Are you doing the work right or are you doing the right work ?

From my first day on the job, I was involved in the improvement business. As someone who was interested in information technology, it was inevitable. After all, information technology was a sub-function of operations management, the goal of which was to improve operational efficiency. Bragging about how good you were at your job was inappropriate, you had to wait for others to appreciate you and accept you as an authority based on your expertise. Professional and business development took time and effort. And I couldn’t even imagine what would happen next.

Because it happened slowly and imperceptibly – the work itself became less algorithmic, more diverse, more complex, the content of the roles changed, the way we performed these roles changed too, and finally we became so-called “knowledge workers” – people who use their knowledge and experience to solve a variety of problems as their main job. Although it seemed like a dream to our parents or an impossible fantasy to our grandparents, we lived it and even felt satisfied and successful. Until – again slowly and unconsciously – we began to feel increasingly dissatisfied, without even realizing why.

The reason started to become clear when we recognized that our work was becoming increasingly intangible and our bosses and clients now wondered if we were doing anything valuable at all. But they still had no tool to measure our performance, because this work could no longer be quantified. And they continued to pay us for the number of hours worked per month, because they had no better idea, but they had begun to become more suspicious about whether we were doing anything useful for them at all. But we weren’t left behind either – without fully realizing it, we started to pretend, like in the theater – when the boss came, we would grab a folder and quickly walk in some direction or stare at the screen, pretending not to notice the boss because we were too busy. We started to fake being busy because the bosses were looking for simple proof that we were working. And the problem was solved in the same way as with hotel room cleaning services – we gave them visible “proof” that we were working, like the cleaning staff makes that swan out of the towels in your hotel room to make you believe that they cleaned it.

This is how workplace performance took precedence over results. And this has only intensified during Covid. Most of us were working from home back then, so we had to prove even harder that we were working hard to earn our paychecks. This is how the endless and pointless online meetings, along with countless email correspondence, became the new “tangible evidence” of “getting a lot of work done.”

To complete the picture, however, the appearance of ​​influencers showed us that if you’re on social media and talking about something, the audience assumes you’re an expert on it, without any evidence to back it up. Because no one probably thought you could speak in public with such confidence without being an expert – in the past, only experienced people were invited to speak on TV. But publicity attracts, especially people with low self-esteem who basically feed on likes. So the virtually zero cost of streaming on social media made public speaking accessible to anyone who wanted to do it. And it quickly became the new normal. I’m not sure how many people even consider that if we strip away all the fakery and vanity, most influencers are actually boasting about accomplishments that, to most of us, are simply insignificant. Nothing. Zero!

“Then why do they have so many followers and make more money than me?” – reasonable people began to ask themselves. And that was their fundamental mistake – the same one I made: we decided that there must be something we didn’t know, because empty boasting wasn’t even an option for us. Such attention-seeking behavior, typical of people with histrionic personality disorder (HPD), could not be tolerated by a wide audience. We believed in the intelligence of the crowd. How naive, huh 🙂

Personally, no matter how much I researched, I found confirmations over and over again that there is no hidden value – it’s just the fact that these people were brave enough to stand in front of the camera and publish content regularly, so they became recognizable faces and people started following them. Without even having a product, expertise, authority or talent in anything, except for daring to show themselves in public. And they are famous just for being famous. That’s all. Using the elementary principle that advertising works on – repetition beats quality content.

Lately I’ve been feeling unconscious anger, and when I figured out why, it turned out that it was because of my perception of injustice regarding the fact that doing your job properly and being good at it is no longer the top priority. If you don’t learn how to brag, like all these people already do, you simply won’t have clients to appreciate your work. Because now bragging is our main job. Our “real job” can only be done if you brag in the right way so that you can attract the right customers to yourself. And yes, if you do your job right, maybe some of those customers will come back to you again. But without bragging, no one will take the time to find out who you are and what you do. So bragging – whether we like it or not – is now our main job. For everyone.

We just call it “personal branding.” It sounds trendy, but it’s basically about the right way to brag.