Doing Elegant Work
Is your work elegant?
Elegant (adj):
1) pleasingly graceful and stylish.
2) pleasingly ingenious and simple.
Elegance gives us a powerful word for something attractive, simple, and effective. It is everything it needs to be and – critically – nothing extra.
We use “elegant” to describe a curious variety of things: well-designed dresses, well-practiced movements, and powerful scientific theories.
But even when the product of our work is elegant (like a dress), we don’t often think of our work itself as elegant.
I have been marveling at the art of “Doing The Right Work At The Right Time.”
In fiction, a story exemplifying this is The Dark Forest, the second book in the “Three Body Problem” trilogy. (Spoilers ahead).
The hero (Luo Ji) does not have a climactic battle, exerting superhuman willpower and persistence to overcome evil.
Instead, he quietly learns the nature of the universe over the course of many years. His “Checkmate” move is to send one short message to the enemy. This tapping of fingers on the keyboard – just the right strokes, and nothing more – saves Earth and humanity.
That’s an elegant solution.
We don’t see elegant victories in many stories.
To me, this void shows our blind spot around this virtue.
We could imagine an entire career being completed within a few years.
Tom Anderson (“MySpace Tom”) built and sold MySpace in 6 years, retiring with over $50 million. He did the right work at the right time.
“But he just got lucky,” I can hear you screaming at me from thousands of miles away…
Yes, he did “get” lucky.
(To speak of "get" luck rather than "earn" luck is another post.)
A more useful observation is: Elegant work looks like luck.
If you invested $5,000 into Bitcoin in 2011 and held it until 2021, you would have over $10,000,000.
You could have just bought Bitcoin and gone fishing. You wouldn’t have needed to hire anyone, persuade anyone, or read any quarterly reports.
That would be extremely elegant investing.
Were you lucky? Or elegant? Only you know how much conviction you had in that investment, and whether your prediction was close to the actual outcome.
When someone does only one thing, but that thing is the right thing at the right time… is it luck, or impeccable elegance?
We can only discern this over many iterations of the same game.
Warren Buffett won the same game for 80 years. We know for damn sure it wasn’t just luck. He does elegant work.
For Warren Buffett, his work is reading, speaking with a handful of close advisors, and (infrequently) making a decision to buy or sell stock.
This makes the list of things he is NOT doing exceptionally long.
(Sometimes I wonder what Warren Buffett’s “Inbox” looks like.)
How do we do elegant work?
Doing elegant work is about doing the right thing at the right time – and nothing else.
My first instinct to try to achieve this was to “get better at prioritization.” I know it is an area I could personally improve on.
I like the way Blake puts this:
The word ‘ruthless’ is helpful here because it reminds you that doing this will be emotionally painful. You will almost certainly feel unkind in the course of being better at prioritizing (no matter what your priorities are).
But “get better at prioritization” is not a comprehensive prescription for doing elegant work.
To find the first thing to do, I felt I had to put 1,000 (ok, 100) things in their proper order, before I could start at the top and work my way down.
Lists feel good to make, but they are a flawed way to plan. By the time I get to task 5, many things have changed. It is not necessarily true that “#5 from last week” is “#1 today.”
Prioritization causes psychological pain because you are still working from a giant list of “shoulds,” knowing full well it is impossible to complete this list.
Through the lens of Elegant Work – doing #1 is what matters.
What matters is not items 2 - 100, but having the time, perspective, and courage to do the right work at the right time.
Ask “What is #1?” all the time.
And this is the next trap.
If I don’t know what #1 is, I often pick up a cuddly, unintimidating task at random and work on it. This is more like theatrical procrastination than elegant work.
If it’s not clear what #1 is, my #1 task is to figure out what #1 is!
We must constantly reorient around the highest and best use of our time, given the current environment and set of opportunities.
Shane Parrish makes this abstract point concrete by pointing out that “An empty calendar is a competitive advantage.”
How do we get an empty calendar?
Not by slotting in the first 10 priorities into the calendar, but by clearing the calendar to be sure #1 gets well-chosen and well-completed.
The correct first focus and skill here is proactive elimination. Understand and accept (perhaps with some grieving) that #5-#100 are unlikely to get done (ever). Acknowledge that truth early, so it doesn’t weigh you down and interfere with completing the first priority.
Elegant work is doing the next, most necessary thing. And nothing else.
(Lots more to explore here, but that’s all I’ve got coherent for now. Part 1/n. See you again soon.)
Part of how I try to do Elegant work is partnering with Athena.
Athena is a company completely dedicated to providing top-caliber executive assistants from the Philippines. I’ve had a conversation with Athena’s CEO and CCO in episode 38 of this podcast.
Get VIP perks when you sign up with my code: athenago.me/eric-jorgenson