Grind till You Get There?
Why Stories About Work Must Change
Volume 1, Issue 6
Two stories dominate the first decade of professional life. The first is the Grind Story. In this tale, you are the hero, the overcomer, the learner-in-public, the mind-like-water yogini. The tale has two basic plot points: (1) you grind and (2) you get there.
Let’s call the second narrative the Burn Story. In this movie, you are the realist, the squinter, the ninja of chill expectations. This story has two basic plot points: (1) burn (2) everything.
Well, not you personally. That would be arson. But you take my metaphor.
You find the Grind Story on LinkedIn, especially in posts with new job pics. It’s also the plot arc for pretty much every Rom-Com from 1989 to 2007.
You’ve seen the Burn Story in the barrens of Twitter and in clickbait journalism about the Great Resignation. The script for this narrative sounds like Timothee Chalamet in Lady Bird. “What you do is very baller,” he says. “You're very anarchist.”
But I’m struck that it doesn’t matter too much which story you tell. Both arrive at the same insight: something’s got to give at work. It might be you. It might be your coworkers. It might be the company. It might be global capitalism.
Okay, that last one is unlikely any time soon. But the give is gonna happen somehow.
At moments of bewilderment, I find it’s helpful to resort to the power and glory of communication theory in the 1970s.
In the Coordinated Management of Meaning, theorists Barnett Pearce and Vernon Cronen distinguish between the stories we tell and the stories we live. The stories we tell are what we say about what just happened. The stories we live are what just happened, whatever that means.
A lot of the stories we tell about early professional life try to glow up the stories we live. That’s why we tell Grind Stories and Burn Stories. Those narratives cast us as heroes. A lot of the early-career professionals I’m researching these days tell these stories, too. My hunch is we like these narratives because—as I heard one millennial put it—sometimes you just need to big yourself up.
Take Melissa Conrad, a Senior Community Builder at an aspirational enterprise, The Wooden Wick Company in Orange County, California. It didn’t take long for me to figure out she really loves the start-up space. She has the tireless cheer of the entrepreneur and, what’s more, she has a disposition as kindly as a morning on Laguna Beach. But, as Sarah Jaffe might say, work doesn’t always love Melissa back. She notes, a little ruefully, that people working in and around the world of small business can be hurried and kind of rude.
And who has to deal with that rudeness? Well, the Senior Community Builder for starters.
Melissa told me a story about an event-planning gauntlet she had recently endured. It had taken weeks of work for her to tie down list upon list, following through on details everybody had agreed upon, communicating with incoming talent, and tracking an hour-by-hour itinerary.
You can probably smell where this story is going.
On the morning of the event, she received an email from the client, announcing a budget change that conveyed the very bad news that the event had been canceled.
My hunch is that, even at such an extremity of frustration, Melissa would not tell a Burn Story. She will concede that no matter how elaborate her plans, how detailed her calendar notifications, how many stakeholders she consults—the higher-ups can still scratch everything. The Grind Story sometimes requires a tough pivot.
I’ve heard the term pivot a lot in the course of my research. It’s a term that seems to mean doing everything over—but with fewer resources and more mistakes. During our chat, Melissa said she’d been asked to pivot 2 or 3 times within the previous month alone.
She tends to say yes to the pivots. But she also compensates by taking more time for self-care and spiritual practice. She does aerial yoga. She practices meditation. She does the Intermittent Fasting thing every day till 4 pm. She keeps quiet time with God, she says, as an integral part of her life. My sense is that, for the people around her, she makes it all look gracious and kind of beautiful.
But Melissa’s experiences added to what I’m hearing in interview after interview with other early-career professionals is that the Grind Story, much less the Burn Story, is simply inadequate to the stories people actually live. The stories they live often require them to
find a lonely space to cry before returning to the scene of your latest mistake
get up at 2:30 AM because an international call requires it
care for kids who are up in all your business during quarantine
deal with a client’s comment that was actually pretty racist
Early-career professionals live these stories in positions that give them a lot of responsibility but not a lot of agency. One interviewee told me she was never quite sure whether she was disrespected because she was a woman, because she was Black, or just because she was young. What she was sure of was that she had to get her job done. Everybody was depending on her to be resiliently productive.
The people I talk to do tell the story of early-career professionalism as a narrative of resilience. It’s often a true story. But the narrative of personal resilience is not an equitable story.
And that’s why I’m writing this newsletter. I’d be the first to admit that neither the world nor your inbox needs another nine-minute read. But I’m doing this newsletter as a way to look and listen for other narratives than the Grind Story and the Burn Story. I’m grateful you’re doing the same.
Let me close with a possible alternative to the stories we usually tell. Melissa told me that she and her colleagues were all gathered one day for a shoot. It’s no small feat when everybody shows up in the same place and at the appointed time. Except that in this case, not everybody had shown up. The contracted videographer was seriously late.
Melissa had an icky question forming in her gut: should the company cut ties with this guy right then and there before things got worse?
But when the technician showed up, she switched modes and asked how she might show grace instead. That wasn’t a question about resilience merely, though it did require some patience. Nor was it a question that Melissa asked cynically, as in: “Like, what else can we do here? The dude’s going to dude. And we need the footage.”
I don’t know what moral intuition prompted her to ask, when the cameraman finally showed up, how his day was going. But when she did, she learned just how wrong his day had gone, and she decided to give him another chance. She pushed the shoot forward and then did the hard thing: she told all the good and decent folk who had assembled on time that, hey, they were going to try this again in a few days.
I’m struck by the weird wisdom of Melissa’s mode-switch. She wasn’t just asking, “What’s gotta give here?” But she did ask how she and her team could give here. It can be tempting in situations like this to circle the wagons, preserve your scarce resources, and tell those outside your group that they’ve messed up and they better deal with the consequences. But what I’ve found, in my conversations with Melissa and others, is that another mode works better. Instead of viewing our resources/time/energy as scarce, we should count on unobvious gifts in our workplace community that enable us to be generous with others.
We can ask, in short, “How can we give here?” That’s a question that changes not just the stories you tell, but those you live as well.
X’s and Zs: An Intergenerational Glossary
I caught Melissa on a sunny day in California right before Chicago was about to be dumped on with four inches of snow. Because of my confusion about time-zone differences, we had some trouble getting on the same call. So, I had to start with an apology and a hearty thanks.
Craig: Thank you for not being salty with me. Am I using that correctly?
Melissa: Salty’s fairly new to my vocabulary, but I enjoy it.
Craig: Does it feel like it's pitched at a certain level of intensity that you don't use it much, or--?
Melissa: I've started using it in lieu of some words that have more intensity. It has a playful tone.
Craig: The weird thing about language is it's so saturated with vibe and mood, so I wanted to ask you about that word mood.
Melissa: If I'm having a bad day, I would say that I'm in a mood. Like, I'm in a mood right now.
Craig: I hear people using it about a person. They’ll say, she is a mood, or That is a whole mood.
Melissa: I wouldn't say that I use it that way. But I've heard it used that way, labeling something to emulate.
Craig: So, when you talk about something that people admire, I think of the admiring phrase: on fleek.
Melissa: That's a fun one, and one my boyfriend actually docks me for—if something is really, really cool and you don't have another word for it, you say, That was so on fleek. Like, These pants are so on fleek. It's the pinnacle of compliments.
Craig: Alright, alright, so I've got to say your terminological assistance here has been on fleek.
Melissa: Glad to help.
Did you resonate with the burn story or the grind story? Tell me about your experience! - Craig
This is totally on fleek! : )