Midline Monday: we are our eulogy

Keeping identity small and remembering what matters.

Weekly Reflections

You are not your résumé. You are your eulogy.

— David Brooks

A bad day at work and I will lose sleep.

Not a bad week. Nothing catastrophic. A single hard conversation, and I’m lying awake at 2am running the tape.

I know this is out of proportion, but why is it happening?

When I zoom out, work matters, but it isn’t more important than my family or my health. So why do I ride the highs and lows so viscerally? Why, even when everything is going well, can I reliably manufacture something to worry about?

For a long time I thought this was just the price of caring. The other side of high performance. The stress, the worry, the perpetual dissatisfaction, was just a tax I had to pay for wanting to be good at something.

Paul Graham wrote an essay years ago called Keep Your Identity Small. His point is simple: the more of yourself you wrap up in a label, the less clearly you can think about anything attached to it.

When what you do becomes who you are, then setbacks can become threats.

That’s the trap for strivers.

A bad day can turn into a verdict on our worth. Feedback stops being information and becomes an attack.

No wonder we can’t sleep. We’re not defending a project. We’re defending ourselves.

I don’t think the answer is to care less.

I think the answer is to hold our relationship to work differently

We can shrink our identity related to work, I can remind myself that I am the one playing the game, I am not the game. My work is a thing I’ve chosen, not the whole of what I’m worth. That small gap, between doing and being can make all the difference.

We can find a way to better understand the game we’re actually playing. Charlie Munger famously inverts these types of questions. He might ask: what situation do we want to avoid at all costs?

Work setbacks seem trivial when measured against health or family. We only get one family and one life. So making health or family trade offs for work doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

Remembering who we really are, and that family, friends and health matter most. That’s the real game, and we don’t want lose there.

The pain of hard work is real. The suffering we pile on top is optional.

Learning to tell the two apart, that’s the work.

Onward 🖤