My Work, Somebody Else's Slide

Here is a small event that does a surprising amount of damage, and almost everybody who has had it done to them has said nothing about it.

Picture the woman watching it happen. It is a Thursday. There is a presentation to the senior team, and she is in the room, at the back, because she is not the one presenting.

Slide eleven goes up. It is her work. She built the model. She found the error in the old figures. She spent four evenings on the part that makes it actually usable, and she remembers which four evenings because one of them was her son's birthday and she did it after he went to bed.

And the man presenting says: so what we did here was.

We. And then he moves on, because he is not being malicious, he is being efficient, and there are nine more slides.

Nobody in that room does anything wrong. That is the part that makes it so hard to hold. There is no villain. He genuinely thinks of it as team work. The senior team think the model came from his department, which in a sense it did.

And she says nothing, because what exactly would she say. Standing up to claim slide eleven would make her look small, and would derail a meeting, and would be remembered by everybody in that room as the moment she made it about herself.

So she smiles, and she goes back to her desk, and something in her goes flat for about four days.

And this happens perhaps three times a year, and after six years that is eighteen slides, which is a great deal of somebody's actual working life presented in a room by somebody else.

The book is honest about the reward

There is a stretch of Ecclesiastes about work that is startlingly clear eyed, and the reason it belongs here is that it does not pretend the accounting is fair.

The writer has just finished observing that a great deal of work is done out of rivalry and comes to nothing. Then he says this.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. (Ecclesiastes 4:9, King James Version)

Two are better than one. And notice the reason given, which is not efficiency. It is a good reward for the work of both.

He then spends three verses on what the two do for each other. One lifts the other when they fall. Two keep each other warm. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.

That is not a passage about output. It is a passage about what a person gets out of not being alone in their work, and the reward described is entirely relational.

You are not required to be alone in what you built, and Ecclesiastes 4 puts the reward of the work in the company rather than in the recognition (Ecclesiastes 4:9), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a practical answer rather than a consolation.

And notice the sentence that ends it.

And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. (Ecclesiastes 4:12)

The image is a rope. What holds is not one strand being acknowledged. It is the strands being wound together and known to each other.

You have a rope available rather than a single strand, and Ecclesiastes 4:12 makes the strength come from being joined rather than from being seen, and the Spirit of God is the one who arranges the people who actually know what you built.

Rejoicing in your own work

There is a sentence in Galatians about this exact comparison problem, and it is unusually direct.

But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. (Galatians 6:4)

Rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. That means the gladness a person gets from their work should not be routed through anybody else's reaction to it.

Read what that solves. It is not saying credit does not matter or that the theft was fine. It is saying that if the gladness has to come back through the room, then the room controls the gladness, and rooms are unreliable.

You have permission to be glad about your own work directly, and Galatians 6 says the rejoicing comes in his own work and not in another (Galatians 6:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that possible for somebody who has watched the credit go elsewhere three times a year for six years.

And notice the first half of the verse. Let every man prove his own work. Prove means test and examine. He is telling people to look at what they actually did, honestly, rather than waiting to be told.

You are permitted to examine what you built and know it, and Galatians 6:4 puts the proving of the work in the hands of the one who did it (Galatians 6:4), and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps that from turning into either bitterness or boasting.

What this is not

Let me be plain, because this one could go badly in two directions.

This is not telling anybody to claim slide eleven in the meeting. It would go exactly as she imagines, and this article cannot see what it would cost her in that building.

It is also not saying she should never raise it. Some workplaces are safe enough for a quiet word afterward, and some managers would fix it immediately and be embarrassed. Only she can tell which building she is in.

And it is not promising the credit comes back. It probably does not. Nothing here ties an outcome to anything she does.

And plainly: if this has begun to reach past work, if you have started to believe you do not count anywhere, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has started wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a presentation. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. There is no faith in doing that alone.

You are not being handed a strategy for getting the credit, and Ecclesiastes 4 answers the loneliness of the work rather than the arithmetic of the credit (Ecclesiastes 4:9), and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows which of those two is actually the wound.