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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday! My name is Emilee O’Leary and when I was little I used to take apart electronics to see what was inside and whether I could put them back together and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In this episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday, I’m sharing a story about the long process I went through this summer in rediscovering the worth in work.
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Fun Fact
Today’s fun fact is a Word of the Day! I know, try to contain your excitement. Today’s word is: Leukonychia. I found this word because I was curious about these little white marks I get on my fingernails. They’re more abundant on the nails of my left hand than my right, but I have at least one such white mark on every nail. The marks look like they’re right below the surface of the nail, or maybe even embedded into the nail itself, and I’ve always wondered what they are.
Turns out, there is actually a name for it. Leukonychia, literally from the Greek words for white and nail. The marks occur most commonly after damage to the nail base and reveals itself as the nail grows out. These marks I’m talking about are not large, they don’t span the entirety of the nail. In the course of reading about this, I discovered that the most common cause is nail biting.
I also discovered that fingernails generally take 8 months to grow out completely. So if you see a leukonychia growing out of the base of your nail, then you got about 8 months before it goes away again.
The Worth in Work
What do you do for a living? Isn’t it interesting we usually default to that question when introduced to someone new? We ask their name, maybe a couple other personal questions about family and everyday life, but oh so often the conversation next goes to occupation. What do you do for work?
Asking the question is a means to get to know someone else’s baseline. It’s not that we’re defined by the work we do, but that the work we do helps to flesh out a picture of what our life is like. The sheer fact that we all have this mutual interest in the vocations of the people we meet should be enough to indicate there is worth in what we do, regardless of what it is we do.
I lost sight of this for a while, that there is worth in the work that I do, and the last eight months has largely felt like I’ve been climbing up this ridiculously high mountain, where the peak is above the cloud line and it’s impossible to tell how high it goes. Even though I got a lot of input that I was working too hard or too many hours, friends and family were still supportive and never told me the work I was doing was worthless. The decreased perception of worth came from within my own head, it was something I conceived, and so it was something I needed to correct. When I finally read the book Work Matters, I was ready to hear the lessons it had for me. It helped me to re-form a picture of what work is, what benefits we receive as individuals by helping to cultivate property and contribute to a large system. A split had formed in my head, I was working hard toward something I believed in, but at the same time I believed that the work I had chosen to do wasn’t important.
I am a web application developer. I work on an incredibly talented team of individuals with varying skillsets and backgrounds in order to design, develop and maintain a technology platform that allows companies to administer surveys to their workforce. From onboarding surveys, to pulse surveys, to engagement surveys, to exit surveys, we have a suite of applications that address the particulars around the different data-gathering needs a company might have.
After the survey closes and the data is in hand, we can then consume that data and apply it to our powerful data analytics platform. If you are a manager, for example, at your company, you’d be able to login to our application and use our data analytics tools to understand the atmosphere in your department, how the people who report to you feel about anything from their job, to the work you’re doing, to what life is like working for the company. I find the analytics side of it fascinating and one of my favorite aspects to my job is seeing the full cycle of a request for a new feature come to fruition. Understanding requirements, building it, testing it, demo-ing it, and watching it go live. Requests for functionality from clients come alive through the code that I write.
In January of 2016, the owners and founders of our small, 40-person, Northeast Minneapolis company sold our technology to a large, international company. Over the next several months, we would be making significant efforts to integrate the companies and work on the technology in order to meet deadlines and demands that were negotiated as part of the purchase. Our 3-person development team could never meet those demands, however, as a result of this acquisition, the technology team I was working on was going to more than triple in size, adding more developers and, very importantly, adding specialists in infrastructure that we lacked.
The majority of my new team was located in Manhattan, and so to begin the integration process, my team and I were flown out to New York the first week of February to do a meet-and-greet, demo our platform, and begin a massive knowledge transfer.
