-Inder.

Some years ago I read something, I think about Microsoft (which is somehow valued at over $4,000,000,000,000 -- four trillion dollars.) I read that they sorted out their employees into one of three categories.

1. Grinder. The person who sits in the office and churns out work.

2. Minder. The person who keeps things moving, keeps clients happy and takes care of relationships.

3. Finder. The person who goes out and gets new business.

Forbes magazine describes those roles this way:

While no one ever talked to me about these personnel classifications, the categories made a lot of sense to me. In my travels through the world, I'd look at people and organizations to see if this Grinder, Minder, Finder delineation made sense.

I also bring the designations up a lot when I talk to my grown-up and-successful daughters. They've seem to have understood and latched onto them, too.

I bring Grinder, Minder, Finder up because I'm busy right now with GeorgeCo., as busy as I've ever been, in six busy years. When you're busy, if you're doing work right, you often have to toggle through Grinder, Minder, Finder with no delay between the strata. That's what I've been dealing with lately.

I might start my day with a new business call. Where I'm closing in on getting a proposal signed. From there I might get an email from a client asking for three video scripts and 108 LinkedIn ads all due tomorrow by five. Moments later I might have a teary phone call with a client asking for my advice on something.

Sometimes I feel like a ping-pong ball in a Cuisinart. 

It's hard to switch tiers. Tears.

And frankly, when it comes to the aforementioned 108 LinkedIn ads, like Bartleby, I would prefer not to.

Here's the point, though. 

Crappy companies look at Grinder, Minder, Finder in terms of hierarchy. You graduate from grinding, to minding, to finding. There was a point in my career, more than two decades ago, where it seemed like the thing to do was to distance myself from rolling up my sleeves and grinding. 

You get too big to do shit.

I was supposed to have moved beyond typing ads for a living. I was supposed to have moved beyond hand-holding clients. I was supposed to be out beating the bushes, speaking at events, judging award shows, etc.

I never got too big to grunt.

I tried effete-ing myself and I lasted about nine-minutes as a do-nothing paper-pusher. The beauty of work is all the work. The good and the bad. In Churchill's words, the blood, sweat, toil and tears. Not just the fancy, the schmancy and the perks.

What keeps you honest with work is knowing how the work gets made. Knowing what the process looks like and feels like. Having to fight through bad briefs, worse timing and sometimes unreasonable demands. 

That's what work is. Taking the worst assignments and making them the best.

You're better at it overall if you understand the component parts that make up work.

I think it's sad that we have people running at agencies or running marketing at clients who have never created an ad, or even read one. They're good at golf, or the schmooze.

It's as bad as a president or senator or congress-person who has no idea of what a quart of milk costs, a bottle of aspirin or how hard it is to pay your Con Ed bill during a heatwave. Or what it's like to commute by subway when the A/C is out, which is always. Robert Moses, the autocrat who built New York's highway system, never learned to drive. He was chaufferred to work in a 12-cylinder air-conditioned Packard, he dictated to secretaries who shared the back-seat with him. He didn't really care what people went through. He lived in a different world.

There are a lot of ways people absent themselves from the dirty work of work. (But work, to be clear, is all dirty work.) It's getting ink on your hands and a printer that won't print at midnight and help you can't seem to find when you need it so you have to do it yourself.

Work is those 108 LinkedIn ads that I don't want to do and while I can pay someone else to do them, they're mine to do, because the assignment, the job, the client is mine and my name is on the work.

All this has been lost in a world where the only way to really make money is to make it off the sweat of others work. But I don't want to work that way.

I want to take something shitty. And make it good.

That's work. 

And as much as I hate it, I love it.