I upset people. That's what I do. Some of my best friends think of me as an irritating bastard and still, that won't keep them from inviting me to the next Thanksgiving dinner. Sweet people, but how much worse must be your perception of me? You, who don't know me personally, don't have many options between hating my guts and loving me "anyway." But wait, perhaps there is something else to be considered:
My evil ways are the fault of my rotten star sign, of course. Hence it's useless for me to issue a public apology.
People crave advice. How do I know that? The revenue of the how-to industry, self-help books, and the self-improvement movement are proof how much we desire for others to tell us what to do. First we need to know how valuable a person's opinion might be: we are obsessed with credentials.
Once you can prove to me you're good, I'm willing to believe your opinion is worth listening to. Recently, I read a guy's book who spend some 55 pages--and I kid you not--on building up his readers' belief in his, this authors, abilities. Incredible! Of course, "past performance is no guarantee for future results," but apparently those using their credentials as bait have unshakable faith in the stupidity of their audience.
We believe someone's credentials, we trust her advice ... but we still WON'T do what she suggests. All of us have had brilliant advice throughout our entire lives. Our parents and grandparents have told us for decades not to spend more money than what we are making. It doesn't get simpler than that. And, did you listen?
Some of us, if not most of us, had to painfully learn it again while paying exorbitant prices for this simple lesson that a first grader can understand intellectually. We don't care about advice, no matter how true and down-to-earth it may me. Honestly, we don't give a rat's pink behind about anybody's credentials. We want to do what we want ... but that can be the most difficult thing to figure out.
I have said it before and I shall do so again: I will never tell you what to do. Neither will I bore you with advice about things you "should not" do. I am giving you EXTREME ideas to ponder. I don't care whether you "like" what I say or not. You happen to agree? So what? You disagree and you feel offended? So?
This is not about an argument one of us can win. It's a waste of time to find common ground by working towards a congruent opinion. I don't care what you think, and I hardly care about my own thoughts. The devil's advocate was invented by the Catholic Church--by Pope Sixtus V., to be exact--in anno domini 1587 to deal with cases of beatification and canonization. The Promotor of the Faith or Promotor Fidei, as his title was called officially, had the purpose to get to the bottom of each case, to find the truth (Saint or no Saint).
Often I playfully take the position of the devil's advocate not to unveil an absolute or "objective" truth, but to enable YOU to discover simply what you want to think and what you really want to do. I don't know what you should think, and I don't have the slightest idea what you should do. The devil's advocate may believe what she claims or she may not believe it herself. That is immaterial. What YOU believe is important, or at least I hope it is of importance to you.
When I see individuals being pissed off about me assuming the role of the devil's advocate, I know I hit the bull's eye: they are completely lost! They are also upset with me because I don't give them the advice they would then REJECT. As upset as they are, I know for a fact that they would indeed reject ANY advice I could give them ("I don't feel so good, but at least I am better than you are.").
Devils' advocates remind us of our own painful moments of confusion. We don't like to be confused. We don't like to be seen by others as indecisive, hesitant, and insecure. Confusion equals weakness for many. I don't believe it used to be easy to land a job at Lehman Brothers, high up the food chain, for indecisive and insecure applicants. That must have really helped the company.
Confusion is good!
When you are at a crossroads and you literally do not know: THEN you get a taste of freedom. I won't deny that the experience of raw freedom is often painful, but it will be your very own truth that sets you free. It's not someone's truth somewhere that you need to hunt down.
I may tell you once-in-awhile that I argue the perspective of "advocatus diaboli." I am sorry if you don't enjoy that! Seriously, I am. I feel sorry for you because it might be in your best interest to treat any type of advice as if it was given by a fraud and a quack like me. The next street bum you see may have wisdom that's potentially more valuable to you than the combined knowledge of a hundred assorted lawyers from Merrill Lynch, AIG, and Lehman. Credentials are cheap these days. No, scratch that: credentials have always been worthless.
Confusion is good for ya, emotional upheaval included. Confusion means instant freedom.
