Recently, I had the misfortune to have to do some work behind a knee wall in my converted attic. It’s less than three feet (~ 0.9m) tall and not all that wide. I’m about 5′10″ (1.8m) so to work in there, I have to spend the entire time crouched down. To get anywhere, you either crawl on your hands and knees or duckwalk. It’s all very claustrophobic and very exhausting.

I didn’t even do much: most of my time was spent watching someone else do the work while I passed tools and kept an eye out for bats and wildly hungry squirrels. (Things have died in there before.) And I was still exhausted. Just being in there, hunkering down, made me tired. When I got out for a break after a couple of hours, I found that I couldn’t straighten out. I had to work up to it.

I had a similar experience when I went to visit my nephews several years ago. They had a little crawl space room where they played, an indoor fort of sorts. “S’uncle Forrest” was coerced into getting in their with them. They were walking around find because they were under three feet tall, but I was doing the same crouching and duck walking. Exhausting even though they felt fine. It was a problem of size, of course.

So what does this have to do with underachievers? How could this possibly relate to our discussion?

Glad you asked!

You see, that’s what being an underachiever of Byron’s type feels like. Every day, he goes to work to do a job where he has to really crouch down, mentally. Just being at his job is exhausting, even though he could have done it when he first got out of college.

Because people come in different work sizes, just like the jobs themselves do.

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Flow (psychology), Andrew Olivier, Underachievers, Person-job fit

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