The Knights Who Say "Meh"

Mary, Sylvia, Amber, Amy

Welcome to Examining Competence. If this is your first visit, you might want to start from the beginning. There’s a narrative thread. Maybe not a great one, but it does exist. Or dive right in if you prefer!

I want to address a skill it can be challenging to describe. I’ve seen authoritative writing based on research that at least chews around the edges of it, but not in quite the sense I’m intending here.

You may be familiar with (and if so, disturbed by) the Milgram experiment. In that experiment, the subjects thought they were administering painful/dangerous electric shocks to fellow subjects for research purposes. Nearly all of them just kept pushing the button because the researcher told them to. The ones who didn’t had a quality akin to what this article is about.

Bystander apathy has some academic writing as well. I never see enough about the people who resist bystander apathy. (Please note that I have not done exhaustive lit search. This is not academic writing. If this trait interests you, please see what the experts have done!

I’ve seen some work recently about mob mentality, and what it takes to get a sweet lovely person over an ethical threshold. Nudging an individual into what the group is thinking, in opposition to their values, to start smashing things up. What it takes to avoid groupthink, that’s where I’m going in this article.

Let’s come at today’s trait a different way. Those are terrible negative examples, but the…gumption…chutzpah…je ne sais quoi…it takes to defy expectations, to break from the pack, to “Think Different” as Steve Jobs might have said…that’s the skill I’m describing today. But not just the existence of it, also the use.

Many sorts of individual and organizational “skills” vary by how dilated time is. To give an example in a group context, it’s very usual for IT organizations to be excellent with emergencies. They spin up committed, cooperative, solid groups to resolve big outages or other terrible short-term bad things. But when precisely the same commitment, cooperation, and response is needed long-term to address lower-grade problems, even when those non-emergency problems cause more cost/misery/outage/failure than the sudden ones, it’s astonishing how bad many organizations are at that. Many of them just…don’t. The same skills, expended over time, fail. Important things never get off the ground or die on the vine.

This attribute I’m describing today, I’m going to call it gumption. It gets studied in the context of urgency. Short time. Running into the road to save someone when everyone else stands by. Leaving a protest turning violent rather than participating. Making more ethical snap judgments about button-pushing.

I think gumption is much more interesting long-term. I think the people who can rustle up this trait in urgent short-term situations, while still not the norm, mostly can’t keep it up long-term. Competent people though, apply gumption both ways. These are the ones you want in an emergency certainly. But more importantly, I think, they’re the rare one you want to have in your organization to be sure that difficult long-term needs are met. The marathon sloggers.

It’s obvious when these people aren’t present in a company/group/org or are so greatly thwarted that they can’t succeed (and usually leave…Competent people hate being pointless as we’ve discussed.) I think what divides the little-c competent from the Competent is being able to take action over a duration that progress would be easy to stop. If Competence means being supremely good at getting things done, consider the increasing difficulty of violating expectations without the advantage of adrenaline. Pursuing a path others disfavor in the face of ongoing doubt, disapproval, or even outright obstructionism. Heck, keeping it up when it’s boring, tiring, not rewarding, or otherwise “why would you DO this?” according to less gumption-filled people. That’s when this trait is at its best.

Gumption, I think, also means doing what others don’t. Defying social expectations, blazing trails (if only for themselves.) A willingness to say “meh” to expectations and do what you choose. It’s a complex trait, so I’ve got four examples to help us suss it out.

In the examples I’ll write about today, our heroes aren’t just folks who dyed their hair, or quit a bad job, or otherwise defied expectations recklessly on the spur of the moment. They aren’t even the ones who walked out of a mob, or the good Samaritans who tried to help and called 911 when no one else would. These are the ones who said “meh,” did what they wanted, and then notably they kept on doing it.

We’re still in the “martial arts” arc of this timeline. Each of these four could do some impressive mayhem if it was called for. Only one gumption story actually involves MA training though.

The reason that they fit in this context(aside from being martial artists I know from a space of years in my life), is that this is one of the handful of Competence skills that martial arts training can actually help adults cultivate.  I think if you have enough gumption to get signed up, many martial arts will make you less and less interested in “what everyone else thinks.” I’ve got thoughts about why, and we can discuss in the chat if you’d like.

