The Grind

It’s a 5.5 hour trip to our place in the country. Usually we fill this time with podcasts and discussion and generally putting our world to rights. This trip saw the conversation drift to what game we wanted to play in the near future. Both my guy and I are gamers and we come together and drift apart in what we play. I would classify him as hardcore as he would play games 24/7 if he could. I can’t play for too long because, although I love gaming, I can’t get past the thoughts that drift through my head that say “this grinding would be better spent on your business than on a fake goal in a fake world”.

Grinding in gamer terms is putting a lot of time and effort into menial tasks to accomplish something.  It could be standing for days mining a ore deposit, or it could be doing quest after boring quest, or it could be clicking 15 thousand time as you collect resources from your local planet. Whatever it is, it has enough of a reward to make it worthwhile, but not so much that it stops you bitching about all the time and effort you are putting in. My objection to picking up World of Warcraft again is the amount of grinding I would need to do to get to level 80 before the next expansion; time that could be better spent writing documentation, creating content, and shipping stuff.

There are plenty of courses out there in the internet world (and outside of the internet) that will conveniently forget to mention that all businesses, even if you are incredibly passionate about what you are doing, will have an element of grinding.  So many people starting out, strike this patch and then give up because “If I love doing it, shouldn’t it all be easy?” . Eff no! Some of it is going to be as much fun as scrubbing out a sewer pipe with a tooth brush.

Recently I listened to Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and the very first chapter is about how award based motivation just doesn’t cut it when you have tasks that just need to be done. It may work once or twice, but it won’t work all of the time (and I am pretty sure all of us have fallen into the ice-cream for exercise trap where we end up telling ice-cream to go sod itself because we aren’t going to exercise today). One must look for the intrinsic value from completing the task as being the reward.

I bet there are quite a few of you out there who never say “wow, look what I just did.”  There is no shame in being impressed by your work, even the most dreary of tasks. Having your nose so close to the grindstone all of the time means you see nothing but the rough edges, yet only two steps back and you can see a long trail of accomplishments that are taking you ever closer to your goals.

This week has been a massive grind for me. Not only that, one of my outsourced staff made a major mistake that erased MONTHS of work that just can’t be replaced. I came >< that close to giving up.  Tomorrow I will start again and at the end of the day I will pat myself on the back and tell myself “good job”.