Muck and Brass
There’s a saying in literature, “where there’s muck, there’s brass.”
This is used to explain that dirty work is often accompanied by rewards. I also look at it the other way. “without muck, there’s no brass.”
The brass in surfing is riding a wave. The muck is paddling against many to get to one such.
The brass in product management is building cool features. The muck is resolving bugs and aligning stakeholders.
The brass in founding a startup is media mentions of fundraises and valuations and motivational talks. The muck is grinding away to build something meaningful for users, solving their irate queries, handling employee dissatisfaction, communicating vision/culture and much more.
Any activity you see, you can look at it through this lens. When you do, you will often realise
the muck is 99% of the activity but gets 1% (or even less) of the visibility. Everywhere, most successful people downplay the muck part of their journey, either because it’s not something that gets people interested or it’s seemingly negative to talk about it.
Since this part of the journey is downplayed, people assume it’s not there and enter in with wrong expectations. These wrong expectations leads to early failure.
Isn’t it better to just estimate muck from the outside? It is, but it’s almost impossible to do. You have to be in the ring to feel the punches.
Often the ROI of this muck is not clear. You can clearly measure impact by spending two weeks on a feature, you can’t do it as clearly by replying to customer support. The learnings you get from doing the muck parts of the job are much more intangible but often invaluable. Customer support gives you strong customer insight and paddling back gives you stamina and back strength.
This is also a surprisingly good decision-making lens. If there are two choices and one attracts you despite it having more muck, you are more likely to enjoy it and be much happier (and better) than others. As Djokovic says, “I like hitting the ball. You’ll be surprised how many tennis players there are out there who don’t.”
Brass attracts the wrong kind of people. Muck attracts the right kind of people. If you are putting out only brass, you will only get people attracted by that brass. This is the equivalent of certain jobs showcasing only the glamorous parts to attract people and then complaining that they didn’t get strong people. Companies who say upfront about their negatives are much more likely to attract good people.
You need to be able to keep an eye for the brass even when you are in the muck. This is harder to do for people who enjoy muck as an end in itself. Nothing wrong with that, in fact it’s eventually a better path to fulfilment, just that it may not lead to the best ‘material’ outcome. E.g. Woz liked assembling computers as an end in itself but it took Jobs to come and exploit the commercial angle of the same.
It’s hard to enjoy the muck, but if you choose the muck, embrace it gladly, the brass is much likely to follow.