41 | Who’s Throwing the Peanuts?

Don't model your life after a circus animal. Performing animals do tricks because their trainers throw them peanuts or small fish for doing so. You should aspire to do better. You will be a friend, a parent, a coach, an employee -and so on. But only in your job will you be explicitly evaluated and rewarded for your performance. Don't let your life decisions be distorted by the fact that your boss is the only one tossing you peanuts. If you leave a work task undone in order to meet a friend for dinner. then you are "shirking" your work. But it's also true that if you cancel dinner to finish your work, then you are shirking your friendship. That's just not how we usually think of it.

In May 2012, I clipped this excerpt from an article in the Wall Street Journal called 10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won't Tell You.

It stuck out to me as a 24-year-old trying to find my way in the real world and it still rings true today.

Typically, before you are responsible for supporting yourself financially, you're spoon-fed metrics that streamline measuring progress - grades on report cards, scores on exams, win/loss records in sports, diplomas and degrees, etc.

It can be pretty difficult to orient in a world that doesn't have a standard way of measuring progress - a lot of career and even financial frustration can probably be pointed back to “failure to orient”.

Because it's so hard to find metrics in the real world, it's easy for income - one of the few things that spans household, profession, industry, and age - to become a default metric of progress.

Some level of income is vital, but beyond that level, it is a pretty lousy metric that doesn't account for the things that add all the color to life, particularly the quality of our relationships.

The line that hooked me was, "But it's also true that if you cancel dinner to finish your work, then you are shirking your friendship."

The quality or strain of a relationship is pretty easy to feel, but impossible to objectively measure.

With enough shirking, I think it's possible to get "fired" from a relationship. It's just a lot harder to recognize when we're on the brink in a relationship because there aren't any peanuts being tossed.

Oftentimes, work must be prioritized - not minutes at work, but real, value-creating work.

Oftentimes, a relationship must be prioritized too.

The nuance isn't in knowing precisely when to lean into each one.

The nuance seems like knowing that the peanuts aren't the only way to measure progress and figuring out creative ways to assess progress for the things that might not have peanuts.