It’s ok to not have wins

Once upon a time there was a tendency to just work and do your job right. Everything was so smooth and sound in the forest of raising economy and stable salaries until the great villain dragon came to the forest and started firing up tree by tree, vanishing vast square meters of peaceful calmness of the woods. And that monster is called — the market

So what if it’s ok to NOT have wins?

In this post, I’d like to think about nowadays market trends, where some employee must fill the CV with wins and actual results, showing that they not just made their job but raised that company from ashes and only because of them the company survived and prospered. I mean that current stereotype is that you have to make your work so good that it always has to include ideas of rising strategy growth, bursting results and very high revenue or whatever else they think is important, oh, the retention and MRR, of course

But how about simple honest job or simply a job? Where you have to do what you do, know it good and just do it? What if you work day to day and just keep quality without that game changing things? What if your job is not to bring the corpse to life but just keep it afloat or actually do something that is never related to “increased \[this] x5 times per 2 weeks” madness?

Take real examples: one backender can work on functions and do perfect code. How can it be measured with that successful success? If you learn and grow yourself, then you’ll obviously stumble upon some efficient tricks or code patterns, so you’ll become that winner of position, but for him this would just be yet another day

Or take 3D artists. They are great at what they are doing: drawing or creating beautiful art, and someone likes it or not. Then how can it be applied to company’s burst on the market? Yes, maybe they can create something that big that will really blow the world’s mind, yet this would be their just another day, namsayin?

But here’s the strange part — at some moment the market stopped understanding what normal work looks like. Everything must be quantified, decorated, framed in some absurd formula of impact, as if the only job worth doing is the one that sets the earth on fire

Basic stability became invisible. Predictability became boring. Quiet competence became a flaw, something you have to apologise for, or worse — turn into a fireworks show just to be noticed

The funny thing is that most companies don’t run on breakthrough moments. They run on people who don’t break things. They run on those who show up, do the work, and leave systems better or at least not worse than they found them

The market doesn’t need more heroes. It needs fewer idiots breaking working systems

And yet here we are, pretending that only chaos framed as victory counts. And yes, you may say this is a play of little violin, but I think this is how we just see it. This world changes and it’s never broken, and this is just us in this period of time observing just another wave of changes that the same people do

You matter and every of that laid brick per day creates this wall of madness or success metrics. It’s just how the world works now, and where it turned

Because here is the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to accept: it’s ok to not have wins. It’s ok to not burn the world down and rebuild it from ashes every quarter. It’s ok if your work doesn’t fit into a “boosted x5 in 14 days” headline

Quality doesn’t always scream. Sometimes it just shows up every day and does the job