Know what you want to do ...

... and what you really don't

First up: apologies to anyone who’s followed a broken link in a recent email, including new subscribers’ welcome emails. Updated the website, been moving things around, broke some stuff. If something hasn’t worked for you, reply to this email or click here and let me know. I’ll fix it.

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I haven’t yet figured out the alchemy determining which topics will go wild. My last email, Have difficult conversations, saw a spike in readers, new subscribers, and feedback. One of you wisely observed that it’s disrespectful to our relationships to avoid hard discussions. Another emailed me about how, if you avoid conversations you should have, little spots become big boils that fester and explode [ew!], sometimes with disproportionately awful consequences.

It’s solitary, writing these emails. I love hearing from you! Do consider replying or clicking the ‘Comment’ button below. It means a lot — and it improves what I write.

And now, our feature presentation …

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Know what you want to do — and what you really don’t

A while ago, the wonderful medical director of the tiny hospital where I work decided to move on, and there was some talk of me taking over. It wasn’t something I wanted to do—I knew it would drain me—but I agreed, telling myself someone had to do the job. (And it flattered my ego.) As the transition date approached, and I’d begun taking over some reins, I realized I was increasingly unhappy. My email inbox mushroomed. My sleep deteriorated. I was working on the book behind these emails: shouldn’t I have been handling this effortlessly? Was I a charlatan?

And then I went for a solitary, snowy, mountain walk in winter sunshine and, within a few hundred paces I knew, in the way that things often become obvious when you do whatever you do when you need to think, that what I was writing was right. The problem was that I hadn’t followed my own advice. By the end of the walk, though a bit worried that my change of heart would annoy colleagues I care about, I’d decided to withdraw.

Of course, everyone was fine with it—respected it, even. We worked out another, better, shared solution. The weight lifted, though it took me a few weeks to recover: I hadn’t realized, until I unloaded the burden, how sapped I had been. And the planet continued to turn on its axis despite my deflated ego.

When opportunities float by, you’ll make better decisions about whether to let them snag you if you’ve already considered what sort of new things would make your life better, and which would make it worse. Opportunities likely will float by: show a glimmer of competence and someone will encourage you to take on something interesting-sounding. It’s flattering. The novelty’s appealing. You may think it’ll be good for your career. If more money’s attached, it may make it harder to turn down. But you’re less likely to make the wrong decision—and it’s easier to find the words with which to decline courteously—if you already know what your real priorities are and, more importantly, what they aren’t. Head in a direction that’s wrong for you and you’ll likely learn from it but, by then, it may be hard to correct your course. And the main appointment criterion for roles with more responsibility or status is, often, not having changed the topic of conversation fast enough. As Woody Allen observed, 80% of success is showing up. Be careful. Not all success is good.

It’s management responsibilities about which many doing work that matters need to be circumspect. If some new opportunity is truly right for you, go for it. But many choose our careers because we want to be teachers or engineers or nurses or academics or social workers or whatever it is we do, not because we wanted to manage teams doing those jobs. We tell ourselves a leadership role will provide opportunities to make things work better. But it’s often a grind, especially for those with temperaments that make them good teachers or engineers or nurses or academics or social workers. The effort-to-results ratio is typically awful. And the work may be removed from the things you care about. If more managing means less of whatever it is that gives your work meaning, think carefully.

Roles with more status can seem irresistible: we care about status more than we like to think. Sometimes it’s only by taking on a new role that you can appreciate what doesn’t make you happy. But you won’t know, at the time, that that discovery awaits you. So consider whether you have a face-saving exit strategy, and what it’ll be, even when you don’t think you’ll need one.

And thank you to my terrific colleagues (who read this) for their understanding and support when I realized I’d made a mistake.

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Great Work is growing: if you’ve signed up recently, you may have missed some earlier emails. Here are some that have been particularly popular:

• Get more done, and do it better, by working less hard

• Imposter syndrome

• Why teams need to be both kind and businesslike

PS Have you, through some terrible oversight, not yet signed up for these emails?

PPS I won’t monetize my emails. No paid subscriptions. No ads. I’m not selling anything. But, to find a publisher for the book-in-progress they’re based on, I have to grow my subscribers. If you’ve found anything useful, would you consider encouraging others to sign up? It’s the biggest thing you can do for me. Thank you.