We’re Not Curing Cancer

I worked with a chief once who was always happy. Bubbly, outspoken, never seemed rattled. One day I asked him how he didn’t stress himself out.

He said, “We’re not curing cancer. If you’re writing the contract to cure cancer, be stressed out. Got it?” Then he pointed out that 99 percent of the things we do are not that. So relax.

I’ve carried that line for years. This piece is about why it matters, especially for the perfectionists, and why I think our whole career field needs to hear it.

Everybody thinks they’re the most important

Every career field tells itself it’s the most important one in the building.

Finance defends the budget; they’re responsible for billions. Security Forces defends the base; they’re the first line of defense. Contracting determines the fate of companies, in some cases literally.

All true. And the truth underneath it is that we’re all important. Nobody carries the base alone.

But let’s keep it on us in contracting. We’re nothing if we don’t have the people we support. Think about it. We have no mission without Security Forces, Force Support, CE, LRS. We don’t often write contracts to support ourselves. Everything we buy is for someone else’s mission.

That puts us in a unique spot. We touch almost every unit on the base, so we’re in a better position than nearly anyone to recognize how important everyone is. That should make us humble, not self-important.

There’s research on what happens when people actually see who their work is for. Adam Grant ran a study with university fundraising callers, a tough, repetitive job with lots of rejection. One group got to spend a few minutes with a student whose scholarship came from the money they raised. A month later, that group was spending 142 percent more time on the phone and bringing in 171 percent more money. The groups that never met the student didn’t change.¹

Your scholarship student is the cop at the gate, the CE crew, the LRS troop. They’re why the contract exists. Remembering that does more for your work than another round of self-importance.

So let’s not take ourselves so seriously

Here’s the part some of you won’t like: at the end of the day, our job is simply to put work on paper and pay someone to do it.

Dumb it down.

Solicit. Evaluate. Award.

Or dumber: research stuff, ask for stuff, get stuff, pay for stuff.

That’s really the way it should be, and I think our culture needs to start changing in that direction.

I don’t need a 40-page requirements document to buy toner that has a part number. I do need a well-defined requirement. Clear isn’t the same as long. A janitor performing on a 100-page PWS is still a janitor on a 5-page document, doing janitor stuff.

If you’re a perfectionist, you can write the perfect contract in a year. Or you could throw together a simple, clear document, hire the right experts, and get the same outcome. The contractor is the expert in janitorial work. You don’t have to be. So what are we doing here?

Perfect doesn’t perform better

This is where the perfectionists need to hear the research, because perfectionism doesn’t do what we think it does.

A team of researchers pulled together 95 studies of perfectionism at work, covering about 25,000 people.² They found no clear link between perfectionism and job performance. Perfectionists didn’t reliably do better work. What they did reliably have was more burnout, stress, anxiety, workaholism, and depression.

All the cost, none of the payoff.

If you read the first piece, you know I learned this one the hard way.

Staying late proves nothing

The perfectionist is usually the last one in the building. And I’ve noticed people who stay late, night after night, usually have one of three things going on: poor time management, trying to impress the boss, or something going on at home. None of those is “they have more work than everyone else,” and none of them gets fixed by staying later.

Poor time management

This one is the most fixable, and it’s usually not laziness. More often it’s the perfectionist redoing work that was already done, the person who never learned to say no, or the one who gets interrupted all day and can only focus after 1630, when the phones stop.

The extra hours buy less than you think. John Pencavel, an economist at Stanford, studied munitions workers in World War I and found output rose with hours up to about 50 a week, then flattened. Seventy-hour weeks produced barely more than 56-hour weeks.³ It’s factory data from a century ago, not office work, but the shape is familiar to anyone who’s rewritten the same paragraph at 1900. Past a point, you’re just doing tired work. The fix isn’t more hours. It’s finding where the day is leaking.

Trying to impress the boss

Here’s the uncomfortable part: this one often works. And that’s a leadership problem, not a worker problem.

