No Category for What I Do

The program is card stock, folded, printed both sides, and there are eleven categories.

She read it at the table while the starter was being cleared, the way you read anything that is put in front of you, and about halfway down she noticed she was doing something specific, which was looking for herself.

Innovation. Client Impact. Rising Star. Team Player of the Year, which is the one that is meant to cover people like her and does not, because Team Player of the Year goes to somebody visible who is also generous, and the whole of her job is being the reason visible people can be generous.

Here is what she actually does. She holds the memory of the organization. She is the reason three separate projects did not repeat a mistake from 2019, because she was in the room in 2019 and she is in the room now and she said, at the right moment, quietly, we tried that. She is the person new people are told to ask. She has, by her own estimate, prevented somewhere north of forty serious errors in six years.

There is no category for prevention. There cannot be. The prevented error is definitionally invisible: it is a thing that did not happen, and no organization on earth has a mechanism for measuring what did not happen, and if one did it would be immediately gamed.

So she folded the program and put it under her side plate and had a genuinely nice evening.

And in the taxi at half past eleven, what arrived was not bitterness. It was a much odder feeling, which is closest to illegibility. Six years of the most useful work she has ever done, and the organization she does it for does not have the language to describe it. Not because they are ungrateful. Because there is no word.

And there is a second thing under that, and it is the one that actually stings, and it is this: if there is no category, is there a thing? Or has she constructed a job out of an absence and been quietly proud of it?

You will have your own program. The list you read looking for yourself, and did not find, and could not say what was missing.

The most cynical verse in the Bible, read properly

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that people usually skip because it sounds sour, and it is not sour, it is diagnostic.

Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man's envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.Ecclesiastes 4:4

Read what he is claiming. Not that some work is driven by rivalry. That all toil and all skill is. He looks at the whole economy of effort and says the engine underneath most of it is comparison, and then he calls the engine wind.

Which means the awards program is not a distortion of a good system. In this book's diagnosis, it is the system, working exactly as designed, and it was always going to produce eleven categories that measure visible outputs, because comparison can only see what can be compared.

So take it plainly: you are outside a machine that could never have measured you, and that is what Ecclesiastes 4 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the most unsentimental book in the canon and lays it down in a taxi at half past eleven.

Now the second thing, the sting, which was: if there is no category, is there a thing?

Notice that the Preacher does not say the work is unreal. He says the motive is wind. Skill is skill; forty prevented errors are forty prevented errors. What he empties out is the engine, not the output. And that distinction is precisely what she needs, because it means her work does not require the program to exist in order to be a thing. It requires the program only if the program is what makes things real, and the Preacher has just said the program is wind.

You have been doing something real inside a system that cannot name it, because the written word separates the work from the rivalry that usually drives it, and His Spirit is what makes that land on somebody who has just been quietly frightened by her own question.

And it is worth noticing what the Preacher does next, two verses on: better a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and striving after wind. He does not solve the categories. He offers a different thing to hold entirely. You have a handful of quietness available that the room cannot award you, and Scripture is what puts that in reach, and His Spirit is what makes it something other than resignation.

Nobody on that program is ahead

Now the guardrail.

The people who won those eleven categories did real things. Innovation is real. Client impact is real. Somebody actually was a rising star this year and the recognition will matter to them and it should.

And the woman in the taxi is not the more faithful of the eleven. That sentence is not available here. Prevention does not outrank innovation, and being illegible is not a superior grade of contribution, and if there were a twelfth category for invisible work she would be in a competition again and would be no better off.

If this article leaves anybody quietly certain that the uncategorized are the real ones, then it has produced the same rivalry the Preacher just called wind.

So: you have nothing to win in that room and nothing that anybody took, because a crown in Scripture is placed on a head and never earned, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase.