TBM 429: How To Thrive At Work When You Think Too Much

This post is important. It is the introduction for a book that’ll I’ll probably never publish. Why? I already have! I’ve written it across countless TBM posts (multiple books worth), but have had trouble getting to the crux of it. Over the weekend I had a breakthrough. It has been sitting under my nose with posts like 20 Things I’ve Learned as a Systems (Over) Thinker and How (And Why) We Help. It was yelling out from this LinkedIn post that has 1400 reactions and counting.

But the insight was elusive. It was much more core. It boils down to:

• How to thrive when you feel misunderstood at work, or

• How to thrive at work when you think too much

So here’s the introduction, along with a bunch of posts that tie in. A favor: if any of this resonates, and you have someone in mind who might benefit from reading it, please forward it along.

Introduction

Have you ever heard something like this at work and felt hurt, confused, angry, defensive, or even combative?

“You’re always overthinking things.”

“You see misalignment that isn’t there.”

“You make things too complicated.”

“You are too theoretical.”

“You have to learn how to keep it simple.”

“You need to keep your emotions under wraps.”

“You focus on problems and not solutions.”

“You keep bringing up things that are settled, why?”

“You spend too much time analyzing things.”

“You’re not comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.”

“You can’t push back like that in front of the team.”

The Garden

Feedback like this can create the visceral response we all know from early childhood onwards: “You just don’t understand!” At work, as an adult, the words change. “I’m perfectly comfortable with uncertainty... you’re the one trying to gloss it over!” But the feeling is the same. Misunderstood.

“You don’t get me!”

It can be especially difficult when these are the very things you value: going deep, noticing what doesn’t add up, sitting with something until it makes sense. Some people value that too, and they have let you know. You know it can be a strength. Hearing it framed as a flaw still lands like an attack on who you are. At a minimum, it would be nice if the feedback were balanced. But in the rush of day-to-day work, rushed 1:1s, and too many things competing for attention, it rarely is.

A memory from childhood. My family redesigned our garden. They loved gardens. A columnist from the Washington Post came to our house with an illustrator and published a story with me in it, in the garden, like a children’s book. A fantasy. I was there, curious, daydreaming, exploring, wondering. The illustrator sketched question marks around me.

The real image is fading in a box somewhere. But the mental image is lodged in my brain like it was yesterday.

I know this sounds like an odd thing to bring up. But whenever I got that kind of feedback at work, something in me would flash back to that image. The garden. The celebrated question marks. The feeling of being celebrated for curiosity, for wondering, for not knowing yet. And then the fluorescent-lit room (or Zoom) where someone is telling me I’m too much of exactly that. The dissonance was almost physical. Like two versions of the world that couldn’t both be true. One where wondering is who you are and people delight in it. Another where it’s the thing you need to fix.

We all have that version of the garden that we want to protect and return to at will as we navigate the adult world.

Thriving, Work, and Self-Worth

For years I treated every piece of feedback like this as a verdict.

One story: I’m the problem. Too complicated, too emotional, too abstract and theoretical, too easy to read. The other: the place is broken, the leader is careless, the “system” isn’t working, and it’s on me to say so. Neither story, or the countless sub-plots that emerged, helped. The question that actually mattered was harder and more practical: how much of this is mine to work on, how much is just the game, and can I tell the difference before it eats me alive and I do/say something that I’ll regret.

Put another way: What path do I take to thrive?

It’s always important to process feedback. If you’ve gotten the same kind of feedback repeatedly, from different people or in different contexts, that’s probably something worth paying attention to. Paying attention might mean changing your behavior somehow.

It might also mean detachment, seeking out new environments where your strengths are a good fit, or deciding this isn’t a fight worth having on those terms. It might even mean recognizing that you’re drawn to situations that aren’t healthy for you, where you’ll hear the same feedback again and again, because you respond to it the same way each time. Psychologists call that a repetition compulsion: returning to a familiar pattern even when it hurts.

But what took me too long to learn: you still have to disconnect your sense of self-worth from the workplace. In fact, not just “even if” you love what you do, but if. If you love what you do and want to keep doing it, you’ll need to figure out how to detach from using the workplace as a proving ground for your worth. Be brutal about your craft. Be your own hardest critic. Seek out people who will push you, challenge your thinking, and refuse to let you coast. But that’s the work, not the workplace. The work deserves your full intensity. The workplace doesn’t.

That’s not the same as ignoring what you hear. It’s recognizing something unique about work, something organizational researchers have documented for over a century.