I’ve surely seen it go the other way, or not change at all, don’t get me wrong. Senior martial artists who care Very Much Indeed what others think are almost more common than the reverse.  But it appears to me that there’s a sweet spot, where many people lean-in to freedom of thought, willingness to take risks, being ok with “dancing as if no one is looking” maybe before the weight of dark belts, tradition, and their own perception of others’ expectations squishes them down again. These four people fit that mold. Or, I guess, don’t fit any mold? The folks I’m describing today grabbed the brass ring of “meh” and didn’t let go. For a long time. Maybe for good. Time will tell.

I’ll start with Mary. I actually met her briefly in class many years before I got to know her. When I met her again, it was just after she’d moved to another state as a first-degree black-belt to start a school of her own. Mary is what I’d call “brash.” (One of my favorite words, and a quality I often enjoy in my friends. It makes me think of a metal scrubber you pull out when no other tool will get through a mess. Mary is that person.) Mary will walk straight up to authority and ask it questions. If Mary is aware that societal expectations exist, she seems to regard them the way Crossfit people enjoy a good box-jump frame. As a thing to jump on to make herself stronger.

Over many years I watched from a distance as Mary built and evolved that school. Please pause and consider just how much opposition a person, particularly a female person, not a particularly senior martial artist, would face about haring off to a new state, and starting a martial arts school. Outward expressions of doubt would be the nicest thing. On top of the obstacles any new unproven business owner faces (ordinary things like financing, or leasing and renovating space) the MA business has some…quirks. Any new business owner gets dump-trucks-full of others’ well-meaning advice. A school owner gets that but couched in tradition, respect. It’s hard to turn down “advice” from people senior to you, even if they don’t really have any connection to the business of the school. Forging a path to creating a new thing is always a challenge. Consider how much of a challenge Mary faced.

Fast forward quite a few years, to a school that’s meeting goals, integrated in the community, proven Mary’s Competence to the hilt. Then some malfeasance by another senior person happened. It was bad enough to be ground-zero for any small business. But not for Mary’s school. She kept it together. The whole weight on her shoulders at that point was a crucible. From a distance I watched Mary forge herself into the kind of person it’s rare to meet more than once in a lifetime.

A few years later, Mary was ready to move on. She sold the school to some colleagues, moved herself back across the country to a place she decided she wanted to live, and started her life fresh. One of the things society makes us think, especially women “us,” is that we must always have plans. No leaping. Safety first. Mary had ideas when she moved, but she gives herself the freedom to explore them, the grace to try things. Mary doesn’t have anything to prove, and she lives that. It’s always a joy watching her progress in life.

So how does that relate to our other folks?

Sylvia I met when she started training. She was working a tedious job that provided health insurance. The moment the ACA happened, she got herself out of that bad job, and started a bakery. She was doing gluten-free baking before that was a known thing. She was also the first in our area to try printing icing for cakes and cookies. And she was selling online before food products really took off that way. She even had a fairly early Kickstarter. “Innovative” is the word you would use for a man. Women tend to get less encouraging words. But the “meh” is strong in Sylvia. 

What I think Sylvia illustrates best is a willingness to pursue a path, follow it until she’s finished with it, then step right onto a new path. From bakery owner she decided to broaden her cooking, working in a little startup restaurant chain, and she went to culinary school. Then she shifted into administration, and learned to be a Chief Technology Officer for the chain. (You read that right.) She figured out every part of online ordering (very very new at the time, she pushed the chain to do it and it was huge for them). She managed the whole tech stack for the restaurants. From there she took those project management skills off to another job, and is growing that career, while on the side she’s developing programming and game design skills for the vision she has for her future.

Most people are fear-based. Cautious steps. Never leaping. Mary and Sylvia illustrate how to build solid skills to enable success, but leaping to the next thing when the time is right.

Amber is that way too. Our culture has some weird notions about ladders and advancement and nose-in-the-air nonsense about who should be doing what jobs. Amber attended a quite nice women’s college. She’s smart, capable, well-educated; an extrovert through-and-through. She can organize things, she can figure things out. She’s Competent. So did she go into politics? Sales? Management? She did not. Amber loves animals. She’s got a way with them. Amber is a dog groomer. 

Sometimes “meh” means defying expectations to “soar” differently than the way society wants us to soar. It means doing the right work, regardless of perceptions. Now Amber is not “a groomer” in the sense that she punches a grooming clock somewhere. She’s the sort of groomer you choose when you want the best. Not necessarily the most expensive, only the best.

