The valedictorian of the company

In school, effort for the sake of effort gets rewarded.

After all, what's an honors course but an opportunity to do more work in order to prove that you're a person who is willing to do more work simply for the sake of doing more work?

And once you show yourself to be the kind of person who puts in effort for effort's sake, you get more opportunities to demonstrate your work ethic at ever higher levels.

However, in a professional context, what generally matters is results. What's the point of doing work that doesn't help to advance the mission of the organization?

In fact, in many companies, every unnecessary minute you spend working actually decreases profitability.

If you're used to measuring yourself by your effort, it can be really difficult to make the shift to focusing on results. It is comforting, in a way, for some people to strive to be valedictorian of the company just the way they once strove to be valedictorian of their high school class. But companies don't have valedictorians, and there might not even be anyone to be impressed by the extra work.

This might be familiar even to those of us who weren't at the top of the class. In recognizing a tendency to grind, we are on the way to fixing it. With every activity, we can ask ourselves whether there is a way that it can be done more efficiently. We can ask ourselves whether it even needs to be done at all.

Some organizations do, in fact, reward time and effort over results, especially if they use such rewards as a mechanism for putting peers in competition with each other. There are plenty of "come in early, stay late" cultures out there.

That's only one way to play the game. Not every company feels like an extension of school. As an employee, you can seek out companies that offer flexibility as long as the work gets done. And as a business owner, you do not have to replicate a school-like mentality. You can find a way to serve your clients that isn't based on the time you put in, but on the value you create.

It took me a few years to get over my own straight-A student mentality. In my first teaching job, I focused on writing lesson plans and developing materials that would have made my college professors proud.

Knowing what I know now, I would have approached that job a bit differently. Instead of creating materials and lessons based on five different musical concepts for five different grade levels, I would have adapted the same concept for each grade level. I would have focused more on the experience of the students, as opposed to proving myself as a first-year teacher. I would have prepared the students to perform at community events. And I would have invited the principal to sit in and play music with us.

As a matter of fact, knowing what I know now, I might not have even have taken that job. The opportunity cost was high. I took it because it felt like the next logical step. It felt like an extension of college. It felt like the kind of hard work that I was supposed to do.

I quit that job after one year, but I didn't immediately change my ways. As a freelance music teacher, I filled my day with additional low-paying work because I was used to that grind. It took a lot of professional development (books, mentorship, and the like) for me to let go of work for work's sake.

I am still finding new ways to approach my work more strategically. Sometimes that means engaging in a period of absolute focus so that I can accomplish a challenging task in a fraction of the time that it would take if I took a more casual approach. Sometimes it means handing off an entire project to someone else who will do a better job than me instead of doing it to prove that I can. There are always meaningful shortcuts. A key conversation can save hours of back-and-forth.

I remember doing my "seat work" in elementary school, cozy and comfortable in a warm, well-lit classroom. Filling in the blanks and answering the questions, I felt virtuous and capable. When I was done, I got to read a book; in a sense, that was additional work, but I liked it.

Real life is less structured. The work I like to do has no fill-in-the-blanks. There is a lot of uncertainty and challenge. I don't get to have that cozy feeling of doing it right and earning a good grade.

On the other hand, when I'm done, I don't have to just sit there and wait for the others to finish. I get to do whatever I want. Sometimes that's more work, but just as often, it's play. The benefit is not in some far-off future or the esteem of a person I've been trained to fear. It is here and now.

The irony, of course, is that if we focus on results over effort, we will often achieve more and gain more respect. Instead of waiting to be seen and recognized, we can intentionally share the fruits of our labor so that our impact is evident and obvious.

Instead of striving to be the best, we can stop when we're good enough to get the outcome we're looking for. Instead of waiting to be chosen, we can choose ourselves. And we won't have to give a speech at graduation.