“You were born 35!” I remember, vividly, my hitherto beloved teacher saying to my seven-year-old self as I chose to stay in and finish some work before going to queue outside for school dinner, followed by playtime. It was said with a mixture of bafflement and frustration – and I resented it. A teacher should appreciate that the temptation offered by spam fritters was not great, and that I – as the smallest in the school, including the five-year-old first years – would be bumped to the back of the queue anyway.
But more than that, I felt, a teacher should be glad if someone wanted to put the finishing touches to her thrilling story about Esmerelda the Golden Bird before attending to the needs of the flesh. I wasn’t doing it to impress her, however – though that would have been a pleasant by-product. I was doing it…well, because it needed to be done and now was the best time. I wouldn’t be able to enjoy my spam fritter, insofar as such a thing was possible, unless it was.
Welcome, my friends, to the world of the plodder. We aren’t fast, but we are dutiful, we are thorough and we are reliable. We are, in the word that would appear every year thereafter in my school reports, conscientious. And we are, too often, vilified for it. We are not glamorous, you see. We are not showy. We do not catch the eye. Nobody gasps at years of a job done well and without causing any trouble to anyone else. If I had ever written “conscientious plodder” on a CV, it would not have got me very far.
But it should. Like the middle-aged women who keep the sociocultural show on the road in the world at large yet are barely visible in it, and frequently derided if they are, we are the ones who get things done. Who underpin countless business endeavours, families, administrations, institutions – you name it, we’re there and we’re doing it. If we all downed our (well-kept, good quality for the money) tools tomorrow, you would notice.
Now, finally, we have some recognition, courtesy of a study by John Burn-Murdoch. In it, he lauds the conscientious personality type that perseveres, that is independently motivated and just an all-round good, professional egg (I paraphrase, possibly introducing some slight bias along the way).
He notes that we tend to live longer, have the most career success and are less likely to get divorced. In other words – plodders! In your FACE Mrs Troutman! Break out the bunting, except don’t, it’s too much fuss and we haven’t factored it in to today’s timetable.
And that’s not even the best bit! Because our hero has also found that conscientiousness is declining among people in their twenties and thirties. Social media, smartphones and streaming services are the likely culprits, eroding the population’s ability to focus, to commit to plans, meet responsibilities and ignore the ever-increasing barrage of temptations and tuggings on our attention. Which means that those who can withstand it – those who were born 35, you might say – will soon find themselves in possession of what is effectively, as he puts it, “a superpower”.
That I have lived so long to see this justice done. How sweet it is.
I’m trying not to take almost as savage a delight in the news that conscientiousness is declining as I am in the recognition of our understated, underacknowledged, much-mocked but now undoubtable brilliance, of course – difficult though it is. Because without a critical mass of our kind, we are all in trouble. Any society, whether it knows it or not, needs us and the solid, unyielding, unreactive base we provide. We are the 10 per cent that does 90 per cent of everything.
On top of that, we provide the stability that enables the fiery, show-offy, what-we-really-mean-by-brilliant types to accomplish their feats. And, let’s face it, we need those people too. Because it is through them and their mad, ebullient, non-linear thoughts, experiments, crashing failures and soaring successes of the kind that makes the natural plodder gape in awe and wonder, and at the same time want to run away and hide under her neat desk with her weekly planner hugged protectively to her breast, that humanity makes 90 per cent of its progress.
It is the gift of the plodder to know our strengths and our limitations. To see everything in the round. That’s why we always keep slack in our systems, so that we have the time and energy for careful considerations. And so we must say – thank you for this long overdue recognition of all the quiet, boring good we do and best practices to which we naturally adhere. But now we must get back to work. There’s clearly going to be more to do.
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