Look. I’m aware nobody likes a snob, and no, I’m not talking about our widely despised DAO community, although, yeah, I totally also am. But mostly, I’m talking about my attitude and approach to life in general.
All my life, people have told me to ‘try the sandwich method’ when giving my critiques, because they’ll be received better. I always knew that this trait or characteristic would be something I’d have to cull if I ever wanted to climb the ranks into upper management somewhere. Luckily, that’s not something I care to do.
Selfishly, I don’t care to waste my time cushioning your ego and stepping around your personal insecurities. I just hope and trust you know my only intention is to help you improve. As a manager that’s not super effective, because the ‘good’ advice is to incept the worker so they internalize your critique without even knowing it and do the required work to make the changes themselves; whether internally in their attitude or externally in their approach to work.
Some people call this a growth mindset, but few people are willing to do the work in their own head to achieve it. Maybe it’s just because I was adopted out of a shitty situation into a great one that I don’t take comfort relishing in my own success or touting them. There’s a chip on my shoulder, whether a figment of my imagination or not, that I need to live up to my opportunity. I’m the guy who’s never happy with my own progress, devising completely unrealistic standards to hold myself to, while also regularly needing to reevaluate them because I achieve the outcomes I set them for in the first place.
But for people who haven’t taken (or don’t have) the requisite time alone with themselves & their past memorie, to be secure in who they are today, the growth mindset mentality that hustle culture preaches is directly at odds with the traits that will enable you to climb the ladder in corporate.
Unironically, the shortcut most people take to compensate lends itself to self censorship and delegating all responsibility out of your own hands as possible. You can see this playout in the efforts or lengths some individuals go to convey a sort of corporate political correctness in all of their written and spoken communications, but at its core its a reflection of individuals not fully owning their ideas out of fear there could somehow be career ending consequences.
Pair that with the fact that we incentivize workers to endlessly aspire to be managers, professional gas lighters of american workers (no offense it’s just how i’m rebranding managerial sciences), who’s greatest contribution is greasing the cogs of our machine, but get paid the most for not getting their hands dirty, and I only see problems bubbling on the horizon.
Few people in this country know how to do anything for themselves anymore and that’s problematic for all of us, because our leaders believe they can solve problems by coercing workers, who aspire to be just like them, to do it.
Sometimes I wonder how scale capitalism isn’t just a big ponzi scheme, but then I remember it is. Don’t trade your time for a commodity like the US dollar. They’ll inflate you to hell and then turn around and ask you when you’ll be done fixing it.