Max Weber showed that modern companies are built around roles, not whole people. Ferdinand Tönnies contrasted organic community with instrumental association. Arlie Hochschild studied emotional labor, the requirement to perform feelings as part of the job. The through-line is consistent: the workplace is not a proving ground for you and your value. It can feel like one. Feedback lands like a verdict. You tie your identity to fixing what’s broken, or to being the person who “goes deep” or “calls out BS.” But a company is a different kind of place than the parts of life where belonging and recognition actually work that way.

I joke that your average pirate ship was more of a community than your average company. But it's true. Pirates elected their captains. They voted on destinations. They split plunder by agreed-upon shares and could depose a leader who lost their trust. The crew's belonging wasn't contingent on quarterly results or a reorg. It was bound by shared risk, mutual dependence, and a code they wrote together.

Your company, probably, has none of that.

You’re replaceable by design and belonging is conditional. The org can pivot, reorg, or lay you off in ways that have little to do with your insight, your effort, or your character. None of that means you don’t matter. It means the workplace is a terrible instrument for measuring whether you do. When your self-worth is hooked to that instrument, every misunderstood comment becomes existential.

The skill isn’t caring less. It’s caring differently: about your work, your growth, your standards, your relationships, without making the org the mirror that tells you if you’re OK. Only then can you start to sort out what’s yours to work on from what’s just the game.

The Game. The Work

So back to the two questions: how much of this is mine to work on? And how much is just the game?

The Game

Start with the game, because a lot of people pretend it isn’t there. Nowhere is that pretense stronger than in the advice to “bring your authentic self to work.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer has shown that getting ahead in organizations is closely linked to self-promotion, political skill, and a willingness to make others uncomfortable. Not with being right. Not with being helpful.

Erving Goffman’s work helps explain the gap. In social life we are always, to some degree, on stage. There is a front stage, where we perform a version of ourselves for an audience, and a back stage, where we drop the act. Work is mostly front stage. You are not just sharing what you think. You are performing a credible professional self. When feedback says you’re “too theoretical” or “not a team player,” Goffman would say your performance didn’t match what the scene required. That may have nothing to do with whether you were right. You brought back-stage honesty into a front-stage moment that demanded confidence and alignment.

Venkatesh Rao, not a scientist but a wonderfully sharp observer of organizational life, took this further with what he called the Gervais Principle. His framing: “Sociopaths” see the game clearly and use it (they advance). “Clueless” genuinely don’t see it (they stay cheerfully in the middle). And “Losers” see it, are bothered by it, but make a conscious bargain to endure it anyway. If you’re reading this post, you probably see it. The question before you is whether to make the bargain, refuse it, or find some fourth path no one has handed you yet.

More research:

• Organizations disproportionately advance people with psychopathic and narcissistic traits, even when those traits undermine team performance (Babiak & Hare; Babiak, Neumann & Hare, 2010).

• Political skill predicts career advancement more reliably than job performance alone (Ferris et al.; Munyon et al. meta-analysis).

• Overconfident individuals attain higher social status, even when peers can see the overconfidence (Anderson, Brion, Moore & Kennedy, 2012).

• At elite firms, cultural similarity and “fit” outweigh technical competence in hiring decisions (Rivera, Pedigree).

• Narcissistic traits predict leader emergence but not leader effectiveness. The traits that get you the role aren’t the traits that make you good at it (Judge, Piccolo & Kosalka, 2009).

That is my pushback on “bring your authentic self to work.” The core issue is bringing authenticity and the workplace into the same conversation, as if they were built for each other. Authenticity matters. It does. Workplaces matter too. A job is nice, and can be incredibly rewarding. Your work can matter deeply to you. None of that is what I’m arguing against. But when you merge the two, when you treat the org as the place that validates your real self, you set yourself up for exactly this kind of hurt. Companies ask for performance all the time, including the performance of authenticity, and then punish people when their actual inner life doesn’t fit the scene.

Hochschild called it emotional labor. We might also call it a trap: be yourself, but not like that.

Company Vs. Community

I have a theory that it helps to imagine your workplace as a literal stage. A Shakespearean tragicomedy. People enter, perform their roles, navigate alliances and misunderstandings, deliver monologues that land or don’t, and exit. Some scenes are brilliant. Some are painful. The drama is real, the stakes feel real, but it is still a production. Nobody is their role, even when they forget that.

