavily on those successes as you move forward. You've always been able to rely on your ability to hit the goal, even going in ill prepared. This behavior, which we have all practiced at some point, can set you up for massive failure if you get into the rut of relying too heavily on your confidence.
From a fighter who doesn't prepare for his opponent and just relies upon a big knockout punch to a college kid who has passed a few tests by not studying and decides to just continue this practice-confidence can be a weakness. Ability, although it has opened doors in the past, can be your worst enemy.
Sometimes your abilities and previous successes can be the catalyst of failure. When you can win at a high level and with the consolidation of many jobs, your success provides new challenges and opportunities. Many of us are doing more today than we did 5 years ago and our titles haven't really changed. Because of our success, we are given more to do and the expectations grow with each of those new challenges. Many of us do not know when to say "no" or fear that if we say "no", they'll find someone else who is willing to take on the new challenges (and eventually replace you for les money). More often than not, it is our confidence that makes us take on these new duties and challenges. Our ability gives us a fighting chance, but sometimes the tasks or titles are truly meant to be performed by multiple people. Someone has to fail first in order for others to realize this.
You have to be careful about this and realize that there are only so many hours in the day and there is eventually a success threshold. I have seen successful and capable managers rendered almost useless and ineffective by the weight of additional duties. Brilliant people, who were leaders in their field, stretched so thin that they become mediocre or fail by the height of the bar of expectations. "Hey, this guy is great! Lets quadruple his workload and just expect him to be just as great". Sure, it's flattering they think so highly of you, but with all that responsibility come all of the blame.
Labron James and Michael Jordan can't pass the ball to themselves and score 100 points per game while playing against 5 other people. Imagine how different their stories would be if the team recruited terrible players around them, just assuming that their abilities alone would always carry the rest of the team. ( Example: Jordan playing for Washington).
I don't mean to be discouraging at all. I,like you, want to do more and be greater than I am. I have never said no to "more". I take pride in the fact that I can handle more than most people and I work on ways to bulletproof myself from my confidence. Yet, even if you have that same attitude, you have to do a gut check and focus on putting yourself in winning situations. Taking on the impossible is exciting and the payoff could be huge, but realize that the percentages are against you. You SHOULD challenge the impossible from time to time, but if you do this too often, your legacy will be that of someone who had more losses than wins-regardless of how talented you are.
At the end of the day, very few people in this world get a statue erected in their honor. Winners want to be the most important asset to any team and do things that others have never done. This is what sets them apart. Don't be blinded by your abilities or let your past track record of success interfere with your future growth. Don't let your confidence, the thing that helped get you here, be the thing that ends up leading to your demise. Don't let others decide your threshold of success. You decide when to say yes or no, because at the end of the day, you know yourself better than anyone else.
Floaters are people who spend much of their life and career looking for ways to keep what they got. To hang on. They wait out the tides of life and hope to just stay above water. To paddle is to resist and could possibly change the target outcome. When you are a floater, the unpredictable is the least appealing option. To stay afloat isn't really living, but it is surviving and that's better than sinking.
Swimmers look for ways to change their fortune and assume that the next move will better their current position. They paddle against the current, pursue uncharted waters and utilize a lot of energy to battle the elements in an effort to better their situation. Swimmers seek the unknown and look to gain growth through knowledge and sometimes failure. Swimming, to many, is living. Although with swimming, there is a stronger possibility of sinking.
Most of us spend much of our youth as swimmers, but evolve into floaters as we age. We are drawn to the appeal and consistency of the predictable bob of life. We have taken all the chances we were willing to take and are completely complacent with the way things are going-just as long as nothing rocks us or forces us to tread water. We hang in for dear life in hopes that it will be over soon enough and we finish things on our own terms.
How boring is that?
Some people have a lot of negative things to say about how Brett Favre ended his career. Everyone was caught up how his last few season were going to tarnish the "legacy" of his career. Favre responded by reminding the media that this was his legacy, his career and he planned on playing out how he saw fit. I don't hate that. You can hate how he retired more than once or hate his refusal to commit to an answer about his retirement or how he might have hooked up with women outside if his marriage, but you shouldn't hate him because he chose to finish the career his way. It's his legacy. It was his career. He can end it how he chooses. Was he supposed to go out safely, as a floater, because we wanted him to leave the game as we imagined? Not everyone has to accept our expectations.
I'm not judging floaters like many would judge Brett Favre. If you spend your life floating-are living up to your true potential, setting records and learning? How many passes would Favre have not completed had he finished his career in Green Bay? How many fewer interceptions would he have thrown had he retired? Say what you want about him and regardless his motivation, at least he took the opportunity to try. It's easy for us to sit back and judge, but as a reminder, this is not our legacy. He left the sport like he joined the sport-a swimmer. For that, he has my respect.
