Why Being Useful Isn’t Always That Useful

The difference between what your career rewards you are and what you actually care about.

Photo by Elimende Inagella on Unsplash

The highest compliment my old boss could give was to call you useful. Being called useful by her made me glow. To be real, I’d already been striving for usefulness for years before I met her. She just gave me the word. It’s so precise. Such a specific compliment to pay to someone’s work. “Oh! That’s useful.”

As a trainee during grad school, my clinical supervisor would raise an eyebrow when that word came up. She pushed back on how I used it, about myself and about clients. “What does that even mean?” In her frame, everything is information. You’re not there to sort for useful and discard the rest. You’re there to sit with it. You’re there to be curious.

I had been doing that filtering so automatically I didn’t know I was doing it. I’d been trained to do it. It’s what my system rewarded. It wasn’t until I got curious that I recognized it as something to question.

The system values my usefulness. But being useful doesn’t dictate my value as a person.

That’s what I call a cog quality.

Cog qualities are whatever your particular system rewards. Work-first. Money maker. Get the title. Be palatable. The qualities that make you an excellent cog in the machine. AKA: being useful.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, especially in the context of work, to be useful. My old boss was a badass (still is). Cog qualities are not inherently good or bad. You need them to operate. Pursuing them is a rational response to the conditions you’re in.

The problem is not the qualities. It’s what happens when you lose track of the difference between what the system values and what you value. When cog qualities stop being tools and start feeling like proof of something. Like the answer to the question of who you are.

Like your value as a person lies in being useful. It doesn’t.

Work systems train you to want what they need you to want. Over time, you start to value yourself based on cog qualities not because they serve you, but because you’ve internalized them as evidence of your worth. As proof.

When that happens, something quieter gets crowded out. The things you care about that have no metric. The work that lights you up that no one is measuring. You tune it out. Not because it stopped mattering. Because the system has no use for it.

And then it starts to feel gone.

This is a feedback loop. The less you hear the signal from inside, the more you chase the metrics from outside. The more you chase the metrics, the harder it gets to hear the signal.

Naming the difference is how you interrupt the feedback loop.

The opposite of your cog qualities: your real values. The things that matter to you, the things that give you energy and purpose.

Three questions I use to tell your cog qualities from your real values.

• If there were no salary, no title, no recognition attached to it, would you still want it? Cog qualities tend to evaporate without an audience. Real values don’t.

• Where does the energy come from? Real values generate energy, even when the work is hard. Cog qualities consume it, even when you’re succeeding.

• What happens when you finally get it? With cog qualities, the goalpost moves. With real values, the satisfaction feels complete.

When you can answer these honestly, the feedback loop has less grip. You are not abandoning the cog qualities. They still do real work. You are just no longer mistaking them for the whole picture.

The world of work has always had a cog problem. Right now it’s louder than usual.

The work that cannot be automated comes from the most human place.

The Values Sort is a tool that can help you tune into your real values. It takes about ten minutes. It’s free. The results are yours. Link here.