There is a specific kind of work-related frustration that shows up when you build something at your job that clearly worked, and nothing about your life changes because of it.
It’s hard to name at the time. It feels like you have a difficult boss, or an ungrateful company, or bad timing. Sometimes those are true. But often what you’re actually feeling is a hard limit built into the seat you’re sitting in. Nobody bothers to tell you about that limit, because most people don’t know it’s there.
I ran into it at twenty-four, and it took me ten years to figure out what had happened.
The Beer Night
I was managing a restaurant when our GM sat me down one afternoon and told me the beer we brewed on-site cost us about ten cents a pint. Ten cents. Beer was our highest-margin product because we brewed it ourselves. No middlemen. His point was that we should be more aggressive about upselling.
My brain went somewhere else.
At ten cents a pint, we could sell it for a dollar and still make a profit, as long as we brought in enough people to cover the staff on shift. So I came back to him with an idea for a dollar beer night. I pitched Sunday, the slowest shift of the week.
Less than a month after we launched it, the bar was so packed on Sunday nights that we called an emergency management meeting to figure out how to handle the volume. We hired bouncers. We roped off the non-bar parts of the restaurant. We staffed up the kitchen, which was getting slammed every Sunday.
I remember finishing one of those Sunday nights, twenty-four years old, exhausted and exhilarated by something I had built.
The Ceiling I Hit
Yet nothing really changed for me. There were no parades thrown in my honor. My paycheck didn’t go up. My life didn’t get easier. If anything, it got harder, because Sunday nights turned into the most hectic shift of the week, and none of the other managers wanted anything to do with it. I could have doubled the results. Tripled them. The size of what I built had nothing to do with what I took home.
I loved making something come alive. And I had put myself in a seat where making something come alive was a problem to be managed, not an opportunity that opened up my future.
The Words I Didn’t Have at 24
I didn’t have the language for any of that at the time. The words came about a decade later from a strange place: a Jeff Bezos letter to Amazon shareholders.
Bezos was making the case for taking big swings on new business ideas, and he used baseball as an analogy. The thing about baseball, he said, is that it has what he called a truncated outcome distribution. Nerd speak for: no matter how perfectly you connect with the ball, the most you can score on one swing is four runs. That’s the cap.
But in business, he said, every once in a while you step up to the plate, and you can score a thousand runs.
That was the thing I had felt on the restaurant floor and couldn’t name. I was swinging as hard as I could. I was in a seat where the most I could ever score was four. No matter what.
Michael Jordan Made His Fortune Somewhere Else
Once I could see the cap, I started to see it in other places.
Michael Jordan, at the peak of his career, earned about $90 million in salary over fifteen seasons. That is an amazing number for the era, and a testament to how much leverage even a dominant NBA player had in the eighties and nineties. Today, Jordan is worth roughly $4 billion.
That gap did not come from how he invested his salary. His salary was his cap. Four runs. Grand slam.
The billions came from the other side of the table. His Nike deal, where he negotiated a piece of the Jordan brand business he helped create. And the Charlotte Hornets, which he bought for a few hundred million and later sold a majority stake in at a three-billion-dollar valuation.
The ‘jumpman’, arguably the greatest basketball player in NBA history, only became a billionaire because he jumped out of his role as a player and into the role of owner.
I never had Jordan’s talent or the ability to earn $90 million as a restaurant manager. But I made a choice that changed my life more than any raise or promotion ever could. I changed the game I was playing.
What This Means for You
I ran into the employee ceiling a decade before I read Bezos describe the dynamic that explained it. I just thought I had a bad boss, because I couldn’t see how it was the system that was limiting me.
You can spend a career taking swings to score a run or two, maybe even four if you’re great. Most people do. And most people never even consider whether there might be another option.
There is. It’s the seat of ownership, where your swing isn’t capped and every once in a while, you step up to the plate and can score a thousand runs.
You don’t have to swing right away. You don’t have to leave the job today. But if you’ve been feeling the disconnect I felt on those Sunday nights, and you couldn’t quite name it, this might be it.
The ceiling you can feel but can’t see is the thing to notice.
I still strike out a lot. But every once in a while, I step up to the plate and I have a swing that drives home far more than four runs.
One Last Thing
If you’ve done something at work you were genuinely proud of, and it didn’t change what came home with you at the end of the day, what did that feel like at the time, and what do you make of it now?
