Aim To Be Good, but Not So Good That You’re Useless

Find the happy medium between the extremes, and you'll be just fine.

This is a working man’s truck. I’d hire a man with this truck. (Well, not this man—I know him… he’s nice and all, but I’d never hire him.)

Every two years, like clockwork, I buy a brand new laptop at the end of the year and sell my old one.

Since I work on a computer all day, every day, literally 365 days per year, it makes sense for me to have the best machine I can to get work done as fast and efficiently as possible.

I first learned about this concept of having the right gear for the job long ago when I worked in construction, and I’ve really taken it to heart, especially in the past few years.

I was a manager for a home building company, and while hiring wasn’t the primary function of my job, it was part of it.

Sometimes, I’d meet a new kid who wanted to work for us, but he’d show up at a job site for an interview driving a 1989 Chevy Silverado with a crumpled fender and a replacement door on the passenger side with mismatched paint.

To him, this felt like a smart choice because it was cheap. He’d be proud that he only paid $4,000 for it.

From my perspective, this did not make him look financially savvy at all. It made him look dumb.

This was his work truck: his primary source of transportation and the most important tool he had in his tool belt (figuratively speaking, of course.) For a construction worker, the most important tool was not the right set of nail bags, a good hammer, or a new nail gun; it was his work truck.

A new guy showing up to work in a super old, cheap, crappy truck that didn’t seem roadworthy did not make him look (to us) like he was making good financial choices. It made him look like he might not be worth hiring.

We’d wonder why he could only afford a truck like that.

Was he such a bad worker that this was all he could afford? Were his finances so poor that he couldn’t even afford a dependable method of transportation to get to work each day?

That would make us think twice about hiring him.

Plus, even if he was an excellent worker, we still may have problems if we couldn’t depend on him. If we sent the guy to the lumberyard to pick up a load of 2x4s or OSB, and his old hunk of junk broke down on the way there, so he was stuck on the side of the road when we needed him most, and our other workers were now at a standstill because they’re waiting on him… that’s bad.

Now, we have a huge problem. This guy has now become a liability to our company.

But another thing I learned about all this was that the converse was true as well.

Sometimes, a new guy would show up for an interview driving a massive, lifted, top-of-the-line, super-duty diesel with Eddie Bauer trim that cost him $68,000, where he was slowly paying it off at $1,200/month.

That was ridiculous too. Usually, that kind of guy would have also soft hands, and wear really nice shirts, and he’d have an attitude that made it feel like he was too good to do any dirty work.

“Send me to the lumber yard to pick up a lumber package?” we could almost hear him saying.

“Perish the thought!”

The point is: if a man had a truck that was that nice, we’d wonder if he’d feel too good to do the actual work we were hiring him for.

Some guys are weird about their trucks like this. They obsess over their paint and can’t stand the thought of their clearcoat getting scratched. They’re terrified that someone might “ding” it so they park WAY out in the far reaches of a parking lot so nobody could possibly open their door into it.

I can’t imagine sending a guy like that to the landscape suppliers and asking him to pick up a load of sand or lava rock. He’d throw a fit about how it would damage his truck.

Therein lies my point: the purpose of having a WORK TRUCK is to DO WORK.

If your crappy old rust bucket is so unreliable that it can’t actually do the work, you have a serious problem, and you need a different vehicle.

If your flawless 4x4 is so pristine and so perfectly unblemished that you can’t imagine letting it get dirty enough to do the work, you have a serious problem, and you need a different vehicle.

The same is true in my industry. The whole point of a work computer is to do work.

If I have a computer that is so old, so slow, and so incompatible with installing the programs I need, I need a new computer.

If I have a computer that is so nice, so fast, so amazing that I’m afraid to take it out to a coffee shop with me or afraid to put it in my backpack and take it on the road because it might get damaged or stolen, I need a new computer.

I know about all of this.

Something strange, though, that I learned recently is that this perception—real or not—also applies to buying and selling computers.

I was ready to sell my old computer, and I wanted to get top dollar for it. So I hired a professional photographer to take photos of it in the best possible light. He came over to my house, and we staged it on a special platform, with a lightbox setup that gave it light from all sides, and the photos were given to me in giant, high-resolution files.

I listed it on eBay, with all the information anybody could possibly want to know. All the detailed specifications, all the highlights about the pristine condition it was in, how I’d babied it for the past two years, how there was nothing wrong with it, etc.

Nobody bought it.

Nobody even bid on it.

I was flabbergasted. How could this possibly be? Nobody wanted my perfect computer in perfect condition? Why not? It was selling for MUCH less than I paid for it.

I was so annoyed. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t understand it.

It had the perfect lighting, it had the perfect staging, it was the perfect listing… everything about it was perfect.

Then, I thought back to my days in construction, and I had a weird thought.

“I wonder if it’s… too perfect?”

Maybe my listing looked so good that people didn’t even believe it was real… or maybe they thought it was a scam?

While I was trying to sell it, I scoffed at all the other listings that were for sale at the same time.

“My photos are SO much better than theirs,” I thought. “My laptop is in SUCH better condition than theirs.”

And all of that was true: I was completely right. But that didn’t matter.

Other people were selling theirs, and I wasn’t.

This was infuriating. So, nearly in a fit of anger, I relisted my laptop after it didn’t sell. But this time, I deleted all the perfect-looking photos, and I removed most of the descriptions in the listing that talked about how perfect it was.

Almost embarrassed, I took photos of it with my iPhone and staged it on my kitchen counter in bad lighting.

“What a weird experiment this will be,” I thought. I published the listing and waited to see what happened.

IT SOLD. IMMEDIATELY. FOR A HIGH PRICE.

I couldn’t believe it. I was selling literally the exact same computer as before.

Everything about it was the same: same laptop, same box it came in, same seller, same starting price, same, same, same…

The ONLY differences were the photos and description. I basically changed it so it looked like a normal guy’s laptop with a normal amount of wear and tear after a normal amount of use for sale for a normal price.

And that worked.

It was—and still is—mind-blowing to me, but it probably shouldn’t be.

Judge for yourselves and see what you think.

Here are the photos of the laptop that I got from a professional photographer that I used the first time around.

(Reminder: this failed. Nobody bid on it.)

This approach did not work.

Here are the photos of the very same laptop that I took myself in an afternoon with an iPhone.

(Reminder: this actually worked. It sold right away.)

This approach did work. WTF?

Just like when I was hiring construction workers, I didn’t want to hire the guy with a truck that was a pile of junk, but I also didn’t want to hire the guy who may as well have been driving a Rolls-Royce to work.

I just wanted the normal guy with a normal truck, who could use it normally, to get work done.

That’s the guy I wanted.

And, apparently, people buying computers have the same values as I did. They just wanted a normal laptop they could use normally to get work done.

That’s the computer they wanted.

Aim to be good… but not so good that you’re useless (or that people perceive you to be.)