People said I did the impossible, but that’s wrong: I merely did something so boring that nobody else had been willing to do it.

Embrace the Grind – Jacob Kaplan-Moss

I was reminded this morning that much of technical support work is to continue trying something until it works.
“I rebooted already.”
Try it again.
“Now it works.”

My wife’s phone started booting in a loop this morning.
I held the power button down until it restarted and then it loaded properly.

I joked about it needing the hands of a seasoned technical support technician.
Likely, it just needed another reboot. More forceful than the last.

I thought about a recent post from Jacob Kaplan-Moss about Embracing the Grind. And I’ll admit I rolled my eyes a little bit. I thought it was going to be another missive about working hard and through hard work comes success.

And it was, but not in the way I expected.

I often have people newer to the tech industry ask me for secrets to success. There aren’t many, really, but this secret — being willing to do something so terrifically tedious that it appears to be magic — works in tech too.

I think about that a lot. Especially in my early days starting out when I would have computers running disk scans to repair issues, trying to recover deleted files without backup, or scanning to remove malware. Sometimes it took multiple scans that would run for hours, sometimes overnight. But eventually I’d find success.

There is magic in hard work. But it doesn’t have to be 90 hour work weeks or 17 hour days. Sometimes just persistence. A little bit of effort over a long period of time. A mundane task slowly worked through.

This is the grind I embrace. The slow advance of a tireless zombie hoard. They’re not fast. They’re not hard working. But their determined. And in the event, their simple determination is what makes them dangerous.