Contrast this with a community: a neighborhood, a family, a long friendship, a religious congregation. Yes, we perform in communities too. Goffman would be the first to say so. The difference isn’t performance versus no performance; instead, it’s about who holds the script, what’s at stake when you flip the script, and whether belonging survives you revealing some deeper level of yourself.

In a close relationship, dropping the mask is how intimacy works. At work, dropping the mask is often how you get the feedback at the top of this post. Hochschild drew the line here: we all do emotion work in private life, but emotional labor is when the performance is sold for a wage and managed by someone else. Tönnies called the community end Gemeinschaft: organic, embedded, durable. Not because communities are pure or free of conflict. Because belonging there isn’t contingent on your output.

The workplace is Gesellschaft: instrumental, contractual, built around functions. The cast rotates. The script changes with every reorg. Your part can be written out for reasons that have nothing to do with your talent or your character. Academics distinguish these two structures because they operate on fundamentally different logics. One is built on identity and belonging. The other is built on roles and exchange. When you confuse which one you’re in, feedback about your performance starts to feel like rejection from your tribe. It isn’t. It’s a note from a director about how you played the scene.

All to say: how much of the feedback you treat as “yours to work on” depends on what you actually want. You can’t sort out the feedback until you’re honest about which game you’re playing, or refusing to play.

Aside: I need to pause here. Because for some people, “performing” at work is not a strategic choice. It is the only way to survive. Psychologists studying neurodivergent masking have documented the sheer exhaustion of suppressing natural responses all day just to be read as competent. Researchers studying code-switching in Black professionals, women in male-dominated fields, queer people in conservative workplaces, immigrants navigating cultural expectations, have found the same thing: the performance isn’t optional, and the energy it consumes is enormous. The burden of navigating the front stage is not equally distributed. Some people are performing with a script written for them by default. Others are performing against a script that was never written with them in mind. “Just change your approach” lands very differently depending on how much you’re already spending just to be in the room.

Which brings us to…

The Work

OK. Now on to “how much of this is mine to work on?”

I have a great friend who once said something that was both incredibly funny (if you knew them), and very poignant. “I reliably rub certain types of people who believe I’m a certain type of person, the wrong way.”

I could relate immediately.

There’s so much packed into that sentence. Self-awareness. The wry acceptance. The recognition that the friction isn’t random. Certain types of people. A certain belief about who you are. Also: they’re typecasting the people who typecast them. They know it. That’s part of what makes it funny.

That’s what makes it hard, too. Because if the pattern is reliable, you have to ask: is this a me thing, a them thing, or a fit thing? Probably all three. The version of you they’re reacting to may not be who you actually are. But the fact that it keeps happening? That’s data pointing to something...

Here’s the wisdom I keep coming back to.

It doesn’t matter what “type” you think you are. It doesn’t matter what type someone thinks you are. It doesn’t matter how you categorize people: Big Five, the Gervais Principle, “the spectrum,” high agency versus low agency, systems thinker versus executor. It doesn’t matter how your worldviews stack up, or whose framework is more correct, or who “gets it.” If what you’re doing isn’t having the effect you care about, you’ll need to change something. Not because you’re wrong. Not because they’re right. Because the effect is the thing, and the effect is what you can actually work with.

In many ways this is incredibly liberating. William James, the father of pragmatism, argued something similar: stop asking what category something belongs to and start asking what it does, what effects it produces. You are not your type. You are a series of choices and their consequences. If the consequences aren’t what you want, you can make a different choice. No identity crisis required.

There’s a psychological framework that operationalizes this beautifully. Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy includes a skill she calls “effectiveness.” The instruction is deceptively simple: focus on what works. Let go of being right. Act as skillfully as you can to meet your goals in this situation. Not “pretend it doesn’t hurt.” Not “they were right all along.” Just: given what you actually want, what’s the move that gets you there? The feelings can be there. The history can be there. The garden and the question marks can be there. But the next action doesn’t have to come from whatever wounds you are carrying; it can come from your goal.

The elephant in the room here is the effort, the potential trauma, the psychic pain that accompanies all of this redirection and masking. It can feel deeply unfair, especially when you’re putting in all this effort and the people giving the feedback seem to be just comfortably winging it.

The cognitive load is real. But the research offers something useful: the load isn’t fixed. It depends on how you regulate, not just that you have to.

Some Strategies

James Gross’s emotion regulation research: reappraisal (changing how you interpret the situation) costs far less than suppression (masking your response). “This feedback is about the scene, not my worth” is cheaper than “don’t react, don’t react, don’t react.”

Ask yourself: What story am I telling myself about this feedback right now, and is there a less expensive interpretation that’s still honest?

