The Rust is the Receipt
I don’t know what this shovel was built for. Probably moving dirt. Maybe sand. Some job that required a flat blade, a wooden shaft, a durable handle and not much else.
But I do know what it has done.
My father gave me this shovel sometime in the 1990s. Before that, I’d already used it as a kid in the 1980s. Last weekend my son used it to help me scrape ice off our driveway after a rare North Carolina ice storm. That’s five decades of service across three generations.
In those years, this shovel has mixed concrete, scooped chicken manure, cleared snow, scraped ice, and done a hundred other jobs I’ve forgotten. Most of which I suspect were not what its manufacturer had in mind.
The rust you see in this photo isn’t decay. It’s documentation. Every pit and patina is a record of work done, of showing up, of being called into service when something hard needed doing.
Shovels and Specialists
We live in an era that rewards specialization. The right tool for every job. The upgraded version. The ergonomic redesign.
And sometimes that is exactly right. Specialists can and do change the world.
But there is another kind of durability that matters just as much: being dependable across myriad challenges. Being useful when the work changes. Being the thing people reach for because it holds up.
This simple shovel has outlasted every specialized tool my family has ever owned. It’s been handed down twice. It will probably be handed down again. Meanwhile, that fancy snow-clearing system with the adjustable blade angle? In a landfill once the newest version with dual-adjustable blade angles hits the market.
This shovel hasn’t lasted because it was optimized for one purpose. It has lasted because it was built to stand up to hard work, to keep showing up for whatever was in front of it. And it’s never complained that ice-scraping wasn’t in its job description.
Playbook
The most successful professionals I’ve worked with have more often resembled this shovel than a single-purpose utensil.
Yes, some people win by becoming the best in the world at a narrow craft. I respect that path.
But the rest of us build lasting careers another way. The needs around us shift, the work changes shape, and the people who keep getting trusted with the next hard problem are the ones who can absorb the impact, adapt, and keep producing.
I wrote a few weeks ago about Rory Sutherland’s observation that we don’t actually optimize our way through life. We iterate. We make gut calls and then build logical scaffolding to justify them. We take exits that feel like failures at the time and only later recognize them as the turns that got us where we needed to go.
I’ve lived this. My career has not been a straight line. I trained in pediatrics, then neonatology, then found myself drawn into patient safety, technology-enabled quality improvement, healthcare administration, and now a role that has me on 140 flights a year talking about things I never imagined I’d be talking about when I was in medical school.
None of that was the plan. Over and over again I’ve been given the choice to move on or take the work in front of me and try to do it well. More often than not doing that work led to other work, which led to still other work, and on and on and on.
Looking back on the journey I’ve taken so far, I’ve needed to be far more like this shovel than like an elegant unitasker. The world rarely needs me to be the perfect tool for one job. It needs me to be resilient enough to show up for whatever work actually needs to be done.
My son doesn’t know yet that this shovel will probably be his someday. He just knows it works. He knows his grandfather used it, his father uses it, and now he’s used it too.
That’s enough for now.
The rust will tell the rest of the story.
Your Turn
Are you building yourself to be indispensable in one narrow moment, or dependable across many?
Because careers don’t go according to plan. Neither do lives.
The people whose work lasts, who get handed one challenge after another, who accumulate rust as a record rather than as damage… they’re the ones who are built to last.
The Perseverance Playbook™ is a weekly newsletter about the middle miles, where purpose is forged and leadership is born. Written from airports, sidelines, and the spaces in between by Dr. Chris DeRienzo.
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