Do the Thing Nobody Asked You To
In my first real job I did exactly what I was asked, well and on time, and I waited for someone to notice. They noticed that I was reliable. Reliable got me kept. It didn’t get me anything else, and I spent two years confused about why the man two desks over, who was no better at the job than I was, kept being handed the interesting work.
He was doing things nobody had asked him to do. Not dramatic things. He’d fixed a form everyone complained about. He’d written up a process that lived in three people’s heads. He’d noticed a problem coming and mentioned it before it arrived. None of it was in his job description. All of it was why he got the next one.
What asked-for work signals
Doing what you’re told, well, signals competence. It’s necessary and it’s not enough, because competence is the entry fee. Everyone who’s kept their job is competent. What distinguishes people is whether they’ve started acting like the work is theirs, and the only visible evidence of that is work nobody assigned.
Not hours. Ownership.
This isn’t about staying late. I’ve known people who worked seventy-hour weeks doing exactly what was asked and never advanced. It’s about looking at the thing in front of you as if you were responsible for the whole of it, not just your slice, and then acting on what you see. That often takes less time than the extra hours, because it’s aimed.
Where to find it
Listen for complaints. Every “someone should really” is an opening. The spreadsheet everyone hates. The question every new hire asks. The client who’s quietly unhappy. The step in the process that exists for a reason nobody remembers. Pick one, small enough to finish in a week, and fix it without a meeting.
Do it, then tell them
Don’t ask permission for small things; asking turns a gift into a request and makes someone responsible for a decision they didn’t want. Fix the form, then say “I rewrote the intake form, here’s the new one, let me know if anything’s off.” Nine times out of ten the answer is thanks. The tenth time you learn something about the organisation, and that’s useful too.
In your own business, it’s the whole thing
When I started working for myself, I realised nobody was ever going to ask me to do anything again. Every piece of growth was unasked-for work by definition. The people who struggle with self-employment are often the ones who were excellent at assigned tasks and had never built the muscle of generating their own. Build it while you’re still employed. It’s free practice.
The quiet effect
People start bringing you problems, because you’ve shown you solve them. That’s how the interesting work arrives: not as a promotion, but as a gradual shift in who people think of first. Within a year or two it’s formalised, and everyone, including you, has forgotten it started with a form.
This week
Find one “someone should really.” Make it yours. Finish it by Friday. Tell them afterwards.
Launch list
Be there on day one.
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The book itself — 40 laws in ten parts, 320 pages, each ending with The Work — is funded first on Kickstarter.