Peter Gollwitzer’s implementation intentions: pre-decide with “if-then” plans so you’re not burning working memory deliberating under pressure. The decision is already made before you walk in.

Ask yourself: What’s the situation I keep finding myself in, and what do I want my default move to be next time?

Steven Hayes and ACT: trying not to feel something is more expensive than letting it be there without letting it drive your next move. Acceptance isn’t approval. It’s dropping the internal fight.

Ask yourself: What am I spending energy fighting internally that I could just let be there while I act anyway?

Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory: when an adaptation feels chosen rather than forced, it costs less. Find your own reason, not just theirs.

Ask yourself: Is there a reason to adjust my approach that makes sense to me, on my own terms, not just because someone told me to?

And sometimes the most effective move is structural: choose environments where less regulation is needed in the first place.

Ask yourself: Am I spending most of my energy on the work, or on surviving the room?

Here’s what it comes back to. If you love your work, if you enjoy the doing, that is the thing to protect. Not your reputation in a meeting. Not whether someone “gets” you. The visceral day-to-day connection with making something, solving something, building something. Or maybe it’s not even the work itself. Maybe it’s what the work makes possible: your family, your hobbies, the causes you care about, the life you’re building around it.

That’s what’s worth protecting. And disconnecting your sense of self-worth from the workplace is the key to getting the distance you need to protect it. You need enough distance to take feedback without crumbling, to play the scene without losing yourself, to notice what’s off without being consumed by it. Enough distance to stay in the game long enough for the things you actually care about to keep growing.

Here’s what it comes back to. Remember the garden.

Not the literal one from my childhood…your garden. The thing that drew you to this work in the first place. The curiosity, the making, the solving, the building. The feeling of being absorbed in something that matters to you. Maybe it’s the craft itself. Maybe it’s what the work makes possible: your family, your hobbies, the causes you care about, the life you’re building around it. Either way, there is something you’re tending. Something that grows when you give it attention and withers when you don’t.

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If this resonated, here’s more I’ve written on these themes:

• 20 Things I’ve Learned as a Systems (Over) Thinker — The practical list: brain always overtime, pace your delivery, don’t show all your work, celebrate wins, know when to fold.

• How (And Why) We Help — When your instinct to help becomes self-sabotage. The tension between working within a system you don’t believe in and questioning it, and how childhood patterns show up in professional urgency.

• Maximizers vs. Focusers — Why the tension between “move fast, keep options open” and “go deep, stay coherent” keeps producing the same conflicts. Different defaults, not different intelligence.

• “You’re Making This Too Complicated” — Why people interpret your approach as “too complicated” or “not bringing solutions.” Different action-vs.-analysis defaults, and how to bridge them without losing yourself.

• Just and But — Bias toward action vs. bias toward questioning as complementary styles, not character flaws. How trust changes the dynamic.

• Probably, Just, Maybe, and Perhaps — Your default explanation when things go wrong, and how to practice generating alternatives before you act.

• Self-Gaslighting and the Doubt Loop — What happens when low-level dysfunction erodes your confidence from the inside. How to recognize the pattern and reconnect with what genuinely fulfills you.

• Why Reflexive Thinkers Need to Take More Breaks — The extra cognitive and emotional cost of holding multiple perspectives at once. Why you’re more drained than your peers and what to do about it.

• The Integrator Burden — The emotional labor of connecting teams when formal structures don’t recognize that work. Why underrepresented people often carry it, and what to do about it.

• The tough reality of being a “glue person” — Silent wins, public mistakes. Practical self-protection for people who hold things together and pay the cost of visibility without credit.

• Perception Asymmetries (and Your Career) — The gap between what your champions see and what external stakeholders perceive. Why competing narratives form, and how to calibrate.

• Working With Very Confident People (Who Dismiss You) — The threat response it triggers, the attribution bias it creates, and the practical move: pick battles strategically, protect your energy.

• The Self-Sealing Argument Trap — When feedback is structured so any response confirms the accusation. How to recognize it, name it, and stop playing a game you can’t win.

• In That Space Is Our Power — Frankl’s space between stimulus and response, applied to being dismissed at work. What you actually want when you feel unheard, and how to avoid escalation.

• That’s Not What They Are Hearing — Why conversations go circular when both people respond to the surface issue and miss the feeling underneath.

• No Unforced Errors — Why change agents get judged more harshly for off days. Negativity bias, halo/horns effect, and managing energy for the long haul.

There’s more, but it is getting late!