Work in the Dark: The Real Work
You have to love it, you're not going to like it, and no one else will get to see it.
A little over four years ago, I wrote my first post on what has now become this blog.
It was called Work in the Dark.
To honour the launch of Base Patterns, I’d like to revisit this post.
Thank you, dear reader, for being here.
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“If you don’t work when you don’t wanna work, you’re not gonna be able to work, when you do wanna work. End of story.” - Twyla Tharp on the Huberman Lab (Exact quote at 1:05:31).
There’s an interesting truth about certain kinds of work.
Most of you reading this sentence have done this kind of work.
It’s work that is mostly invisible to everyone else, except you.
It’s the work you do that allows you to show up in front of others and be impressive—if you’ve worked hard enough.
Let’s call it, the work in the dark. This is the real work.
When we get inspired by someone else’s work, what we’re seeing is not their work, it’s the outcome. The byproduct of their real work. One of my favourite podcasters, Jackson Dahl, sometimes calls it the exhaust.
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I know absolutely nothing about the NFL.
From what I’ve been able to put together, if a team had to play every single game they could possibly play in order to win the Super Bowl, it would amount to 21 games.
Each game lasts 60 minutes.
Simple math tells me that’s a total of 1,260 minutes (21 x 60).
The average 9-to-5 working week has 2,400 minutes (40 hours).
So, for a single team, a dream NFL season in terms of playing time, lasts for a little less than three working days.
What are NFL players doing for the other 362 days in their year?
Working. In the dark.
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One of my favourite podcasts is Acquired with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal.
It’s long form (most episodes are 3-4 hours) and incredibly detailed.
They just celebrated 10 years of hosting, and in their 10-year anniversary episode they detailed some pieces of their process for making the show (Starting at 1:10:06).
Most of the real work that Ben and David do, is research and editing. Each episode takes a month or sometimes more to create.
No listener gets to see or hear that.
The content that I and many others have the pleasure of hearing is just the exhaust.
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Work in the dark is the real work.
It’s the work you have to love and it’s the work you are most likely to hate.
Work in the dark can’t be rushed. Like the nature of anything that compounds, it needs time.
It’s the most honest form of work because not only do you know whether you’ve really done it, but when it comes time for you to show up in the light, others will know it too.
I’ll leave you with what I think work in the dark feels like:
“...a quiet, deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done to create the best future results and then simply taking those steps, one after the other, turn by turn of the flywheel.” - Jim Collins, Good to Great (pg. 169)