There are positives and negatives to being a swimmer or a floater. Swimmers are sometimes so caught up in the battle with the current, that they don't take the time to assess the situation. Unlike floaters, they kick, flail and create ripples that rock the boat and cause more stress than needed. Floaters often give up too soon and not chance the unknown. They check out early and look for ways to ride out the waves, never testing themselves, but rather just accepting the natural progression of things. Inside every swimmer is a floater. Inside every floater is a swimmer.
Although I might be harder on floaters than I am on swimmers, I respect and understand both perspectives. This is your legacy. Your mark on the world. As long as you make the decision to take the direction and not allow that direction to be dictated, then you are still in control of your legacy. Like Favre, you should be the only one to decide how you leave the "game". Just make sure, when you decide to start floating, that your not selling yourself short. Each of us has more swimming to do.
My father has read all the Jack Reacher books. I have read a couple of them for a change of pace. I traditionally don't read stuff that the average person enjoys. My personal library is full of marketing, management and how to influence people kind of stuff. Unless you are into this genre of books, you traditionally don't finish too many of them. I could see where books about Christian Grey or wizards could be more for the imagination. I feel, that if I don't learn something from what I am reading, that its not really worth the time. It's not to say I couldn't pick up a move in the bedroom or learn how to cast a proper spell from these books, but I'd rather use my time to study something that would have more application in my life. At the end of the day, I'll watch the movie...
Back to Jack Reacher and the dwarf they cast to play the mountain of a man. Tom Cruise is a greater actor, but he's about a foot shorter and 100lbs too light to play the character from the books. The point of this blog is not a lesson on how, regardless of who you are, you too can be someone you are not (Reacher is 6'5" and 250lbs....Cruise is 5' 7" and 147lbs). The core of this blog is about the one constant in all the Reacher books.
Doing the right thing.
Regardless of how hard the decision is and how "painful" it is to make it, Reacher always does the right thing. In life, too few of us do this. Yes, Reacher is a fictional character from a series of books and his actions are not a reflection of someone who has actually made these decisions. So its easy for Lee Child to put him in these situations that enable him to do the right thing. It's easy to script out what the right thing to do is when you already know where the next chapter is taking the reader. In life, we really don't have that advantage do we? Yet, that is not an excuse to ignore doing the right thing.
So the question is...what truly is the RIGHT thing to do?
There is a big misconception on what is the right thing to do. Yes, we should always attempt to be a good person, avoid being a d-bag and focus on the greater good. But, we don't always do that do we? It's in our DNA to be selfish, look out for número uno and do the thing that brings the least amount of "pain" to ourselves. Doing the right thing, in most minds, means doing what you perceive is the right thing for YOU. The right thing is rarely about you, because we don't always know what's good for us.
Unlike an author, you don't know what the next chapter in your life will bring. How many people, that go through a divorce or a bad breakup, have the clarity to acknowledge that life might be so much better in the next chapter of their life? Yet, they will fight this change to the death because they cannot see beyond the initial pain and strife. The right thing is sometimes something that is done TO YOU and you have very little control of it.
How many employers drag their feet on firing someone who brings down the rest of the group? Nobody enjoys firing people. It's the least attractive part of my job, but often it is necessary. The pain and the stress of pulling the trigger does not compare to the potential on the other side. You cannot get caught up with the relationship you have with that person, you have to do the right thing by the group. Sometimes, by firing someone, you actually do the right thing for them as we'll. The right thing is sometimes something you have to do TO SOMEONE.
The biggest challenge is to never put yourself before the greater good of the group or the project. As a leader, this will be one of your biggest challenges. I have worked with and for people over the years who fail miserably with this task. They might be so selfish or pig headed, that they don't realize that the right thing is for them to make a decision that causes something bad to happen to them. Often, if they are good people deep down, the right thing won't ruin their life and career. Yet, it will cause them discomfort, pain and probably result in them having to do more to better the situation. I am sure we can all look back on a situation where we had to do this, but we probably haven't experienced this as often as we deserve. The right thing is sometimes something you have to do TO YOURSELF.
Jack Reacher gets to spend the entire book always knowing what the next chapter brings-We don't have that advantage. It's imperative that we keep an open mind and understand that the right course of action may be the hardest. You, and the others in your life or work group, may never understand why these decisions were made. Sometimes a series of wrong things need to occur so that opportunity for the right thing can present itself.
Just try to always do the right thing. Life will give you back what you deserve.