When you were a kid, you had to learn to brush your teeth. It may be easy now, but at one point it was a skill. You would get toothpaste everywhere, and your mom or dad would have to remind you to brush every tooth.

You also probably hated doing it. You'd conveniently "forget" unless reminded, and then make excuses for why you hadn't done it yet, or didn't actually need to do it tonight in particular, or that actually your teeth were better than everybody else's teeth and thus brushing was unnecessary and beneath you.

The problem, of course, is that if you don't brush your teeth, your teeth will fall out of your head. At first, your parents were responsible for keeping your teeth in your head. Eventually, as you got better at brushing your teeth and got used to it as an inevitable, minor daily annoyance, you stopped thinking about it.

Now, as an adult, imagine if someone told you that brushing their teeth was too much of a hassle to be worth doing – that it would take too much effort to get good at and that, besides, it's ridiculous that we need to brush our teeth. Shouldn't they just be healthy all on their own? Why haven't we evolved that? You would rightfully think that they were shooting themselves in the foot over a very minor inconveience. Surely a few minutes of mindless chore per day is worth the upside, right?

This is the pitch that someone gave to me a few years ago, and it changed my relationship with my career.

At the time, I was feeling what is, I think, a very common feeling: That pointless bureaucracy was making my job a slog, that I was being held back from doing good, interesting work, being asked to make it worse in order to make it legible to a bureaucracy that didn't understand what I was doing, didn't understand why the way I was doing it was actually better, didn't value quality, didn't reward the right behaviors, and generally made us all do paperwork that few people would ever read and that would have no meaningful effect on what we actually produced. It all felt so pointless and unfair. Why can't we just let people do good work and get on with their lives?

As an aside, there are actually good reasons for all of this that tend to be harder to appreciate when you're earlier in your career. A mentor once told me: "Organizational dysfunction is never completely avoidable. Sure, it might be possible to do things better, but it's always downstream of a genuinely hard coordination problem. The fact that all these different people and groups, with their competing and misaligned interests, can collaborate at all is a miracle of game theory. The fact that it isn't perfect should be the least surprising thing in the world." If this is interesting to you, read The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. It will change how you think about human organizations.

But let's ignore that and assume, for the sake of argument, that bureaucracy really does exist for no good reason at all.

While this feeling is nearly universal at some point in a career, consider the analogy to brushing your teeth. No matter how stilly it may feel, feeling that it's silly isn't going to magically make us evolve past the need to brush our teeth. You have two options: You can either do what most of us do – accept a very minor inconvenience and get the benefits of having teeth – or you can avoid a very minor inconvenience, but at the cost of feeling constantly angry at an unfair world and not having teeth.

Think of the bureaucratic bullshit as teeth-brushing. The child perspective entails constantly dreading the impending request to brush, clumsily brushing and getting toothpaste all over your face, and having poor dental health from all of the times you managed to avoid doing it. Imagine, instead, if you got good at navigating the bureaucracy. It would take some up-front investment to develop the skill, but once you did, you could put it all on auto-pilot. Just like brushing your teeth, as you got good at it, it would take less mental effort. It would feel less like a big, looming obligation and more like just another small cost of doing business that you get out of the way so you can move on to the interesting work you really care about doing.

Beyond the mental peace, you would also have more control over your career. As you learned how to speak bureaucrat-ese, you would be more effective at demonstrating – in a language that your manager's manager's manager can understand – that your work is important and should continue to be funded. You would get to pick more interesting projects because you would know how to convince your leadership that they were worth investing in. You would get less oversight and micromanagement because you would be trusted to use your judgment about what to work on.

The next time you encounter somebody with a really cool job and think, "fuck, what did they do to get a job that cool," consider how good they are at brushing their teeth. Maybe a lot of what separates you from them is just a few minutes per day and some toothpaste.