Words from Collier, huh? Sounds fancy, maybe.
But it ain’t. Not really. It’s just about cutting through the bull, you know? We spend so much time, especially in our fancy office jobs, talking in circles. Making things sound more complicated than they are. I’ve been there, done that, got the t-shirt, probably stained it with coffee from all the endless meetings.
I remember this one time, I was absolutely stuck. Banging my head against a wall with this project. We thought it was super complex. We had charts, diagrams, presentations, and meetings about the damn meetings. Everyone was “aligning” and “synergizing” and spewing out all that corporate jargon. Total nonsense, if I’m being honest. We were getting nowhere, just spinning our wheels and patting ourselves on the back for looking busy.
Then, I stumbled across something, can’t recall if it was an old book or maybe a documentary I watched late one night. It was about coal miners. These folks, their entire life boiled down to one thing: getting the coal out of the ground. Simple as that. Dangerous work? You bet. Hard labor? Absolutely. But the goal was crystal clear. And the way they talked, man, no frills. Just straight to the point. Something like, “If it ain’t digging, it ain’t helping.” That kind of directness.
And it just clicked for me. All our “strategic initiatives” and our “paradigm shifts” – what actual coal were we trying to dig out? What was the real, tangible thing we were aiming for? Most of the time, if we were honest, we couldn’t even answer that simple question. We were just digging holes to fill other holes, making a lot of noise in the process.
Now, you might be thinking, how do I know this isn’t just me rambling some philosophical stuff? Well, let me tell you a bit about my Uncle Joe. He wasn’t a coal miner, no, but he worked in a factory his whole life. Hands like rough leather, voice like he gargled with rocks. Sharp as a tack, though, just not in that “multiple degrees” way people get impressed by these days. I was a young buck back then, just landed my first “proper” job, feeling pretty pleased with myself and my shiny new diploma. I was grumbling to him one evening about some office politics, some manager who was a real piece of work, how my “genius ideas” weren’t getting any traction.
He just sat there, listened patiently, nodding now and then. Took a long drag from his cigarette, squinted at me through the smoke, and said, “Son, you get paid to do a job. So, do the job. If they ain’t listening to your ideas, either they’re fools, or your idea ain’t as genius as you think, or you’re just not explaining it right. Figure out which one it is. Complaining don’t load the truck.“
Man, that just shut me right up. “Complaining don’t load the truck.” That’s a collier’s kind of wisdom, right there, even if it came from a factory worker. It’s all about the fundamentals. Are you actually producing something useful? Are you making things happen? Or are you just adding to the noise?
- Are we really focused on the actual work, the “coal”?
- Or are we just getting lost in the process, the “digging for digging’s sake”?
- Is this specific task, this meeting, this report, getting us closer to loading that truck?
Ever since that conversation, whenever things start to feel overly complicated, when the jargon gets too thick, or when I’m in yet another meeting that seems to be going nowhere fast, I try to ask myself: “What’s the coal here? And are we genuinely digging, or just playing in the dirt?” Sometimes, the answer is a bit embarrassing, makes you realize how far off track you can drift. It ain’t about being dumb or simplistic; it’s about being real. About getting to the core of what matters. That’s what I try to hang onto, anyway. It’s a daily battle, though. We all like to sound important, don’t we?
