“You guys. You lollygag the ball around the infield. You lollygag your way down to first. You lollygag in and out of the dugout. You know what that makes you? Larry?” – Bull Durham
These are some pretty rough office politics.
One big question about careers: should you play the game?
Way back when I was in college, I had a part time job. My boss was out of town, but asked me to send out mail that was 100% fraudulent. He was attempting to get confidential business information from a competitor by pretending to be someone else.
Thankfully, I knew that this was more than just a bad idea – it was illegal. Really illegal. Like spending vacation time in the federal pen illegal. I told him no, it was illegal. He told me to do it anyway. I didn’t do it. I even took it to his boss. All his boss said was, “Well, he shouldn’t have used our address.”
The next day I took this problem to a professor in one of my business classes. I asked him what I should do. “Well, John, you’ve already quit, so I don’t see much more you need to do.”
“But,” I replied, “I haven’t quit.”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, John. You quit.”
When I thought about it, he was right, I had quit. I just hadn’t realized it. But it was the right thing to do. Besides, anyone who will knowingly ask you to commit a crime is more than willing to turn you in to the cops to save themselves.
So, no, don’t play that game.
Pa Wilder didn’t know magic tricks. He said accounting tricks were enough.
What if the game is simply immoral or unethical?
In one case, ethics cost me a job. I was at an interview and the interviewer asked me if I would do this rather specific unethical act. “No, that’s unethical.” Oops. Their actual business model was based on gaining a competitive advantage by behaving unethically. I haven’t lost a minute of sleep over not getting that job.
I also had a boss who asked me to do something unethical. I said, simply, “That’s unethical.” I believe my boss didn’t know it was unethical and he looked disappointed – not in me, but that his idea was unethical. “Are you sure it’s unethical?”
Your mileage may vary – but I’ve decided I’m not going to play that game, either.
What if it’s just stupid or silly?
Well, then if you need the work, you play the game, cheerfully. I know that, especially when I was young, I felt that doing stupid things at work was . . . stupid. I made the decision early on – swallow my pride (along with the jelly donuts in the break room) and go along to get along. Selling out? Not really. There is always a political element to work. Heck, get six people or three women together and there will be politics.
But if you have a family to pay for and don’t have the means to do it, don’t let your ego talk you out of a job. Do you need to cower and whimper? Certainly not. If that’s the behavior that’s rewarded at the company, find another job. It’s never going to get better because your boss isn’t an accident. Your boss was promoted because he or she exhibits the behavior that the company wants.
Which brings me back to the promised subject of today’s post: goals.
I’m thinking “writing dank memes” wasn’t what he was looking for.
My boss asked me a question, one that I wasn’t really ready for:
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
As much as I could be surprised, I was. I had no real answer. Thankfully, this wasn’t my first corporate conversation, so I played the game and gave my answer. When I described my answers to The Mrs., she laughed. “You just gave the Bull Durham answers.”
The Mrs. loves that movie, and it appears to be a part of our marriage contract that whenever we’re flipping through channels and Bull Durham is on, she gets to watch it. Anyway, the relevant scene is:
Crash: “You got something to write with? Good. It’s time to work on your interviews.”
Nuke: “My interviews? What do I got to do?”
Crash: “You’re gonna have to learn your clichés. You’re going to have to study them. You’re going to have to know them. They’re your friends. Write this down. We’ve got to play them one day at a time.”
Nuke: “Got to play – that’s pretty boring, you know?”
Crash: “Of course it’s boring. That’s the point. Write it down.”
Nuke: “One day at a time.”
Crash: “I’m just happy to be here. Hope I can help the ball club. I know. Write it down. I just want to give it my best shot, and the good Lord willing, things will work out.”
Nuke: “Good Lord willing -”
Crash: “Things will work out.”
What’s funny is that I had already spent a chunk of time working on my goals that very week. I looked at several aspects of my life – relationships, this blog, taking over a small island in the Pacific and making them worship me as their fire god, and brushing my teeth every morning. I have space for work goals, but those are still blank two weeks after the conversation with my boss. That alone is probably the focus of a future post, but not in the next week or two.
I ask my kids what they want to be when they grow up – maybe they have some ideas I could steal.
But goals are crucially important. It’s not like Jeff Bezos woke up one morning and said to himself, “Whoa, where did all of this money come from?” No, he had goals. One of them involved getting jacked, another involved him becoming the world’s richest man, and the last one involved perfecting his version of the Roomba®, which was really just two miniature poodles hot-glued to a dinner plate.
I guess Jeff got divorced because his wife was past her Prime®.
Jeff Bezos has goals and I do too, although none of mine involve having the National Enquirer® post pictures of my, um, crotch cuckoo on the front page. I don’t know how Jeff does it, but when I write down my goals, I use a fairly simple formula:
What – Write down in as much detail (as you need) to describe the goal. Mine vary from achieving a very specific number of regular readers for this blog to setting higher standards for myself in some other areas of life, like learning to braid my armpit hair. The goal should be significant enough to warrant the effort. For me, launching an interplanetary mission might be really hard. But it’s a no-brainer for Elon Musk, who I believe keeps most of his weed on Mars.
Why – Why am I doing this? Superficial goals will lead to superficial effort. If you don’t look at the “why” and feel that it’s really important to you, the goal itself is trivial or you haven’t gotten to the real why. If you can’t come up with a good why you should achieve the goal – kill the goal like Nancy Pelosi kills a half-empty fifth of vodka.
