The Quiet Cost of Being Good at Your Job

The warm breeze and salt air slowly filled the living room of our coastal home. Coming back to the house I grew up in always seems to bring a familiar calm, and Easter weekend was no different.

As the afternoon slid away, I found myself looking east across the water toward Morehead City, watching a military jet cut a loud pass over the sound. The kids had just gotten home with pizza and were dropping bags at the door when the countdown started on the TV.

“10, 9, 8…”

We gathered around to watch the launch of Artemis II as four people began a ten-day journey farther into space than any humans before them. I wasn’t sure if my kids were fully grasping what they were watching. I wasn’t sure I was either.

I joked that we might catch a glimpse of the rocket from the Carolina coast. Obviously I knew better. Later that evening I stepped out into the backyard anyway. The sky had cleared and the stars were sharp against the dark sky.

I thought about the small pocket telescope I picked up as a souvenir the first time I visited Kennedy Space Center when I was eight years old. And I mean small.

I used to carry it out to the front porch and try to identify whatever I could up there. Constellations, the North Star, or maybe Mars or Venus on a good night. Then there was the moon. When it was full it lit the water in a way that it didn’t have to compete with anything else, no city lights, just the sound and the sky.

My kids started asking questions about the launch that evening. Some I could answer, others I couldn’t, and at some point I realized I was watching them the same way I used to watch that sky, with the same sense of wonder as that eight-year-old who had stood roughly fifteen feet from where they were sitting.

They were mostly fascinated, and a little uneasy, that four people had voluntarily charted a course into a part of space with no guarantees of coming home.

I found myself still watching the coverage when I normally would’ve moved on. Four people had spent years preparing to sit inside that kind of uncertainty. They had come to grips with something I’d been quietly avoiding in my own life.

The crew didn’t board that capsule because the uncertainty was gone. They went because somewhere in all that preparation, uncertainty stopped being the obstacle and became part of the work.

Over the next few days, the launch stayed with me. I kept coming back to how comfortable they were sitting inside something they couldn’t fully control.

At some point I caught myself comparing it to my own work.

I’ve spent years building work that runs predictably. A course I can teach without much preparation and one I haven’t had to meaningfully change in a couple of years. Clinic days that follow a familiar pattern of the same problems, the same pathology, the same paperwork. A calendar I mostly know how to navigate before Monday arrives because I’ve already seen most of what’s coming.

I built it that way on purpose and for a long time it felt like exactly the kind of progress I was after.

What I didn’t account for was what quietly left in the process. When you design work to eliminate the unexpected, you don’t just reduce stress.

You reduce something else too.

I remember sitting in a meeting two years ago, genuinely unsure how something would turn out, and I noticed I was more alert than I’d been in months. There was more presence and a pull I hadn’t felt in a while toward a problem I hadn’t already solved. I remember thinking how strange that felt. Now I think it was information.

By building something fairly reliable, I hadn’t noticed what it cost.

From the outside, that kind of predictability looks like success. And in many ways it is.

But there’s a version of it that starts to feel like something else, something harder to name because the work is still getting done and you’re still good at it. That’s actually what makes it difficult to question. Competence doesn’t create pressure to change anything. It just keeps the calendar full and the days moving forward until one morning you notice something is different.

The Artemis crew didn’t wait for uncertainty to feel comfortable before they launched towards the dark side of the moon. They trained until they could function inside it anyway, and in doing so they kept something alive that most of us quietly set down and forgot about.

I’ve been doing the opposite.

Early the next morning I walked out on the dock before we packed the car. The moon was still low over the water as a light northeast breeze came off the sound. A few stars held on in the pale part of the sky before the sun came through.

I stood there longer than I usually would. It was long enough that my wife came outside once to check on me. I told her I’d be in soon.

The questions that came weren’t the kind you answer before coffee, or maybe ever. Had I made things too easy on myself. Whether the work I’d spent years building still fit who I was becoming, or just who I was when I built it. What were my kids actually seeing when they watched how I spent my time.

I didn’t try to answer any of them.

An egret moved slowly along the far edge of the marsh as the breeze picked up slightly and at some point I just turned and went back inside.

That felt like its own kind of progress.

Where has your work become so familiar that you stopped being curious about it?

You might not be able to answer that today. That’s fine.

If someone came to mind while you were reading this, feel free to pass it along.

Until next time.