For years she built her reputation, did her work with the best skill (winning a noted “best of” regional award one year). She also learned the business, planned, watched, and recently made the leap to start her own mobile grooming business. Entrepreneurship isn’t a required Competence trait, but it’s a great indication of gumption. Gumption to do a job you love rather than a job people tell you you “should” do. Gumption to take new leaps to do more of what you love and have more control over how to do it.

Which takes me to Amy. Amy has somehow fit in a few lifetimes-worth of different vocations and avocations. She’s got a Ph.D. in Neurobiology. Apparently that’s the thing you need to teach high school science in California. Which she did for several years. At the same time she got connected with a group there that teaches about child safety (teaching kids to be safe and teaching adults to keep them that way). She’s written books, taught, raised a child of her own, and, of course, leapt. She’s a film producer, with some award-winners in her portfolio. She’s deeply interested in politics, and works on that interest in a few ways, most recently launching a Substack to tell some folks what they need to know. She’s always sought-after for boards and committees, but she takes her own choice about how to spend her time (setting appropriate boundaries is an essential child-protection skill that is also a life skill).

When Amy leaps, she does it with research, care, due consideration, preparation, and bringing along her vast experience to make her next one successful. The story I’d like to tell is about a change that didn’t happen. Amy was considering going back to school to learn a new discipline, very different from her previous ones. She considered, she studied, she worked harder than most people ever would, doing everything well to ensure success. But near the end she had a choice to keep pursuing it, or to change direction. After an all-in effort, she chose a different path and walked away.

The thing is, Amy knew all along that that could happen. Amy succeeds at hard things a lot. But she knows that sometimes paths change. Just as Mary, Sylvia, and Amber do.

It takes all-in effort to achieve a hard goal. Lots of folks hold back. They fling out a “trial balloon” or sandbag their effort. Maybe they fear failure and don’t want to get attached to a goal. Maybe they fear success. A Competent person can escape those traps and be utterly determined to do something.

When people are utterly determined to do something, they’re prey to the sunk-cost fallacy. They may be myopic about changed circumstances. Pitfalls for the passionate are everywhere.

The knife edge of full commitment combined with good judgment about when to pull up short is a rare and difficult thing to achieve. I’ll discuss the popular “how do I know when to quit” topic more in a later article.

The analogy Amy uses for this is rock-climbing. Planning the route, exploring each new step before putting full weight on it, then upward again. Sometimes a hold doesn’t pan out and it’s time to change the route. Sometimes another route looks better from close-up. Sometimes there’s a storm and you have to get to shelter. Competent people manage all of that.

These four folks are examples of people who commit. They put immense time, effort, thought, and determination into the goal. Eyes on the prize. They are not preoccupied with failure, and know when to change direction, there are plenty of big goals left for them. On to the next.

I may be giving you the impression in this series that Competent people are superhuman success-monsters. This robust array of skills means a whole lot of success. It does not mean assured wins with every try, every goal achieved just as it was originally envisioned. We talked about resilience skills in previous articles. Those matter too. If you don’t know you can bounce back, you don’t risk. But here I want to visit a different nuance. A nuance about gumption.

In martial arts there is a way of thinking about a strike. You don’t picture punching the front of the thing you’re punching. You picture punching all of the way through. Folks who do the breaking of boards and blocks and trees and walls (not my cup of tea, but so I’ve been told) don’t think about hitting the board, they think about hitting the other side. In my less-board-breaking experience, we occupy space. We may occupy it even if someone else is already there. That ability to pick a goal and move to it, not to think about the boards, not to be deterred by what’s occupying that space, that’s gumption.

In life, you can put a bunch of urgent adrenalized energy into an effort to make a thing happen fast. Breaking a metaphorical board. Most people can’t do that. But fewer people can put measured, well-paced, balanced, but still entirely-determined effort into a long-term goal. Competent people decide what space to occupy and move into it. They move regardless of obstructions, “reasonable questions,” doubt from friends, family, and society at large. These folks move steadily until they reach their own goals and it’s “meh” to what anyone else thinks of that or the obstacles in their way.

Thank you for reading. Subscribers, feel free to discuss in the comments. Does this description of “gumption” resonate for you? I think this is a meta-trait, but I haven’t nailed down the foundational traits that make it up. Thoughts?