Don’t get me wrong, feeling important actually feels really, really good. When you have someone or some group of folks depending on you and you deliver, wow, what can be better than that? Happens all the time in sports, the winning quarterback gets the Disneyland commercial, the winning shot gets all the glory, the team triumphs to claim victory for an entire nation. It feels good, oh so good. Intoxicating. You want more as soon as the feeling begins to fade. You need more, so you should do more to entice those dependents to shower you with more praise and adulation. It all makes sense, right?
Not really. It’s like junk food, that bag of chips that you pop open when you’re starving. Oh, these taste so good, one more, ok one more, a couple more, chomp chomp chomp. Once you get finished you’re an oily, greasy mess huddled in the corner of the kitchen, plastic bag slowly unrolling itself once again to tempt you with just one more chip. Eventually you walk away, but at some point, you’re going to come back, you know it, I know it, Frito Lay knows it. You admonish your own behavior and swear to control yourself with just one chip next time, failing to connect the dots, the underlying issue of being hungry rather than needing to control your junk food urges. If you would have just cooked a proper meal you wouldn’t need to binge on that crap, but those thoughts come rarely.
That’s a long-winded analogy, but I’ll do you one better. Back in a life long ago, I worked at an typical office in a depressingly dated office park. If you imagine The Office without any hijinks or tomfoolery, this was my world. Sounds fun, I know.
At this office we worked on nothing worth describing. However, we did have your typical office hierarchy in place. There was the boss and he oversaw all of us, and all of us had some semblance of a pecking order largely determined by what responsibilities we had undertaken. I was in one group of folks who had taken on larger roles and as such, we were leaned on more heavily. It didn’t help that we were model employees, didn’t complain, got things done slightly faster than expected, came up with solutions that could be applied elsewhere, in general we were doing our jobs and our bosses felt they could depend on us. Good for us. Until we all got laid off. That’s a different story.
Back to the dependability. At one point, the boss decided to move to a smaller office space within the same office park. It would save money on the lease and help us in the shifting economy. Whoo hoo, moving is fun! The boss took two of us, the “dependable” ones, to tour the new space around the corner. We strolled in and it was an empty office space, but it was nice I guess, as nice as an empty office space could be.
One quick aside, our work depended on computing power. Nothing too fancy, but we were all using desktops to do data work. At the very least we needed an internal network to make sure we could all pull from the same database and coordinate our linked computers. It’s important because…
As we walked around the empty space, I asked the bosses how much still needed to be done. He said not much, just physically moving all the furniture and equipment over. I asked the logical follow-up question of how the technical stuff was being handled and I was met with a puzzled look. “That’s a good question, we hadn’t thought of that.” A grin rolled across his face and a welcoming nod, which produced a more puzzled look on my face.
“Are we hiring someone to wire the office?”
“Hmmm, I don’t know. What do you think?” Another grin, another nod.
“Boss, do you want us to try to wire the building?”
“Oh, OK, since you asked.”
To put this in several different contexts, let’s start with motives. My boss was always really nice and paternal to a fault, so this wasn’t some devious trick he laid upon us.
Second, I was slightly intrigued by the prospects of wiring the entire office. I’d never done something like that before and learning it would be interesting.
Third, let me repeat that, I’d NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE! They have trained professionals that run wires and cables all day long. I know, I see the commercials for ITT Tech and DeVry all the time. What in the world was I thinking? What in the world was my boss thinking? This probably wasn’t the best plan.
This led to the next two days, where my coworker and I ran to Home Depot multiple times. We learned it helps to have something taller than a 6-foot ladder and that when you don’t have one, well that’s all we had so we couldn’t complain. We learned that the warning label on CAT-5 wiring includes a note about carcinogenic material being handled. We learned that masks are a necessity when pushing your head into the fiberglass insulation above you. We learned it’s hard to run wire across the ceiling without actually being, you know, in the ceiling. We learned if you’re not going to be up there, tying the wire to a large, round rod and throwing it from one post to the other will do the job.
After two days of literally working in the ceiling tiles and insulation, we had everything wired. We crossed our fingers and plugged in a laptop and found…SUCCESS!! How in the world did we actually succeed, I still have no idea. But it all worked and the network was up and running once we moved over.
I vividly remember our lunch break on the second day. My coworker and I grabbed something fast and trudged our way back to the break room in the old office. We were caked in dust and dirt, face watering from every orifice due to allergies and fiberglass, just not a pretty sight. Sweating from climbing up and down ladders, pushing our heads into the ceiling, throwing wooden rods halfway across the office. It was gross. And one of our coworkers who was similar in age and background but not quite handling the same projects as we were, walked into the break room and said, “Wow, is it fun doing that?”
There was no hint of sarcasm or malice from her. Rather, genuine curiosity mixed with a sprinkle of envy.
“No, this is horrible.”
“I don’t know, sounds fun to me. You guys get a break from this, you get to hang out in the new space.”
My coworker and I were too exhausted and dumbstruck to respond. We literally looked back down and started eating again in complete silence. It’s like we were two guys who had seen something horrible, like the blob or something, and all we could do is keep our heads down.
Let me be the first to say, if you want to run wires in fiberglass insulation all day long, be my guest. However, I understand the sentiment, and sometimes it’s hard to resist feeling the same way. So-and-so is lucky, they get to this-and-that. They are more important than us, but they shouldn’t be. We do the same thing as them, we should get to do this-and-that.
At the same time, worrying about what so-and-so is doing, and whether you should be doing the same thing is an exercise in frustrating futility. Feeling important, that’s an ego-stroking measure that accomplishes so little. Odds are you’ll be overinflating how important you are, and you’ll be simultaneously garnering the scorn of those around you for puffing out your chest and patting yourself on the back.
It’s human nature. To seek the approval and applause of your peers, of your bosses, or respected figures. Yet, there’s a simple thing you can do to make it a bit more in-line with successful humility. Seek to accomplish the best results in your tasks and find the importance for yourself. Don’t focus on the reactions of those around you, focus on your own reaction. Are you doing your best? Are you improving? Are you contributing in a meaningful way that will provide you with a sense of accomplishment? Because if you’re doing all those things, the praise and the attention will come naturally. And even better, the praise and attention won’t actually matter to you, in a strange twist, it’ll become unimportant.
There’s nothing wrong with striving to do a good job. It’s just a fine line in itching for that positive feedback that provides you with a higher sense of self-worth. Here’s a hint, that type of self-worth is fleeting and requires you to seek more and more feedback. Pretty soon, your whole being is devoted to getting that positive feedback and you lose sight of whatever it is you were doing. Take a look at the innovators, the people we call geniuses, they don’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about the external responses. You know this because they’ve already moved on to the next big project or idea by the time you’re giving feedback on their last performance or product.
Be important. With that, you won’t waste your time trying to feel important.
Coming up: The dibble-dabbles