The Empty Box

When my son was small and interested in science after binge-watching Sid the Science Kid we enrolled him in a study of behavior and the brain. You know, for fun. He spent a couple of mornings at the University of Maryland playing with graduate students, including taking the famous Marshmallow Test. (I’m sure he ate the marshmallow immediately – I would have.) After all the fun and games the researchers sent us a video of their interactions, and we sat down to watch it as a family. We saw this little drama play out from behind the one-way-glass:

Graduate student comes into the room where my cherubic four year old sits. She is carrying a wrapped box, a gift, and tells Noah it is for him. She hands it over, tells him there is a toy inside, and he can unwrap it while she is out. She leaves him alone. Noah shakes the box and examines it, and then rips open the paper and opens the flaps. He looks blankly inside. There is nothing there. He turns it upside down and shakes it. Nothing. Finally he gently puts the box back down on the table and says sadly to himself, “Empty.”

That word, and the dejected look on my four year old’s face will forever be my personal definition of the word Disappointment.

I was reminded of my son’s brush with science the other day when talking with colleagues about the difficulty of asking for leave. People often don’t take all the leave they accrue – they don’t stay home when they are sick, they don’t take all their vacation time or work while on vacation, they are nervous about announcing they’ll be on parental leave. It isn’t (just) that people love their work and are workaholics. People don’t take the leave they are entitled to because they are afraid to disappoint their boss and their team.

“Disappoint” was the word we used, but the disappointment of a boss who needs to back-fill for you while you are away is of a different character than the disappointment of a four year old with an empty box. To say you don’t want to disappoint your boss and so you must work while on vacation is to say: “I am important to my boss, and I don’t want her to be disappointed in my work.” Which is true and good.

But why, really, don’t you want to disappoint your boss? Are you afraid he will look at you like my son looked into that box full of nothing but dashed hopes? No. Not wanting to disappoint your boss isn’t actually about your boss; not wanting to disappoint your boss is really about you. When we say (or feel) that we don’t want to disappoint our boss, what we are really saying is that we don’t want our boss to think badly of us. Now think about what it means to say “I don’t want my boss to think badly of me for taking the leave I am entitled to.”

We are coming to work sick, calling into meetings from the beach, and fretting about announcing pregnancies because we worry that bosses will think less of us. Will think we are not team players, are not super performers, are not perfect. We are worried they will have some negative thoughts about us, and that idea can be intolerable.

But what if we could tolerate the idea that other people have negative thoughts about us sometimes? What if we truly believed that we can (and inevitably will) disappoint the boss occasionally and still thrive? There is no way to both live a complete life and to never let anyone down at work. Not being able to tolerate that reality is a recipe for madness, for a rat race where we can never be fully human, with all the needs and joys that humanity brings. And still, we’d disappoint people.

That day in the lab, after my son opened the empty box, the graduate student came back in and made a big show of slapping her head and saying “Oh, silly me! I forgot to put the toy in the box,” and she handed him a windup dinosaur. Disappointment faded, and life went on. Let us assume the best of each other, that we are all better than four year old boys in managing inconvenient surprises, and that we don’t hold people’s humanity against them. That maybe, just maybe, we actually appreciate them more for it.

And even if we don’t – if someone actually does think badly of us for doing something so radical as taking leave – well, we can tolerate that, too. Life isn’t about avoiding disappointment.

Oh, and by the way – I’ll be out of the office over the holidays. See you in January.