The Unpaid Work

Tuesday evening. Knee's stiff from the afternoon session. House is quiet. Sheldon's already given up on me and gone to lie down somewhere with better light.

I pick up my phone and send a message to somebody I know is not going to answer.

Not somebody who might not answer. Somebody who won't. I'm not guessing. There's a pattern and I can read it.

I send it anyway. Nothing dramatic. Just checking in. Hope you're good.

No reply.

Thursday, I do it again. Still nothing.

And Thursday night I sat there thinking about why I do that. On paper it makes no sense. I run a business on measurement. Everything I do professionally has a number attached to it. And here I am, twice a week, spending something on an activity with a documented zero percent response rate.

We've been trained to measure everything by return. The touch, the call, the hour, the dollar. What did it produce. Was it worth it.

That training is good. It's most of why I'm still standing. When I was at my worst, the discipline of measuring is what pulled me out, because feelings lie constantly and numbers mostly don't.

But there's a cost to running that operating system across your whole life, and the cost is that you slowly stop doing anything that doesn't report back.

Not on purpose. Here's the actual mechanism.

You get busy. When you're busy you triage. When you triage you use whatever information is in front of you. And the information in front of you is receipts.

So the stuff with receipts always wins the tiebreaker. Not because you value it more. Because you can see it.

Which means over time your life quietly reorganizes itself around whatever happens to be measurable. Not around what matters. Around what reports.

Nobody would agree to that arrangement if you put it in front of them. Nobody sits down and says, I'd like my priorities determined by which of my activities generate data. But that's the arrangement you're in right now unless you've done something specific to prevent it.

The measurable stuff isn't more important. It's just louder. And you've been letting volume make your decisions.

PT. Twice a week I drive to a place, a professional bends my knee in directions it doesn't want to go, and I go home and do exercises that look like nothing. There's no session where I walk out feeling meaningfully better than when I walked in. There is no daily win available in rehab. That's not a flaw in rehab, that's what rehab is. There's just the appointment, and the appointment again, and months from now a knee that works.

The walk. Every day, Sheldon and I go out. He does not care about my revenue. He has never once asked how Q3 is tracking. He cares about the leash and the door and one specific patch of grass he's been building a relationship with.

The walk isn't exercise, not really. It's not networking, it's not content. It's just the thing I do because I'm the guy who does the thing. If I skipped it, the only entity in the world who'd register the loss is a Yorkie, and he'd forgive me by dinner.

The standard is the standard. It doesn't get lower because nobody's watching. And honestly the standard is only real when nobody's watching. Everything else is performance, and performance is rented.

The check-in. The one from Tuesday. The one from Thursday.

I'm not giving you details, and I'll tell you why. Some of the people in my life didn't sign up to be in a newsletter, and I'm not spending somebody else's privacy to make a piece land harder. The shape is what matters anyway, and the shape is universal.

You know your version. There's somebody you reach out to who doesn't reach back. And you check in anyway.

Not because you're a saint. I want to kill that framing, because it's how people turn this into something noble and then feel bad when they can't sustain it.

It's that I'm the guy who checks in. That's a thing I decided about myself, and the decision doesn't get re-litigated every week based on results. If the identity depended on the response, it would be a transaction. I do this, you do that, we're square. And the second the other side stops holding up their end the whole thing collapses, and I get to feel righteous while it does.

That's not care. That's an invoice with feelings attached.

The training. In the gym almost every day. Knee's compromised, so the numbers are down. The mirror isn't doing anything interesting. Nothing this week produced a visible result. But the body's a long game and every workout is a vote. Not for how I look Friday. For who's still standing at sixty five.

I need to put a fence around the check-in, because I know how it can be heard.

There's a line between doing unpaid work and abandoning yourself. It isn't a fine line. It's a clear one, and I've been on the wrong side of it, so I'm not lecturing from a clean position.

Unpaid work costs you a little and takes nothing from your center. I send a message, it takes thirty seconds, and if nothing comes back my Wednesday is unaffected. I still trained, still worked, still walked the dog.

Self-abandonment is when the not answering starts running your week. When you're refreshing your phone. When somebody's silence is setting your mood, your sleep, and how you show up to everything else you're responsible for.

Same action. Completely different thing.

The test is simple and a little uncomfortable: what happens to you when there's no reply?

If the answer is "nothing much, I go on with my day," that's healthy and you should keep doing it. If it wrecks you, then the reaching out isn't generosity anymore. It's a bid, and you're waiting on a verdict, and you've handed somebody else the job of telling you whether you're okay.

That's not a person you need to reach less. That's a thing to go work on, probably with help. I say that as somebody who sits in a room with a professional regularly and has found it to be the highest return unpaid work I do.

Reach out. Absolutely. Just check what you're doing it for.

One more, because it's the thing on today's list that does eventually pay.

Two weeks ago I wrote about a fifteen touch discipline. Fifteen real touches a day as the floor.

That floor is twenty five now. Not because fifteen stopped working. Because fifteen got easy, and the second something gets easy it stops being a discipline and becomes a habit. Habits maintain. They don't build.

But here's why outreach belongs in a piece about unpaid work, even though it's the most obviously commercial thing I do.

On any given day, it also pays nothing.

Twenty five touches on a Tuesday produces, on a typical Tuesday, nothing. No deal, no call booked, frequently no response. If you measured any single day of outreach on its own return you'd quit inside a week, which is exactly why most people do.

The twenty five doesn't pay on Tuesday. It pays in November. And you can't trace the November deal back to the specific Tuesday that caused it, which means you never get the satisfaction of knowing which rep mattered.

They all mattered. You just don't get to know which one.

So my professional work and my personal work run on the same engine. Show up, do the rep, don't demand a receipt. The only difference is that with outreach I've got enough history to trust the math. With the rest of it, I just have to trust myself.

The empire gets built on the things that don't pay you back right away. If you only do what pays, you'll only ever have what's small.

Everything durable in your life, every relationship worth having, every skill anybody respects you for, every bit of physical capacity you've still got, was built during a stretch when it produced absolutely nothing and you did it anyway.

Fast receipts fund your month. Slow receipts build your life.

This Week I'm Thinking About: Triage Was Supposed To Be Temporary

When you've been in survival mode, everything that doesn't pay gets cut. That's not a character flaw, that's triage, and triage is correct when you're bleeding.

But a lot of guys I know got out of the emergency two years ago and never turned it off. They're not in survival anymore. They're just still living like they are, they've stripped life down to the parts that produce, and they can't figure out why the wins don't feel like anything.

Efficient and hollow is a real place. Check whether you're standing in it.

Reader Question

What's the one thing you're doing because it defines you, not because it rewards you?

And if you can't find one, sit with that a little longer than is comfortable. Because if everything you do has a price, then your identity has a price, and whatever pays the most is who you'll become.

Hit reply.