Fail Juice
Why integrity matters in matters big and small
Photo by Devon Janse van Rensburg on Unsplash
Hi @work,
Paul here. Right now it’s early Thursday evening and I’m sitting at my desk in the bay window of my North Beach, San Francisco apartment, drinking a tasty aperitif. If that sounds good to you, well, I’m not gonna lie, it kind of is. But to be honest, what I should be drinking is a big glass of Fail Juice. Because I was supposed to draft the @work column this week and instead, I just had to apologize to my partner in this endeavor for completely screwing the pooch.
And I need to apologize to you guys, too. I’m sorry.
You see, I’m moving this week. Tomorrow in fact, though you wouldn’t know it by the empty moving boxes laying around. I have been gifted an opportunity to live rent-free for the summer. Which looks pretty nice given the last year of SF rents. I am about to embark on a cross-country journey with the girlfriend and our dog Bambi in a used 1997 Jeep that we hope is as solid as it seems. (Update: As the Instagram shows, solid wasn’t the right word choice. But we’re fine and what happened may be another, related tale for you down the road.)
Though I knew our move was coming, I thought that I could still do everything I normally do. To do it all. Be it all. That all I had to do was hustle a little harder. And that I had to do it all by myself.
I was lying to myself, denying my own truth. All while denying community. Which is how we get out of integrity — integration — with ourselves, our Onlyness.
Earlier this week, another team I work with had a similar incident. Someone overpromised and underdelivered. And while he had every good intention at the start of the week, he found himself, as it were, on the paved road to Hell by Friday. And so, the following Monday, during our weekly team meeting, he resurrected a tradition from another company he once worked at, took his morning glass of OJ, added A LOT of Lee & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, and chugged it. On camera, during our Zoom call.
Fail Juice he called it.
As un-fun as it was for him to consume, it was equally painful to watch. But it was a wakeup call to himself to be accountable. And for us, his team, to help him be accountable to himself. We had a laugh, but it was a serious business.
It’s a serious business to be truthful, real, fully ourselves.
My point in telling you this story isn’t to ask for your sympathy and understanding, but to be sympathetic and understanding.
To ask, how do we get into these situations, and then, how do we get ourselves out of them?
I’ll tell you what I did. I led Nilofer — not my boss, but even worse, my partner, down the primrose path. To say, I’ve got it. And then, I’ll get it. Until I finally handed her a piece of writing we both knew wouldn’t work, but which I had rationalized to myself would be acceptable. Not worth a minute of your time.
So, not only did I not deliver, I tried to pass off shoddy work. People get fired for this sort of thing. Business deals go south. Endeavors go under. All because we want to keep up an illusion of who we are.
And so she suggested that sharing this entire yarn is what we do instead, and that clicked. I knew what to do with it because I FINALLY OPENED UP and talked about my problem, but not before it was almost too late. And we laughed that uncomfortable laugh when you know the truth is not actually funny.
I know the truth. That if YOU (ahem, me) aren’t honest with yourself, you can’t be honest with anyone else. That if you don’t identify your tribe and trust them and let them in, you will never stand in a place of real security and clarity. You cannot have confidence if you haven’t done the work. And you cannot trust yourself, because you’ve shown yourself that you’re untrustworthy.
You either choose integrity, and follow that wherever it leads you, or else you risk annihilation — disintegration — by your own hand.
If you have people in your life that you feel you can’t lean on, or that don’t hear you when you need them, you need to do one of two things, or maybe both things:
One: Find new people. The right people. You know who they are and are not.
Two: examine your own role. Are you doing what you say you will? When you know your interests are aligned, do you admit when you need help? You will let people down more by keeping them out than letting them in.
By hiding your own truth, rather than revealing it, you are walking away from that spot in the world where only you can stand, your onlyness.
As Nilofer would say: You need to show up, fully, own fully both the light and the dark, to be fully alive at work. What spoke to me from way back in Nilofer’s work is her embrace of this idea — the way she demands this as table stakes. It’s why I almost instinctively wanted to work with her on creating @work, and I now realize why it speaks so deeply to me. It’s a message I need to hear. And maybe you do, too.
Whatever version of this story comes from your work and your life, you have to stand in that same place, your onlyness, and make moves to find it and hold onto it. Or else, frankly, you’re gonna drink the Fail Juice, too. And trust me, it ain’t tasty.
We’re taking a (preplanned, I swear) week off next week, but we’ll be back on July 12 with a straight banger. Promise.