Egbert Sukop
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
loving idiocy
"Triple your income and enjoy life!" promised the business card I discovered on top of a urinal in a restaurant. Network sharketing at its best. I did not touch that card. Hell no! Somehow I had a problem computing my idea of enjoyment as a direct function of literally inviting others to piss on my name. Besides, it's kinda sexist and discriminating to exclude women as potential business associates even if your business is of such crappy nature.
Understandably, armies of job-hating employees prefer to suffer through the decades until retirement puts them out of misery. Or a heart attack. Or a quasi retirement, diversified by having fun as a friendly greeter at Walmart, part time.
Employees are bright people in general! Choosing despicable jobs for a lifetime does not mean an individual is too blockheaded to leave appalling work situations behind in exchange for freedom, riches, and the joy of doing what she loves to do. Not necessarily. At least subconsciously, most employees are aware that hating a job may not be the worst of all available alternatives.
We aren't fighting anymore for survival in an environment of sabertoothed tigers, poisonous snakes, and war parties of belligerent tribes. Well, in a transferred sense we are, and it continues to be a desperate act of survival for many of us. You don't need to be an anthropologist to recognize dynamics that were typical for stone age societies beautifully preserved in any bureaucracy. Groups of people, for that matter, tend to re-enact reprehensible forms of "togetherness" we thought we had overcome by now.
We haven't. Laziness is not as bad as its reputation and as we see, even evolution is not exactly forging ahead with a type "A" personality. Hostile work environments--infested with backstabbers, freeloaders, and other lowlife entities--benefit us. Imminent danger to get screwed keeps our senses and pencils sharp. Imagine that: everything you hate about your job is actually good for you!
The fact that we won't look too pretty after a week alone in the jungle often obscures the truth that our reptilian brain is still fully functional. We do know how to suspend judgment, bypass the neocortex, and knock on the old lizard's bedroom door. SNAP! And this hundred million year trained fight-or-flight machine rips a chunk out of anything and is ready for a second helping ... unless you start thinking first and fast. You may not believe in dragons anymore, the guardians of your sixth sense. I do: I have seen them fly.
Hating your job feeds the dragon, sharpens its claws, and keeps the old freak loyal to you and to your purposes.
Yet dragons love to take long naps and interruptions displease them. You know what that means, don't you? Eh? C'mon. You guessed it: our instincts are sufficiently developed to know that hating miserable jobs for forty years is BETTER and infinitely safer than unpredictable environments of entrepreneurship. Employees know that hating a job, as awful as it may be, still allows them to go home at a certain time, play with their kids on the weekend and pick up a paycheck in predictable intervals.
Employees know that self-employment can mean years of hell, physical and emotional hardship, sleep deprivation, having to see their family under constant existential threat, and worse: living with the pain and the guilt of not spending enough time with their loved ones.
It is utterly irresponsible to promise employees a better world when they enter self-employment. If you have a job today, heed my advice and keep your damn job! Each of the alternatives may not only be significantly worse than what you are hating today. Anything besides the things you hate doing today could easily be classified as torture by you and by independent judges.
Yes, you got that right. What you hate doing is rather foreplay than torture. The things you say you'd love to be doing may turn into brutal and violent (self)-destruction once you realize there is no way back and you will be forced to do it to the very end, until you die. I am not kidding!
My father--a farmer--ridiculed employees who made twice the money he did and who could afford to go on three-week vacations year after year. He mocked government employees who could not get fired, were basically exempt from paying income taxes, and had generous pensions waiting for them at retirement age (no, of course he didn't make fun of employees to their face).
My dad didn't have a safe paycheck nor a secured pension. He did not expect to retire, ever. When the weather demanded it, he would work every day for months. Sometimes he had a bad year, financially. I saw him--and us--going through several meager years in a row. Vacations? Yep, he enjoyed about half a dozen vacations, 3 - 5 days long in his late sixties, totaling a month of goofing off during his lifetime perhaps.
My old man worked for more than fifty years on a "job" he did not initially choose. He felt he had to take over this 800-year-old family business when his older brother got killed in WWI. Most individuals in our society would easily label my father's life as 50 years of "Labor Camp." Yet, I never heard him complain. He whistled at work. He was a happy man. He never said it explicitly, but I do know he absolutely LOVED his life and his vocation. He CHOSE to work every day.
