In school, you always know when you have homework to do. Well, if you listen to your teacher, anyway. “Please read these ten pages and fill in the worksheet until tomorrow.” That’s easy. At least easy to comply with. You can do your homework badly, and it’ll still count.
Once you get to the real world, life ups the difficulty: Your homework is no longer announced. It might be implied or hinted at, but you’ll rarely get an exact list, let alone the rules for scoring high. Whatever lists you do get are incomplete or come with hidden expectations. It’s a mess.
I once talked to multiple people in my organization who all requested I set up a meeting with a partner. I did. I prepared a short list of questions for us to run through. Still, somehow the meeting felt awkward. Nobody was sure why they were there. That’s because I wasn’t, either. I simply had done what people asked me to do—but I had forgotten the homework.
Later, my boss told me it felt as if we’d had an internal meeting with a client present. As if we were trying to figure out what we needed to figure out on full display. Our questions weren’t advanced enough. We didn’t know what we should have known before we talked to our partner. There’d been homework, but I hadn’t realized. That was an interesting lesson.
Yesterday, I was in a meeting that felt the same way, except this time, it wasn’t me organizing. “We should know the answers to these questions,” I thought. “We could have figured out 90% of this on our own.” I’m grateful I’ve now witnessed this phenomenon from both sides. It adds perspective.
It’s not a tragedy to forget your homework. Not in school and not in life. But generally, everything flows a little more smoothly when you do it. And for better or worse, as a grown-up, you’ll have to figure out what’s due tomorrow, time and again, on your own.
Sometimes, it’s good to show up without expectations. But it never hurts to ask: Is there homework before the meeting?