Kimberly Elsbach and Dan Cable studied what they call passive face time, just being seen at work. People seen during normal hours got labeled “dependable.” People seen outside normal hours, early or late, got upgraded to “committed” and “dedicated.”⁴ Managers mostly didn’t realize they were doing it. They were rating presence, not work.

Erin Reid studied consultants at an elite firm where the ideal was an 80-hour week.⁵ Some of them quietly worked 50 or 60 and just made it look like they were always on. Managers couldn’t tell the difference. Both groups got the same rave reviews and promotions, and Reid found no evidence the people actually working 80 hours accomplished more.

So when staying late impresses the boss, it’s because the boss is rewarding the wrong signal. (Same trap as rewarding meeting attendance when you want technical experts; more on that in Make Rank Because of the Work.) Rate the output, not the parking lot.

Something going on at home

This is the one to handle most carefully, because it’s the one where a leader can actually help. Some people stay late because the office is easier than home. Money stress. A rough marriage. A house that’s too quiet. Sometimes the late nights are the first visible sign that something’s wrong.

The right move isn’t a lecture about work-life balance. It’s noticing. Then a quiet, private, “Hey, you’ve been here late a lot. Everything good?” Most of the time you’ll get a shrug, and that’s fine; they know you noticed. And if something is going on, get them to the people who can help: the First Sergeant, the chaplain, the professionals.

The fair exception

Sometimes the work really does demand it. End of fiscal year. A deployment surge. A real emergency. Nobody’s arguing you should walk out at 1630 on September 30th with a stack of unawarded actions. The test is simple: is it temporary, and is there a real reason? If late nights are the exception, that’s the job. If they’re the norm, it’s one of the three above.

Stop being so damn hard on yourself

Do what you want to do. Have your own brand, your own flair. Build your documents the way you like them. That’s all good. Just remember the outcome we want: the customer gets what they need, the contractor gets paid, the mission keeps moving.

And stop being so damn hard on yourself for not remembering a D&F. Because the D&F did nothing. It didn’t make the toner show up faster or the janitor clean better. If it’s required, do it. Just don’t lose sleep over it. Fix it, learn it, move on.

If you’re worried that going easy on yourself will make you sloppy, the research says the opposite. Juliana Breines and Serena Chen ran four experiments on what happens after people fail.⁶ The people who treated themselves with self-compassion, instead of beating themselves up or pumping themselves up, were more motivated to improve. In one experiment, after failing a hard test, the self-compassion group studied longer for the retake than the others.

Being hard on yourself feels like accountability. Mostly it just feels bad. Being kind to yourself makes it safe to look at the mistake, and that’s what actually fixes it.

If you’re the leader

Your shop takes its stress level from you. If you treat every buy like it cures cancer, so will they. If you laugh about the toner order and fix the missing D&F without a lecture, they learn where to spend their worry.

Same with the clock. Your people watch when you leave. If you stay until 1900 every night, you’ve set the standard whether you meant to or not, and the ones trying to impress you will start staying until 1915. So go home on time, on purpose, and let them see it. Then judge them by what they got done, not when they left.

Save your intensity for the contracts that deserve it: the ones where lives, the mission, or real money are on the line. Your people will believe you when it counts, because you didn’t spend it on toner.

The short version

1. We’re all important. Contracting is nothing without the people we support.
2. Remember who it’s for. Every contract has a customer. Go meet them.
3. Dumb it down. Research stuff, ask for stuff, get stuff, pay for stuff.
4. Clear beats long. A well-defined requirement doesn’t need 40 pages.
5. Perfect doesn’t perform better. It just burns you out.
6. Staying late proves nothing. Rate the output, not the parking lot, and quietly check on the ones who never go home.
7. Go easy on yourself. You’ll fix more, not less.
8. Go home on time. Your people are watching.
9. Save the stress for the contract that cures cancer.