I have met hundreds and hundreds of self-employed men and women, entrepreneurs, selfmade individuals in all sorts of industries, in different countries on several continents. My father's story does NOT stick out as special. On the contrary, as far as self-employment goes, he was quite normal. It matters not that my dad lived in Germany all his life. What I have learned and what I continue to admire is that America and the greatness of the U.S. have been build by such "normal" individuals.
Ingenious tinkerers willing to go through hell for the people and for the work they love. Reckless idiots in the eyes of outsiders, like the Wright brothers. No, those who hate what they do won't risk braking limbs and necks without a reflection of that risk in a pay raise. Only people who love what they do are willing to destroy marriage, friendships, and their own health over their "love."
Do you really love what you want to do? Enough to die for it? Oh, that is just my negative programming? Yeah sure, you new age dork! Agreed, there is an off-chance that you are lucky. Maybe you will coast through self-employment with ease, wade through truck loads of cash, and all that's good will only get better throughout eternity. And boy, I wish that's true for you. But if you expect that to happen, oh baby, I'm afraid you are a doomed freaking wretch.
Choice can turn one man's (and woman's, naturally) torture into another man's paradise. It is pure idiocy to assume doing what you love will make you happy. You are the one who has to modify everything you do, the stuff you hate doing and the things you say you love. You have to breathe happiness into every single one of your endeavors. If you don't, the stuff you love today will taste like yesterday's stale beer tomorrow and turn into a heavy burden.
It is dumb to believe doing what you love will get you anywhere. "It" won't. YOU may and you may not ... if and when you are ready for it. Asking you to quit employment and to do "what you love" is the equivalent of asking you to jump into a volcano and to fight with dragons to your last breath. If you happen to love THAT, then by all means do it! If you don't, I don't want to be held responsible for talking you into it. Nope.
And yeah, if you are aware of the risks--in addition to the risks you will never be aware of in advance--you will probably enjoy it. At any rate, I beg you (on my knees): start a business but do it parallel to your sleeping-dragon employment. You'll thank me soon.
In short, job-hating is an insurance policy against possibly traumatizing and maybe fatal self-employment. I urge you to love the job-hating if you lack the balls to subject yourself to the fate of going down or up in flames by doing what you "love." Whether it'll be "up" or "down" is not for you to decide: whether you like it or not, the market always has the last word.
Love thy dragon as thyself,
Egbert Sukop
Understandably, armies of job-hating employees prefer to suffer through the decades until retirement puts them out of misery. Or a heart attack. Or a quasi retirement, diversified by having fun as a friendly greeter at Walmart, part time.
Employees are bright people in general! Choosing despicable jobs for a lifetime does not mean an individual is too blockheaded to leave appalling work situations behind in exchange for freedom, riches, and the joy of doing what she loves to do. Not necessarily. At least subconsciously, most employees are aware that hating a job may not be the worst of all available alternatives.
We aren't fighting anymore for survival in an environment of sabertoothed tigers, poisonous snakes, and war parties of belligerent tribes. Well, in a transferred sense we are, and it continues to be a desperate act of survival for many of us. You don't need to be an anthropologist to recognize dynamics that were typical for stone age societies beautifully preserved in any bureaucracy. Groups of people, for that matter, tend to re-enact reprehensible forms of "togetherness" we thought we had overcome by now.
We haven't. Laziness is not as bad as its reputation and as we see, even evolution is not exactly forging ahead with a type "A" personality. Hostile work environments--infested with backstabbers, freeloaders, and other lowlife entities--benefit us. Imminent danger to get screwed keeps our senses and pencils sharp. Imagine that: everything you hate about your job is actually good for you!
The fact that we won't look too pretty after a week alone in the jungle often obscures the truth that our reptilian brain is still fully functional. We do know how to suspend judgment, bypass the neocortex, and knock on the old lizard's bedroom door. SNAP! And this hundred million year trained fight-or-flight machine rips a chunk out of anything and is ready for a second helping ... unless you start thinking first and fast. You may not believe in dragons anymore, the guardians of your sixth sense. I do: I have seen them fly.
