Don’t Let Emotion Affect Work Efficiency
It's ironic that I intended to write a clear-cut article to tell everyone how not to let emotions affect work efficiency, but in reality, the person most often defeated by this is myself. This article can only serve as a warning to inspire both myself and everyone else, hoping to constantly remind myself of the frightfulness of the emotional beast.
The first time I realized that emotions can greatly affect work efficiency was when I was in my first team at Facebook. At that time, I painstakingly created a feature that I loved, and my boss and team members also approved of, but after the experimental results came out, the performance was not as expected. I had invested so much time, effort, and passion into this feature that I couldn't accept the fact that it was about to fail. I spent a lot of time discussing with my boss how to improve it, telling him that I could complete and launch a new version in a very short time for the next experiment. I was willing to work extra hours; I just really wanted to introduce this baby to the world.
My boss at the time, observing my youthful vigor and unwillingness to admit defeat, calmly asked me to have a 1:1 meeting with him. He then looked at me very seriously and said something that was a wake-up call for me: "You should never be attached to the things you build."
"Are you kidding me?" That was the first thing that came to my mind. How could I not love the work I had put so much effort into? How could I just forget about it and cut it off as soon as it was finished? I didn't agree with a single word my boss said. With my pride hurt, I left the meeting room angrily, feeling that it was too cold of him to ask me to simply cut off my hard work.
It was many years later when I realized that my boss was actually teaching me how to protect myself. There are too many things that you can't control; the only thing you can control is your own heart. The emotional fluctuations were so big because I tied my heart too closely to my product. But in fact, doing so is very dangerous, because the product is not my child, the users are the owners of the product. As product creators, our main goal is to create something that users like, and this process can never be accomplished in one go. No product has the chance to succeed without going through iterations and refinements. Not to mention the 99% of products that fail. I bet every single one of those products was someone's labor of love, but if everyone made decisions with emotions like I did when I first started working, not only would they be unable to make truly objective judgments, but they would also hinder their own progress toward truth, because they were stuck in place by emotions.
I am very grateful that my boss, a benefactor, told me this principle early in my career, which reminded me to stay calm and neutral when making bigger product decisions later, and to understand that negating your hard work does not mean negating you. I must admit that this is not my innate value. I can only remind myself through constant practice.
