Performing Performative Performances
This is my twenty-third post in the Advent of Writing series.
Today I’m doing what I’d call my first rant. It’s about online nonsense and viral ideas that don’t make much sense to me. I’ll complain a bit, but I’ll also try to make sense of it by the end.
If you don’t work on the holidays you’re ngmi
When I studied at uni, we had these unspoken pissing contests about who spent the most hours in the library before exams. Staying late at night was a flex. That later turned into flashy internships and bragging about how deep into the night you had to grind at the office.
It was, by any reasonable definition, extremely performative. Most of the studying wasn’t efficient, nor particularly meaningful. Anyone looking at it from the outside would have called it a waste of time. It was mostly driven by peer pressure and mimetic games.
We were hungry, in our early twenties, and this kind of behavior fit the picture. I didn’t think it made much sense even back then, but I played along anyway.
The unfortunate part is that some people carry this mindset far beyond their uni days.
Before going further, let’s address the obvious objections. I can already hear them forming.
Without hard work, you’ll never do anything remarkable. True.
Plenty of successful people in sports, business, and art worked insane hours to get where they are. Also true.
None of this argues against hard work itself. It argues against what hard work often looks like.
I’ll quote Karri Saarinen, CEO of Linear here:
Working 80 hours on low-quality tasks isn’t the hard part. The hard part is driving meaningful growth by finding leverage, building systems, and advantage.
Putting in the hours matters. Walking the extra mile when no one else does matters. Pushing yourself to the limit can matter if you want to achieve something exceptional. But that alone isn’t enough, and it’s not the hardest part.
The harder and more important question is what you’re working hard on. Which direction you choose. Where you’re actually applying effort.
Finding real competitive advantages and building systems that outlive you are what compound over time. At least for me, those ideas rarely appear during long grinding sessions. They show up while walking, sitting on the metro, brushing your teeth.
Those moments of thinking, not grinding, tend to be the ones that matter most.
And those are the factors that will ultimately determine whether you’re going to make it or not, however you define making it.
The company’s AI enablement is through the roof
This leads naturally to vanity metrics. Measuring hours worked is one of the most common ones, but it’s far from the only example.
If this story from this tweet/X post sounds familiar, you know what I’m talking about:
Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.
$30 per seat per month.
$1.4 million annually.
I called it “digital transformation.”
The board loved that phrase.
They approved it in eleven minutes.
No one asked what it would actually do.
Including me.
I told everyone it would “10x productivity.”
That’s not a real number.
But it sounds like one.
HR asked how we’d measure the 10x.
I said we’d “leverage analytics dashboards.”
They stopped asking.
Three months later I checked the usage reports.
47 people had opened it.
12 had used it more than once.
One of them was me.
I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.
It took 45 seconds.
Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.
But I called it a “pilot success.”
Success means the pilot didn’t visibly fail.
The CFO asked about ROI.
I showed him a graph.
The graph went up and to the right.
It measured “AI enablement.”
I made that metric up.
He nodded approvingly.
We’re “AI-enabled” now.
I don’t know what that means.
But it’s in our investor deck.
A senior developer asked why we didn’t use Claude or ChatGPT.
I said we needed “enterprise-grade security.”
He asked what that meant.
I said “compliance.”
He asked which compliance.
I said “all of them.”
He looked skeptical.
It’s easy to make fun of large corporations for chasing vanity metrics like this. But startups and individuals fall into the same trap all the time.
Chasing the next funding round instead of actual customers. Comparing who in the friend group has the best 10k PR instead of focusing on long-term health. Optimizing for numbers that look good rather than outcomes that matter.
The examples are endless.
If you think during the holidays you’re gmi
This brings me to the final point.
If you deliberately create time and space to think about your life and your actions, you’ll be better off.
I don’t literally mean that this has to happen during the holidays. If you only do it once a year, you’re probably not doing it often enough. Do it whenever it makes sense for you.
Imagine being one of the first humans to sail across the Atlantic and measuring your course once before departure, then just committing to it. That would be a terrible strategy. A better strategy is to check your position regularly. Adjust if you realized your initial measurements were off.
Your life isn’t much different.
When was the last time you course-corrected?
If you don’t have a clear answer, maybe now’s a good time.