Many careers have follow up work:
- I'll send a follow up email, summarizing this conversation
- What are our next steps?
- How will we measure success?
- What do you think they thought of the presentation?
But a lot of careers/jobs don't have follow up work. You just show up, do a great job, and you're done. You go back out on your way.
A friend and coworker once told me a story of how his wife was in charge of opening a restaurant. As one does, he became a volunteer and his job was to greet everyone coming into the door. "Hello! Welcome! Right this way!" and "enjoy your evening!". That was it. At the end of the day, he was done. The job was complete.
We were both a little envious of that life.
Relatedly, I was lucky to sit at a chef's table on a dinner date one evening. This gave us a view of the entire kitchen, including the enormous cooktop the staff used to create & deliver the meal every evening. But the best part of this view was actually toward the end. After all the dishes were plated and the kitchen was "closing", they began the cleanup & turn down process.
- scraping the cooktop
- turning up the heat & deglazing all of the evening's residue with some clean water
- scraping again
- cutting the heat and wiping down the cooktop.
- No really, thoroughly wiping it down. Like both hands on the rag and going back and forth, like you're in an ab workout.
- and so on
At the end, the kitchen was reverted back to the state it was in at the start of the day. Perfectly clean, everything in its place, and ready for the next day.
No follow up emails. No "campaigns" or KPIs or anything.
It was beautiful.
What if playing the long game (the one with all the follow up work) is just doing that, but every day?