Hating your job feeds the dragon, sharpens its claws, and keeps the old freak loyal to you and to your purposes.
Yet dragons love to take long naps and interruptions displease them. You know what that means, don't you? Eh? C'mon. You guessed it: our instincts are sufficiently developed to know that hating miserable jobs for forty years is BETTER and infinitely safer than unpredictable environments of entrepreneurship. Employees know that hating a job, as awful as it may be, still allows them to go home at a certain time, play with their kids on the weekend and pick up a paycheck in predictable intervals.
Employees know that self-employment can mean years of hell, physical and emotional hardship, sleep deprivation, having to see their family under constant existential threat, and worse: living with the pain and the guilt of not spending enough time with their loved ones.
It is utterly irresponsible to promise employees a better world when they enter self-employment. If you have a job today, heed my advice and keep your damn job! Each of the alternatives may not only be significantly worse than what you are hating today. Anything besides the things you hate doing today could easily be classified as torture by you and by independent judges.
Yes, you got that right. What you hate doing is rather foreplay than torture. The things you say you'd love to be doing may turn into brutal and violent (self)-destruction once you realize there is no way back and you will be forced to do it to the very end, until you die. I am not kidding!
My father--a farmer--ridiculed employees who made twice the money he did and who could afford to go on three-week vacations year after year. He mocked government employees who could not get fired, were basically exempt from paying income taxes, and had generous pensions waiting for them at retirement age (no, of course he didn't make fun of employees to their face).
My dad didn't have a safe paycheck nor a secured pension. He did not expect to retire, ever. When the weather demanded it, he would work every day for months. Sometimes he had a bad year, financially. I saw him--and us--going through several meager years in a row. Vacations? Yep, he enjoyed about half a dozen vacations, 3 - 5 days long in his late sixties, totaling a month of goofing off during his lifetime perhaps.
My old man worked for more than fifty years on a "job" he did not initially choose. He felt he had to take over this 800-year-old family business when his older brother got killed in WWI. Most individuals in our society would easily label my father's life as 50 years of "Labor Camp." Yet, I never heard him complain. He whistled at work. He was a happy man. He never said it explicitly, but I do know he absolutely LOVED his life and his vocation. He CHOSE to work every day.
I have met hundreds and hundreds of self-employed men and women, entrepreneurs, selfmade individuals in all sorts of industries, in different countries on several continents. My father's story does NOT stick out as special. On the contrary, as far as self-employment goes, he was quite normal. It matters not that my dad lived in Germany all his life. What I have learned and what I continue to admire is that America and the greatness of the U.S. have been build by such "normal" individuals.
Ingenious tinkerers willing to go through hell for the people and for the work they love. Reckless idiots in the eyes of outsiders, like the Wright brothers. No, those who hate what they do won't risk braking limbs and necks without a reflection of that risk in a pay raise. Only people who love what they do are willing to destroy marriage, friendships, and their own health over their "love."
Do you really love what you want to do? Enough to die for it? Oh, that is just my negative programming? Yeah sure, you new age dork! Agreed, there is an off-chance that you are lucky. Maybe you will coast through self-employment with ease, wade through truck loads of cash, and all that's good will only get better throughout eternity. And boy, I wish that's true for you. But if you expect that to happen, oh baby, I'm afraid you are a doomed freaking wretch.
Choice can turn one man's (and woman's, naturally) torture into another man's paradise. It is pure idiocy to assume doing what you love will make you happy. You are the one who has to modify everything you do, the stuff you hate doing and the things you say you love. You have to breathe happiness into every single one of your endeavors. If you don't, the stuff you love today will taste like yesterday's stale beer tomorrow and turn into a heavy burden.
It is dumb to believe doing what you love will get you anywhere. "It" won't. YOU may and you may not ... if and when you are ready for it. Asking you to quit employment and to do "what you love" is the equivalent of asking you to jump into a volcano and to fight with dragons to your last breath. If you happen to love THAT, then by all means do it! If you don't, I don't want to be held responsible for talking you into it. Nope.
