Underselling What’s Easy

A few weeks ago, I wrote about transitioning into working for myself, and a conversation I had this week reminded me that I left out one of the most important parts, a nugget of wisdom passed onto me by a mentor.

We undervalue what comes easiest to us. We undervalue our gifts.

In a world that values effort, elbow grease, and time spent, we miss the magic of where exercise fluidity and grace. We think our magical powers—whether it’s ideation, cohering a group around a vision, flying through Excel or Adobe—are no big deal. And so we give them away. Or under-charge for what we do best.

I think this is a bigger point than market rates: It speaks to our willingness to focus on our weaknesses and dismiss our strengths. To write them off as worth nothing. In fact, I'd argue that if you want to understand your most-developed and exceptional talent, make a list of what you would offer for free.

There are several books I love about work, one of which is Do Nothing, by Celeste Headlee. It’s a treatise on our productivity-oriented culture and propensity to overwork. She writes:

I think we have engineered our way further and further from what we do best and what makes us most human. In doing so, we’ve made our lives harder and infinitely sadder. “I can hunch over my computer screen for half the day churning frenetically through emails without getting much of substance done,” writes Dan Pallotta in the Harvard Business Review, “All the while telling myself what I loser I am, and leave at 6pm feeling like I put in a full day. And given my level of mental fatigue, I did!”

Many of us are exhausting ourselves this way, working very hard at things that accomplish very little of substance but feel necessary. To a large extent, the solution to this problem is to correct our misperceptions. In the way that those with body dysmorphia see something other than the truth in the mirror, the feeling of being productive is not the same as actually producing something.

Headlee’s point is a good and salient one: By making our busy-ness the thing, we abandon ease. There are some things at which we are each uniquely gifted; others, where we’re not. May we come to understand our talents, prioritize them in our work, and shepherd those of each other, too.