The Art of Basicking

As my life complicates, why do I just want to jigsaw puzzle?

I held a leadership role in a large tech company known for its extensive promotion process. At the company it was notoriously difficult to get a promotion, the process required the manager to complete a balanced, detailed analysis of the employee’s accomplishments, complete with peer assessments, quantifiable performance, and arguments for and against the promotion. Then the report was reviewed and discussed by the senior management team, who probed at these details, questioned assumptions, and made a call about the candidate’s readiness.

Sometimes, a candidate was turned down because the manager failed to draft a proper report. Common errors included lacking measurable data, being too effusive and not fact-based, or not including enough diversity of input from other departments and levels of seniority.

At the end of one of these evaluation processes we learned that one of the promoted candidates, whom my colleague had successfully advocated for being promoted into a management role, declined the promotion.

The team didn’t really know what to do with this information; not accepting a promotion was going against the natural order of things. I remember thinking at the time, what’s wrong with this guy? Does he not know how hard his manager worked to get him promoted? Doesn’t he want more responsibility? More direct reports? More money?

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Thinking about the incident with the benefit of hindsight it makes more sense to me why the candidate declined the promotion. I gleaned from his report he was a strong leader of a small team who did his job well while simultaneously building consensus around his projects. He had the respect of colleagues, up, down, and sideways on the org chart. Perhaps he was in his occupational zone and didn’t need the validation of a manager role to prove himself. Maybe he had a side hustle, and his current role with limited people-management responsibility enabled him to pursue it. 

Or maybe he wasn’t interested in the trappings of having to Play Big. 

In her post, “Let’s go Small Together”

Rita Ott Ramstad

explains why playing small feels wrong and right at the same time:

“If this is a bit disconcerting–and it is, if, like me, you’ve labored long within a culture that tells you not only that, if you just work hard enough, you can do and be anything, but also that you should do and be something big–something important, something meaningful, something that distinguishes you from others–it can also be freeing…”

I must confess, during the aforementioned time as a manager of a large team, I was harboring heretical thoughts, fantasizing about being demoted to an independent contributor (IC). Being an IC I was happiest in my career, responsible for creating, but free to create results in my own way. Or put more simply, free to create.

But in the corporate world that can sound like a major cop out. Playing small. Not optimizing one’s potential. When we’re in the mode of Playing Big we’re racking up wins, accumulating titles and LinkedIn followers, building professional currency. We’re also, as former CNN journalist

Chris Cillizza

says, most at risk of succumbing to the Curse of More.

…At every stage of my career, I got what I thought I wanted. But when I got it, I wouldn’t allow myself to be happy or satisfied. I was forever wondering why I didn’t have more or better or different. There was always someone above me in the pecking order, someone who I thought had it all. If only I could be that person, I remember thinking to myself, then I would be truly and completely happy. That, of course, was a fallacy. Because when I got more — A podcast! A video series! Better homepage placement! More staff! — I still wasn’t happy.

I was the dog forever chasing the car. Every time I thought I was getting close to catching it, it pulled just a little further away from me. Then the car ran me over. (Sorry, gross metaphor, but you get it, right?)

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So what, then, WILL make us happy? 

I’ve been asking myself this question of late, and I don’t have a magic formula (happiness is a feeling, not a chemical state), but there are components in life that I notice make me happy. 

Like jigsaw puzzling. I noticed this while on a weekend getaway years ago, after a typical, stressful period at work. We had rented a house near the ocean and, typical for me at the time, I hadn’t planned any activities in advance and was a bit bored by the selection of board games in the house. I had two kids under age 3 and wasn’t going anywhere, so I pulled a woodsy jigsaw puzzle off the shelf and started sorting the pieces. Three days later I’d finished the puzzle and discovered I felt lighter and calmer than I’d felt in years.

I was also confused: We were navigating a pivotal time with our startup, talking to investors and potential acquirers. I’d brought Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In, with me, as it seemed an acceptable, professionally-forward-leaning (pun intended) bit of homework, and my laptop, should inspiration strike and I conceive a new slide for a pitch deck. And yet, here I was, sorting dark greens from the lights, reveling in the occasional pops of lilac that arrived like little presents at my doorstep, determined to finish something that I would have to dismantle by check-out time.

Many years, and jigsaw puzzles, later, I don’t question this predilection of mine. I revel in it. My family knows you can’t go wrong buying me jigsaw puzzles as gifts. My husband set up a station for me in our den, complete with a wide butcher block table, stackable sorting bins, and a no-glare adjustable spotlight. Some puzzles I knock out in days, especially during holiday breaks; others take months. I don’t time myself. And while I have a system of approach (edges first, sort by color, words or themes) I don’t know that I have improved my puzzling ability. I don’t care. It’s the absence of caring that makes it so enjoyable. 

I’ve discovered a few other unproductive activities that make me happy:

• Listening to The Moth Radio Hour, Snap Judgement, This American Life, or any storytelling on NPR;

• Reading the young-adult novels my kids left lying around the house;

• Collecting perfume bottles;

• Walking into town to run errands, not because I need anything, but because I get to listen to music while walking;

• Watching Lifetime, or Lifetime-like romantic dramas —nope, I can’t get the time I spend watching them back, and I don’t harbor any fantasies of moving to a small town and falling for an unassuming curmudgeon that I later discover is the Prince of an island in the Maldives. But so what? 

• Watching Queer Eye and British Baking Show. I have no ambitions to uplevel my personal grooming or domestic skills, and yet I can get lost watching others humbly grappling with theirs. I get a cheap adrenaline thrill watching other people meeting their potential and realizing their dreams. Now I know why my mother (whom I miss so very much) used to watch hours of American Idol reruns.

I’ve also learned that noticing happiness and defining it for yourself is a new skill set. May we all help each other notice more; strive less; and celebrate our wins, most surely, but also revel in our choices to decline opportunities that will distract us, be unproductive, and spend hours on random puzzles. 

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And don’t forget to leave your basicking hack—an activity you are cutting out or integrating into your life to infuse it with more joy—here in our Open Thread discussion of the week.