Proud and humble

Idon’t think much about Ted Nugent, but something he said in the 1970s has an outsized effect on how I live my life.

He said was something like, “If you’re going to be a gas station attendant, be the best gas station attendant in the world.” I take this to mean that no matter how high your aims, never believe that work is beneath you.

If you have a job to do, no matter how trivial that job may seem or how over-qualified you believe yourself to be, attack it with gusto. Do it right. And don’t be embarrassed to do it.

Leaving aside the inherently problematic fact that it’s Ted Nugent who said it, it’s interesting that these days his statement might seem problematic. Something called “quiet quitting” is fashionable. A lot of people aspire to so-called “lazy girl jobs,” the ideal of which The Wall Street Journal describes as “one that can be done from home, comes with a chill boss, ends at 5 p.m. sharp and earns between $60,000 and $80,000 a year—enough to afford the basic comforts of youngadult life, yet not enough to feel compelled to work overtime.”

I can see the allure of such work; we shouldn’t be strictly defined by what we do for a living, and many workers in this country might legitimately claim they’re being exploited by their employers. Wages are stagnant, even though the economy steams along. A corporate CEO can expect to earn hundreds of times a staffer’s salary. Hard work and loyalty often don’t even get you congratulations from your bosses.

On the other hand, there’s a concept in economics called the Pareto principle. It’s named after 19th-century Italian sociologist, economist and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto, a wild-eyed polymath who popularized the use of the term “elite” in social analysis.

Pareto observed that 20 percent of the Italian population owned 80 percent of the country’s property. In the 1940s, Joseph M. Juran, an American management consultant, was an advocate of Quality (which he used in a different way than Robert Pirsig, the “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” author discussed in last Sunday’s column; for Pirsig, Quality is recognizing and valuing the inherent character of whatever one is experiencing, be it touring on a motorcycle or having a root canal).

For Juran and his followers, Quality is a subjective attribute having to do with whether a product or service satisfies customer expectations. (For example, reasonable people might disagree on what constitutes a quality newspaper or Rolling Stones record. So much depends on customer expectations.)

Juran generalized and popularized Pareto’s theorem, codifying into a general principle holding that for many outcomes, roughly 80 percent of consequences come from 20 percent of causes. He applied it to the workplace, where he said roughly 20 percent (the “vital few”) performed about 80 percent of the work.

There’s nothing terribly scientific about the Pareto principle; it gained traction because it feels intuitive. It’s taught in management courses. I’ve worked in shops where I thought the ratio was somewhat higher or lower, but as a general rule it’s useful enough. Every organization has high producers and people who can’t quite screw it together.

That’s not to say that roughly 80 percent of any workforce is malingering deadwood, only that everybody has a different skill set and disposition toward work. If you’re in what you perceive is an ill-fitting dead-end job, you’ll likely be among the 80 percent who aren’t so productive. If I had a sales job, I’d

be one of the most unproductive members of the staff, even if I followed Ted’s advice to be the best sales rep I could be.

A lot of those in the latter group are good people; taken as a whole they’re probably more fun to hang with and saner than the psychopaths driven to set the curve. My experience is that there are very few intentional slackers, but there are people for whom work is not their top priority.

And people in the former group can be driven by any number of pathologies, some less healthy than others. Maybe they’re following the dictates of Ted Nugent and trying to be the best employee they can be. Maybe they are hyper-competitive like Michael Jordan and need to prove themselves over and over again. Maybe they are terrified of failure.

One of the reasons we like sports is because they are engineered to produce clear outcomes, to manufacture winners and losers. Many of us never get to experience a clean win in our working lives; most results are compromised and incremental.

We have metrics in our business now, and there is a slight correlation between what is quality work and what resonates with readers and is important to the larger journalistic mission we should (but don’t always) keep in mind. In a sense, my job has been game-ified; if you want to help me win, please share this column on your social media pages, but use a link and don’t copy and paste it.

I don’t know that I am among the 20 percent of this workplace population that produces 80 percent of the consequences. I am, after all, a former reporter who now mostly practices gasbaggery. But like most gasbags, I got here in part because I was a pretty good reporter and retain instincts and tools, and every now and then I ask uncomfortable questions. I do all right, though every now and then I have to—for my own mental health—write a column for myself, without giving too much thought as to how well it will show up in the reports that we’ve all agreed not to weaponize (for now).

This is one of those columns. We give out prizes in this business, but there are only a couple that matter. What matters most: the Pulitzers. This year a startlingly good writer and thinker from Alabama named Kyle Whitmire deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He entered the same portfolio in a smaller, less prestigious contest called the Green Eyeshade Awards. He came second in that contest. To this guy.

It was my fifth first-place in Green Eyeshade; I have four others for criticism. Some sportswriters I know have five, and Dave Barry has a cabin built of Green Eyeshade plaques, but five is a lot.

Winning a journalism contest is like making a hole in one; it’s mostly luck. Art Wall Jr. had something like 35 aces during his years on tour; no one would mistake him for a Jack Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer. But it’s not nothing either, you have to get the ball to the hole.

I can do that.

I don’t cheat you or my employer. Somebody once told me you could be proud and humble at the same time. I hope I’m that.