Not a genius, but a grinder

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Liverpool Football Club. Their motto, "You'll Never Walk Alone", is literally tattooed on my skin. Yet, while it was the revelation of Michael Owen on the world stage during the 1998 World Cup that first drew my eye to LFC, it was another player who ensured that I continued to follow LFC long after Owen had left the club to play for Real Madrid.

Jamie Carragher, retired as of 2017.

I own a few LFC football jerseys, and throughout the decades that followed, I've only ever had one name and number on the back - No. 23, CARRAGHER.

No. 23

Why Jamie Carragher? Well, we share certain traits. Like me, he wasn't the most technically skilled player in the team. He made blunders, some of them pretty costly. As far as I can recall, nobody was ever banging on our doors offering us big money for him. However, match after match, he went all in. He gave everything he had. Granted, sometimes it just wasn't enough. But his passion and pride was never called into question.

I consider myself less of a spectacularly talented Robbie Fowler, and more of a solid but unfashionable Jamie Carragher. While it was the likes of Fowler, Owen and Steven Gerrard with the silky skills and spectacular goals that I admired; it was the arguably less gifted but utterly committed Jamie Carragher that I related to the most.

"Touching fish"

Once, I asked my ex-boss a question. My current company's Director had hired me based on my ex-boss's recommendation. What had been the basis of that recommendation? His reply was almost Confucian in its inscrutability.

"Because you don't touch fish," he told me. This mystifying remark was put in context when he sent me a link to this article explaining how young workers in China get by on doing the bare minimum. (First "996", now this. These Chinese sure have a knack for popularizing work-related terminology, don't they?)

Now that's touching fish!

Though I'd like to point out that my aversion to "touching fish" isn't out of some misplaced sense of duty. End of the day, a job is still just a job. No, my motivations are definitely selfish in nature. (Selfish, geddit? Hur hur)

Go all in

In the tech industry, there are a lot of people smarter, younger and more knowledgeable than I am. My IQ is completely average; in school I was a B-student at best. In terms of sheer quality, I'm not in the top fifty percent of tech workers on this island; shit, I may not even qualify for the bottom twenty-five percent.

How have I coped with so much superior competition?

Simple - unbridled enthusiasm. Like my hero Carragher, I go all in. I've long accepted the fact that in order to compensate for my lack of actual talent, I have to hustle like a complete maniac. This lesson was learned fairly early on.

In school, I wasn't the smartest kid. The best scores I ever had were straight Bs across the board. Nobody ever suspected just how hard I had to slave for those Bs - for some reason, they actually thought I was just that talented.

Joke's on you, suckers. I don't have any talent. Not an ounce.

In the first semester of my first year in school, I made the mistake of thinking I was smart enough to coast with a minimum of actual work. My plummeting grades showed me the error of my ways pretty quickly. I came to the realization that I wasn't a smart kid - I was a hardworking kid and needed to play to my strengths. This took the form of doing my homework conscientiously, catching up on the required reading, obsessively coding and generally not having a life. From being a lousy student who got lousy grades, I became the kind of student people copied their homework from... all in the space of six months.

I kid you not. Straight Bs. My best results ever.

A slow, lumbering truck.

That pattern has repeated itself in my career. I'm not a racehorse, but a workhorse. Not a sleek, sexy race car but a lumbering diesel truck. Not a genius, but a grinder. Where people get by on their smarts, I rely on a certain amount of dedication to my craft. At work, I code. After work, I code. Once every couple years, I go back to school to learn more stuff while continuing to work.

Work-life balance is for bitches. Real men have work-and-more-work balance.

I'm kidding, of course. 996 isn't what I would recommend; chief reason being once this kind of thing becomes the default, people like myself become a lot more common and consequently a lot less valuable. The world is full of hardworking idiots; and only two things make me stand out.

One; not complaining about not getting my due. All I ever wanted from life was to code and be paid for it; and by that measure I've achieved everything I ever wanted. Get me fully engaged with the task at hand, and I'll put the average 996-er in the shade.

Two; acknowledging the fact that I'm a hardworking idiot. I constantly work on myself to be less of an idiot. Some of us have to come to terms with the fact that we're not as smart, as smooth, as talented as we would like to be. An overwhelming percentage of us are completely average compared to global standards. It's just that not everybody is willing to admit it, even to themselves.

I still fall short. A whole lot. But if and when that happens, it won't be due to lack of trying.

I'm also in a very secure financial place at this time of speaking, and losing my job is quite possibly the last thing I'm afraid of. Why do I still work so hard, then? Simply put, it's the only way I know how to work. That's a dangerous habit, and one I'm trying to break out of. You see, I'm 43. At some point, giving a hundred percent at work is not going to cut it anymore. As age catches up, my hundred percent could very well be a younger person's eighty.

One last caveat

A huge part of this blogpost has been about the value of hard work. Jamie Carragher showed me that a guy doesn't need a ridiculous amount of talent to get ahead, but he does need to demonstrate that he's all in.

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that hard work is enough. The value of hard work, by itself, is exactly zero. Hard work is a good start and compensates for a multitude of sins; but ultimately, we're judged by results.

Go all in, go the distance!
T___T