When – A deadline is a spur for action. External deadlines on things like doing the taxes are powerful, but self-imposed deadlines work, too. In my case, I’ve set a deadline for writing these posts three times a week. If I didn’t? They wouldn’t get done and I would spend all my time practicing my armpit hair braiding.
How – Goals just don’t achieve themselves. Here I often will get very specific. Number of minutes working out, number of pushups, that sort of thing. I realize that when working towards a goal, especially an audacious one, no one has all of the details worked out on the first day. That’s fine – your plan can and will change as you take action. Just make sure that “eat less than 1500 calories a day” doesn’t morph into “don’t eat the seventh eighth jelly donut.”
The closer that you can link your goal to your actual physical survival, the less that you need any of the above. Very few drowning men write mission statements and then create a list of action items. It’s simply not necessary. Similarly, I didn’t write down that I’m going to write three times a week – it’s a given. I did write down some concrete steps on how I was going to get better, but The Mrs. felt that the “kidnap better writers than me and chain them in the basement” step was a bit extreme. She thought rope would probably work.
The uncut version of this movie is just called “Face”
In last Wednesday’s post I mentioned to not dwell on negative outcomes. I stand by that, especially when peak performance is required. But negative outcomes are very helpful when it comes to staying motivated to working a plan, week after week, sacrificing to get better when I could be torturing my captive writers and eating jelly donuts instead. For some goals I use those negative outcomes as an incentive, of sorts, and it seems to work.
Especially at first, don’t have more than half a dozen goals. For me, it’s important that I write them down on paper. Something about sitting and writing them makes them more real. And it also makes the final step, checking progress, easier. I suggest you do that weekly.
So, get to it – play the game and get your goals done. There’s no time to lollygag, because what does that make you?
A lollygagger.
I don’t like jelly donuts. Fortunately, the woman who brought in donuts appreciated the occasional compliment on her hair or earrings. Maple crullers started appearing, and interestingly, short skirts. Couldn’t last forever, of course. I don’t look good in a short skirt.
I’m with you. Why people defile a perfectly good donut by putting jelly into it is beyond me. Same for that cream-filling crap.
This is the era of healthy eating, a jelly donut counts as a serving of fruit on the government nutrition pyramid.
Don’t forget the vegetable oil, which counts the same as green beans.
But, lemon?
Ha! Short skirts are great in summer, especially if there’s a breeze. Keeps me cool.
A goal without a plan is just a wish. Don’t take my word for it, ask Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (or coach Herm Edwards, who stole that line without attribution for his NFL players’ life lessons seminar, possibly unattributed because no one who can pronounce ‘Exupéry’ was in the room at the time).
And just what makes Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry such an expert that self-help huckster Tony Robbins goes to HIM for motivation? Well, he did write The Little Prince, a relentlessly twee novella that reads more like a 3rd grader’s Elon Musk-like fascination with space travel than serious literature. That it is, according to GoodReads, the most-translated book in the French language speaks volumes about French ‘sophistication’ (though I hear their poetry is rather good. If you like poetry, which I do not.)
Finding employment as a humble tech writer is what remains of my goal of becoming the next Shakespeare/Hemingway/Steinbeck for it is not likely that I will pen a ‘Moral allegory and spiritual autobiography’ anytime soon, as did the esteemed Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry. Frankly, I would much rather be noted for having produced a ‘Profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered’ book, as Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men was described by the Washington Post in a review, quoted on the dust jacket.
Goals need to be realistic, above all. So if this one does not pan out, can I have a pony, instead?
Yay! Ponies!
I was Hemingway one night when I was in college. I wrote in a fever pitch, the words coming one after another onto the page. Each sentence better than the last.
Then I woke the next morning, excited to read what I had written.
Booze is NOT your friend when writing. Or at least not my friend. I couldn’t even read my handwriting.
I tried to excuse my drinking once by pointing out that a great many famous writers were drunks – Faulkner, Poe, Kerouac, Joyce – too many others to count. But then my wife shot back by pointing out how very few famous drunks were writers. Comedians, actors, politicians, sure. Writers, not so much.
Write drunk, edit sober. Oh, and don’t quit that day job.
Don’t remember where I heard it but when asked “Where do you see yourself in five years?” the answer was, “Hopefully, suspended with pay.”
That one’s good. I’ve always thought a fun answer to where-do-you-see-yourself-in-five-years would be, “In your job. No, wait … in your boss’s job.”
In my “career job,” back before I retired, we had the usual annual performance reviews which required each of us, as part of our inputs to the process, to make up a set of goals for the upcoming year. One year, when I was reporting to a guy with a sense of humor and that I trusted, I turned in a preliminary set of my “real goals,” which included: use every available second of sick and personal time, surf the web at least six hours a day, and maximize my ratio of compensation to work-performed. He got a laugh out of it. (I didn’t actually operate that way.)
I like it. If done properly – the goals are great. If done poorly, they’re just an exercise in mind-reading and self-humiliation.
Nice.
Very nice.
In a corporate world driven by meeting unrealistic quarterly goals to please the investor class, it is almost inevitable that many/most large companies will be tempted to engage in unethical behavior. When the Wells Fargo fiasco blew up a few years ago, it was completely plausible because I had seen the exact same behavior at the banks I worked at for.
Yup. And where there is no morality, ethics are just a suggestion.