In my late 30s, still doing it. I don’t expect to be rewarded though, I just want to toil away without being a dick to people around me.
Thank you
I was pretty young when I knew this in my brain.
I was way too old before I really believed and felt it in my soul.
Don’t be a doormat, but be nice and take a little time to be a bro at work. I’ve been given many great opportunities because I tried to be nice. As long as you’re competent and you care, you don’t even need to be competitive.
Let you know when it happens.
For the most part the more active and nicer you are the happier you will be. Yeah yeah you get taken advantage of, you know the same result if you are a lazy asshole.
Your insurance company is going to deny your claim, your stuff is going to break down, you will be ripped off, you will be injured, you will be robbied, and eventually you will die. All of this stuff will happen in your existence and there is fuck all you can do about it.
What you can do is stay active and stay giving. You can surround yourself with people who very much want you to be happy in life and your happiness almost completely depends on it.
So go ahead and make your decision. Do you want to pass judgement on a world that doesn’t care what you think about it and rot with whatever pathetic little you have or do you want deep connections and a lifetime of achievement.
While I don’t fully disagree with this, I do disagree with the happiness being dependent on this, as that is highly subjective and is not true unanimously.
Why tell me? Tell all those shrinks and psychology professors who have been doing endless studies on this for a century.
Turns out Aristotle was right all along. Took us like 25 centuries to relearn it.
I tell you because you are the one that actively brought this point to a place of discussion.
Fine. I would start reading with the PERMA+ model
I’m aware of it. Although I am starting to lose belief that positivity is how you operate, strictly judging from your responses. Nonetheless, have a nice day.
Don’t think I made any claims about myself
Your statements in your original post are enough to go on, I’m not here to insult, just an observation.
This is good stuff! I love me some positivity
At 15, on my first job. There were 3 others in the same position. I finished first, perfectly, while they goofed off. Told the manager, all excited. She had me clean out a closet while I waited for the others to catch up. It was a real defining moment.
The best thing is that this is true in every job. Your reward for being 15% more productive than everyone else is an extra 5% in wages. Sometimes not even that.
Your reward for being 15% more productive than everyone else is 25% extra work
Fixed.
Also this.
It’s really, really going to depend on your work environment. In some cases, being the person who is 15% more productive buys you some leverage and slack that others don’t have. Was that guy in some roles - there was definitely shit I was able to get away with that would’ve ended in disciplinary conversations for others.
The trick, though, is being to suss out when that’s actually the case, when you’re just deluding yourself , and when that might’ve been the case once but for whatever reason isn’t anymore. That’s tougher.
Yeah, in my environment I find that people tend to remember who they can trust with a task and who’s going to fuck it up. And that’s often the basis for networking.
This is only true in the kind of jobs where you’re just a pair of hands.
In most jobs the more “productive” you are, the more you learn, and the quicker you progress to the next level.
While you’re making money for your boss you can be learning how to make money for yourself.
On second thought, perhaps what you said is true, but that 15% premium compounds over the years.
Oh, way too young. Grade school. I didn’t give up on the nice part, but I realized that extra work got a brief notice - and you constantly had to apply more effort to get that notice, the rest of the time you were the same as anyone else. So why work extra all the time for little reward? Guess I’m not very approval- or reward-driven.
Been in union gigs for decades now. You do your work, do it right because that’s what you do, and you get paid pretty well. Generally nobody’s in your business offering or retracting rewards based on how they feel about you or your work.
Around 16 or 17. I was already aware that “studying hard” was bullshit by 13, which made my grades fall from 90-100% to just passing, which in turn led to lots of complaining from my mom until I finished high school.
In school I would calculate exactly what I would need to do to just pass. I’ve always loved learning but didn’t care for basically everything about the schools I was in. Which brought a storm of shit from my teachers and grandma.
No one appreciated the effort of calculating how many questions need to be answered on a test in order to bring your grade to a 74%. Sure it would’ve been easier to just do the thing, but they didn’t make it fun and it didn’t matter.
I think I was in my early 20s, at my second dev job. It was early enough in my career that it helped.
In my late 30s I realized I could work a little less hard, ask for support, and ask for what I wanted without expectations. It’s an improvement so far.
In my early 30s and after the constant flow of assholes fail upwards and get promoted ahead of me, I decided to set fire to the world and did a Office Space.
That constant directness led me to run a department.
This guy’s management material.
When my angel of a tee totaling mother who would cry from the stress of working unpaid OT, making every family member custom holiday sweatshirts, or hosting other little girl’s birthday parties at their lazy mother’s request, died rather quickly from a brain tumor after her quack therapist ignored her months of aphasia. Selflessness guarantees nothing.
Thankfully, around 7-8th grade. The English and History teachers worked in tandem to impose a critical thinking background to their lessons. Of course, it made me and others cynical as shit, but we were at least less surprised when life decided to go in dry.
I miss MadTV… Great reference.
Trust me, if you’re thrust in unprepared and need to learn the lessons for yourself you will turn out more cynical in the long run.
I used to be so Idealistic…
Can I just respond to this with the entire lyrics for The Logical Song by Supertramp?
I teach for a living, yet I never learn.
FWIW, I had educators who were quite direct about their opinion of the job.
Oh I love the teaching, it’s the crap around it that bugs me. The hard work is all the paperwork that no-one ever reads - “write only documents” as my father used to call them.
30s. Earning well, no issues yet.
Being good to the people around me and those in my community isn’t an act. It’s just how I feel I should be.
I now work on projects I’m passionate about, and spent years prior swinging a tool.
Everyone’s path is different. I was lucky, but I didn’t act a certain way because I was trying to put up an act. It’s just how I conduct myself.
Lucky af here too. None of the “work sucks” stuff ever realllly resonates with me. But I sympathize all the same. Just happened to get super lucky in most every way. We need to do better for the majority, but even an evil system ends up working well for some folks (perhaps only a privileged few). So, caution people on blanket “absolutely everything sucks, trust no one!” kinda thinking.
Way too old.
Ok but if I’m even slightly mean to someone they try to screw me over for the rest of my life. Meanwhile, I see people getting away with it. I need a tutorial on being an asshole that people tolerate.
You have to make sure you’re only being an asshole to people who’re seen as beneath you. If someone above you both likes that person better than you’re going to get fucked. They on the other hand can be an asshole to you with impunity.
Kiss up, kick down. That’s how it’s always worked.
I don’t condone it, because we should be kissing down and kicking up, but the rich people don’t want it that way.
