Mike Tomlin spent twelve years building a city in Minecraft.
He started around 2014 as a way to spend time with his kids. They eventually grew out of the game. He did not. Last week he finally gave the world a tour of his virtual metropolis. 20,000 people watched “EP 1: ROOFTOPS, PENTHOUSES, AND URBAN LIVING” live, and it now has over 3 million views.
Neither of us plays Minecraft, but even we could appreciate the immense detail Tomlin built into his world. A boutique hotel with an executive spa and a basement speakeasy. A high-rise with an aquarium on every floor. Penthouses with what he described as “Jack and Jill bedroom concepts, with multiple sinks.”
Our favorite line: “You’ll find an appropriate number of public restrooms and stuff throughout all my public facilities. Not anything over the top in terms of detail, but it was important that I represented that.”
Nobody was grading this. There is no scoreboard in Creative mode. No client walkthrough, no inspection, nobody to notice whether the virtual conference room had a virtual restroom down the virtual hall. He built them because it would have bothered him not to. That is what we think pride looks like. It’s holding yourself to something nobody else is enforcing. The standard is the standard.
We had someone new start with us recently. One of our spouses stopped by the office and was around her for a few minutes. Their comment afterward, unprompted: “You can tell she takes a lot of pride in her work.”
That is the thing about pride. It shows up almost immediately, and it is very hard to fake for long.
One of our core values is passion, and we try to be direct with our team about what we mean by it. We want people who are passionate about being here. We are not completely naive about this. People need jobs, and we are fully aware there is a financial necessity to work for most of us (and we are okay if your passion for being here is unabashedly the financial remuneration potential!). But if you genuinely do not want to be here, we’re happy to help you find a new home.
We spend an enormous share of our lives at work. Because of this, we think it’s unfair to ask someone who cares to spend forty hours a week beside someone who doesn’t. Culture is fragile and it gets built or eroded one person at a time. And in our experience, pride compounds. The person who cares about the thing nobody checks almost always cares about the things everybody checks, and the people around them start caring more too.
Tomlin built restrooms nobody would ever use, in a video game, for twelve years, because it was important that he represented that.
We’d hire him. And as proud shareholders of the NFL’s only publicly owned team, we regrettably may be in a position to do so next year…
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team