I was on my lunchtime walk last week, turning over a question I didn’t expect to be asking this year. What do you do when you get the opportunity you asked for, and it’s harder than you thought it would be?
For a while now I’ve wanted more responsibility at work. This fall I got it. New projects, new roles, people I haven’t worked with before. I’m capable of the work. I just don’t have my feet under me yet. It’s the quarterback who finally gets the start and finds out the linebackers are faster than they were in practice.
I’ve been here before.
Years ago I took a data job at a company in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. I came in eager to prove myself, show what I knew, and make things better. I learned quickly that enthusiasm without understanding frustrates everybody, including the person who has it.
The data standards I was pushing for were sound. I still believe that. But I wasn’t connecting them to anything the people I worked for could see. I was asking them to care about the fix before they could see the problem, and they didn’t.
That went on for more than two years. By the end I was still passionate about the subject. I had just backed off my certainty far enough to hear what my customers needed and test my position against it. Turned out there were several ways to get good data and still give people what they actually needed.
Hebrews says no discipline seems pleasant at the time, but it produces a harvest later for the people trained by it (Hebrews 12:11). Those two years were the training. I didn’t enjoy one week of it.
So this time I’m starting with a different question. Where am I meeting real resistance, and where am I just being asked to do something new and don’t like it yet? And what don’t I know that the role needs me to know? A new playbook. New people. A different kind of patience.
I heard a phrase last week, delusional optimism, and I’ve been chewing on it since. I’m not delusional about the outcomes. I’m delusional about the gratitude. I’ve been through enough hard seasons and enough of my own frustration to know that getting to do this work at all is the point.
Lunch was over. I walked back in.