And yeah, if you are aware of the risks--in addition to the risks you will never be aware of in advance--you will probably enjoy it. At any rate, I beg you (on my knees): start a business but do it parallel to your sleeping-dragon employment. You'll thank me soon.
In short, job-hating is an insurance policy against possibly traumatizing and maybe fatal self-employment. I urge you to love the job-hating if you lack the balls to subject yourself to the fate of going down or up in flames by doing what you "love." Whether it'll be "up" or "down" is not for you to decide: whether you like it or not, the market always has the last word.
Love thy dragon as thyself,
Egbert Sukop
Sunday, September 7, 2008
frontal attack
"If you have a job without any aggravations, you don't have a job." --Malcolm Forbes
In other words, "loving your job" is not the equivalent of enjoying every damn thing that's part of your job. Every job has elements you won't like at all. Loving your children doesn't mean that they are sweet, well-behaved creatures all day, and just the way they "should" be. On the contrary, if our love for somebody or something doesn't absorb a good portion of adversity, love ain't love.
The quest to find something you love to do for a living is often carried out as a "frontal attack" of the problem. What do I enjoy doing? What am I good at? Where are my strengths? Not even a mad bull would expect to win with such a doomed strategy. It's not likely to work well for you either.
Jobs per se are not our last inhumane bastion of self-hatred, but certainly one of vast proportions. Most jobs are an expression of self-neglect and certainly the lack of self-respect. You think your individuality is a liability, your creativity is worthless, and you aren't worthy of freedom? Get a job. Any job will do, in fact.
Jobs are time machines transporting you into the dark ages of socialism. You don't matter. The stuff you do doesn't matter. And your paycheck is rather immaterial. You are doing it mostly "for the benefits." You really believe you can improve on a pitiful situation like that? Well, fetch my free ebook 'How to Better Hate Your Job', pray hard, and I wish you the best of luck.
Forgive me! I got side-tracked. Apropos, that's what jobs are in general: detours of life. Jobs distract you from doing something worth your while. Jobs divert you from being yourself and from the development of your individual genius. Jobs are coffins of individuality (and so is multi-level garbaging), but hey babe: Don't quit if you have a job right now! I am serious. Build a business parallel to this bloody black hole of individuality. Start something on your own! And--as I hope you recall--it does NOT have to be based on activities you enjoy in order for you to love it.
Have you watched "Glory" with Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Matthew Broderick--when Denzel could still act (and wasn't just Denzel Washington in a new setting)--or "The Patriot" with Heath Ledger and Mel (Oh-God-teach-me-to-be-a-less-obvious-antisemitic-ass-while-drunk) Gibson? You'll remember battle scenes with two armies standing vis-a-vis slaughtering each other, showing the brutal stupidity of frontal attacks.
When you attack your life's problems head on, you are becoming canon fodder just like dead soldiers of previous centuries. "I think only positive," or "I want to do what I enjoy for a living," are frontal attacks on your intelligence, and they aren't blessed with better chances to succeed than bitter exchanges of musket salvos in the 18th century. In order to do what you love, you don't have to do what you love.
Come again? Yep, you heard me perfectly well the first time.
Human beings have the incredible ability to love what they don't like. We can even hate what we're doing, and we can hate it so much that we love the way we hate it. Following our feelings is immature. "Yeah, but what if it doesn't feel right?" Your feelings and emotions got you by the nose? Not good. It's part of growing up to learn how to do WHAT YOU WANT without getting distracted or slowed down by the way you may feel.
You seriously believe Lance Armstrong could have won the Tour de France seven times--and he's preparing for the Tour de France 2009 as we speak--had he listened to his feelings all the time? Sure he likes cycling, but do you realize the inhumane pain he puts himself through to do what he wants?
If and when you do what you want, it will NOT feel good all the time. On the contrary, when you do what you really want you will go through so much pain that others would call it torture if they were forced to do the same, involuntarily. Doing what you want may cause you MORE pain than the job you hate so much. Being obsessed with feeling good is good only for morons. It's the frontal attack of loving what you do ... and childish: I love you as long as I like you.