It was quite an experience, being there in the Seaport District of New York, just a couple blocks north of Wall Street. For this flannel-wearing, suburban-happy Minnesotan, it was definitely unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It became clear to me, at that point, that things were about to change in incredibly drastic ways. I wasn’t working for a small, Minneapolis company anymore. I was working for a global-scale corporation.
My work environment wasn’t the only thing that changed that week. I got home from New York on a Saturday. The next day was the Super Bowl. And two days later, my dad died.
The spring, summer and fall brought many challenges. Learning to live without my dad, dealing with the unpredictable bursts of emotion, and overcoming the pure shock of his premature death was just one side to it all. When he died, we were at the very beginning of this major acquisition at work, the merging of two companies. I was facing two major overhauls in my life, neither of which could be ignored and both demanding all of my energy and attention.
The road ahead of me at work was finite, but it was rough terrain. Everyone at the company put in a lot of hours, week after week, sacrificing nights and weekends, summer holidays and standing family engagements, in order to complete the work that had been scoped for us to deliver.
The amount of work I had to do everyday, coupled with a reduced amount of time I had to deal with new stages of grief, really began to change me. While the road at work was finite, the road of grief was, and is, much less so. Things that were hard before losing my dad became even harder. Communication was difficult and anything that wasn’t work related felt like it had to be put on hold, at least until things settled down, just so I could put forth the effort that I felt was being asking of me at work. I prioritized work above other things, and as such, my attitude toward my vocation became less positive. I still enjoyed what I was doing, but in the large scheme of things I kept asking myself what intrinsic value I was bringing into the world. What did all this matter, really, when I was faced with the reality of how fragile life is? How was programming going to make any difference in people’s lives? When this world washes away, what good will my skillset be?
I expressed this viewpoint to a couple family members early on, and both of them recommended Tom Nelson’s book, Work Matters, to me. It took awhile for me to have the appetite to read again, but when I regained that appetite, I inhaled the book. The first time I read it, I barely chewed. I swallowed it whole. Then I went back and savored each chapter a little more, thinking about the different stages of my grief and how I let a bunch of little lies influence the way I perceive my work.
Here’s what I learned.
I spent a lot of energy this summer bemoaning the severely imbalanced ratio of personal time to work time, and it got me into this mindset that the work I was doing was worthless. I said earlier that my friends and family were supportive, and yet most people in my life were telling me I was working too much or too hard or warning me that I wasn’t taking the time I needed to recuperate.
When I signed my new employment contract with the big company, I wasn’t warned about the increased demand they would be asking of me. I wasn’t warned of the short timetables of deliverables they’d promised to clients or the massive infrastructure overhaul we’d need to implement. But I made a commitment to this company to see this through, and even though I was hurting and even though I didn’t feel like I was getting enough downtime or enough sleep, I was pushing through because I knew it wasn’t always going to be that way.
It was really hard to communicate this to a lot of people because even though I felt this strong commitment to see my responsibilities at work through, I also felt like I needed to show people that it wasn’t my first choice to be working this hard or this many hours. And I found myself in a place similar to the one I described in episode 516. In that episode, I told the story of driving to Oklahoma for the Fringe Finale party held by Clint and Darrell and how making that decision enabled me to start being myself and stop being half of two different people. And this summer, I felt like two different people again.
The journey back from that split has felt like I’m running down that mountain after climbing up and up and up all summer. Freedom, almost a giddy ease in returning to sea level. Reading through the book recommended to me helped guide me back from a lot of negative thinking and gave me permission to correct bad habits. I learned that I had a false understanding of work, and I needed to correct it. I learned that the worth in work won’t always come from satisfaction in what I do, but who I am and the effect I can have on others. I learned that I was created with work in mind. I learned that I am part of the cultivation process, and that I cannot derive my own worth from comparing my part of the process with others’. It’s been the most exhausting, but liberating, of lessons I’ve ever learned.
My name is Emilee O’Leary and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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