In case you really want to to what you love, you gotta learn to love it while you hate it. When you do what you want it may hardly feel good at all. I promise, doing what you love will put you through more pain, trouble, and challenges than enduring a job you hate. And you got to love it.
The only thing that matters is that it is what YOU want. Who cares how that feels?!
Egbert Sukop
In other words, "loving your job" is not the equivalent of enjoying every damn thing that's part of your job. Every job has elements you won't like at all. Loving your children doesn't mean that they are sweet, well-behaved creatures all day, and just the way they "should" be. On the contrary, if our love for somebody or something doesn't absorb a good portion of adversity, love ain't love.
The quest to find something you love to do for a living is often carried out as a "frontal attack" of the problem. What do I enjoy doing? What am I good at? Where are my strengths? Not even a mad bull would expect to win with such a doomed strategy. It's not likely to work well for you either.
Jobs per se are not our last inhumane bastion of self-hatred, but certainly one of vast proportions. Most jobs are an expression of self-neglect and certainly the lack of self-respect. You think your individuality is a liability, your creativity is worthless, and you aren't worthy of freedom? Get a job. Any job will do, in fact.
Jobs are time machines transporting you into the dark ages of socialism. You don't matter. The stuff you do doesn't matter. And your paycheck is rather immaterial. You are doing it mostly "for the benefits." You really believe you can improve on a pitiful situation like that? Well, fetch my free ebook 'How to Better Hate Your Job', pray hard, and I wish you the best of luck.
Forgive me! I got side-tracked. Apropos, that's what jobs are in general: detours of life. Jobs distract you from doing something worth your while. Jobs divert you from being yourself and from the development of your individual genius. Jobs are coffins of individuality (and so is multi-level garbaging), but hey babe: Don't quit if you have a job right now! I am serious. Build a business parallel to this bloody black hole of individuality. Start something on your own! And--as I hope you recall--it does NOT have to be based on activities you enjoy in order for you to love it.
Have you watched "Glory" with Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Matthew Broderick--when Denzel could still act (and wasn't just Denzel Washington in a new setting)--or "The Patriot" with Heath Ledger and Mel (Oh-God-teach-me-to-be-a-less-obvious-antisemitic-ass-while-drunk) Gibson? You'll remember battle scenes with two armies standing vis-a-vis slaughtering each other, showing the brutal stupidity of frontal attacks.
When you attack your life's problems head on, you are becoming canon fodder just like dead soldiers of previous centuries. "I think only positive," or "I want to do what I enjoy for a living," are frontal attacks on your intelligence, and they aren't blessed with better chances to succeed than bitter exchanges of musket salvos in the 18th century. In order to do what you love, you don't have to do what you love.
Come again? Yep, you heard me perfectly well the first time.
Human beings have the incredible ability to love what they don't like. We can even hate what we're doing, and we can hate it so much that we love the way we hate it. Following our feelings is immature. "Yeah, but what if it doesn't feel right?" Your feelings and emotions got you by the nose? Not good. It's part of growing up to learn how to do WHAT YOU WANT without getting distracted or slowed down by the way you may feel.
You seriously believe Lance Armstrong could have won the Tour de France seven times--and he's preparing for the Tour de France 2009 as we speak--had he listened to his feelings all the time? Sure he likes cycling, but do you realize the inhumane pain he puts himself through to do what he wants?
If and when you do what you want, it will NOT feel good all the time. On the contrary, when you do what you really want you will go through so much pain that others would call it torture if they were forced to do the same, involuntarily. Doing what you want may cause you MORE pain than the job you hate so much. Being obsessed with feeling good is good only for morons. It's the frontal attack of loving what you do ... and childish: I love you as long as I like you.
In case you really want to to what you love, you gotta learn to love it while you hate it. When you do what you want it may hardly feel good at all. I promise, doing what you love will put you through more pain, trouble, and challenges than enduring a job you hate. And you got to love it.
The only thing that matters is that it is what YOU want. Who cares how that feels?!
Egbert Sukop
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