by Megan Hustad
How to
* * *
Be Useful
* * *
»» A Beginner’s Guide to Not Hating Work
Megan Hustad
Houghton Mifflin Company
BOSTON • NEW YORK • 2008
Copyright © 2008 by Megan Hustad
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hustad, Megan.
How to be useful: a beginner’s guide to not hating work
/ Megan Hustad.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-O-618-7135O-9
ISBN-IO: O-618-7135O-6
1. Success in business. 2. Career development. 3. Job satisfaction.
4. Success. I. Title.
HF5386.H97 2008
650.1 — dc22 2007038413
Book design by Melissa Lotfy
Printed in the United States of America
MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Selections from Sex and the Single Girl and Sex and the Office appear courtesy of Helen Gurley Brown.
Excerpt from The Office, series 1, episode 3, written by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This book includes many anecdotes from people kind enough to share their impressions and experiences with me. Names of individuals, some job descriptions, genders, most places of residence, and occasionally company names have been changed to disguise those who violated nondisclosure agreements and/or their better judgment.
for Amy
When the individual does move into a new position in society and obtains a new part to perform, he is not likely to be told in full detail how to conduct himself. — ERVING GOFFMAN,
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
The unvarnished truth is almost all of the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realize in some subtle way that you recognize their importance, and recognize it sincerely. — DALE CARNEGIE,
How to Win Friends and Influence People
There’s just no point in behaving like a shit. — KEIRA KNIGHTLEY,
as quoted in Elle magazine
Contents
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Introduction
1 On Being a Poseur Early Capitalists on Why Writing Business Letters Takes Longer Than Reading Them Does
2 Dodging the Great Failure Army Orison Swett Marden on the Strange Power of Finding Something Nice to Say
3 Party Tips for the Nouveau Riche Etiquette and the Importance of Asking Questions
4 On Near Universal Self-Absorption How to Win Friends and influence People by Recognizing What Navel-Gazers People Are
5 The Master Mind Napoleon Hill on the Proper Use of Friendship
6 Checking Yourself at the Door What Brooks Brothers and Midcentury Handwringing over Bland Conformity Reveal About Personal Style
7 When It’s Just Not About You Helen Gurley Brown on Having One’s Underwear Forcibly Removed
Interlude
8 Self-Deprecation The Art of Humble Beginnings Stories
9 On Defense The Dark Heart of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
10 The Uses of No Donald Trump and “You’re Fired”
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
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WHAT'S IT LIKE to work in an office? It’s difficult to get excited about, for one. The prospect of cubicles, giving your day over to a corporation, having to tell some coworker named Dan that he’s got cream cheese on his chin—none of this sounds appealing. The benefits of working 9 to 5 also seem more meager than they have in the past. That is, meager compared to the poolside cocktails bonanza some people are enjoying. Somewhere between your morning shower and sinking into your IKEA chair, you’re bound to be reminded—by a magazine cover, or a reference to Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive—of the hordes of celebutards getting paid to do nothing, or to DJ, or to just be mildly clever.
Then there’s the problem that job descriptions often fail to communicate the many nuances of being a corporate underling, so your expectations get skewed. Ben, a trainee architect at a Washington, D.C., commercial real estate firm, had an illuminating episode his first week on the job. Day three, his boss asked him to get rid of some empty cardboard boxes from an Amazon.com shipment. These boxes had been cluttering up the hallway for the better half of two weeks and she just wanted them gone. So Ben called the downstairs switchboard because his boss had given no instructions and he had no idea whom to talk to about this. He got nowhere. Later that afternoon, with the problem still unsolved, Ben poked his head into his boss’s office to say that he’d been as yet unsuccessful in finding someone to come collect them. She examined him for a few seconds before speaking. “You,” she said slowly. “The person who throws away boxes here is you”
No one had informed Ben that in addition to drafting and designing, he was responsible for minor housekeeping duties. Nor had he given much thought to office hierarchies, a superior’s moods and attitudes, organizational politics, strategy, positioning, or how to cope with the fact that this boss character —practically a stranger—suddenly had all this power over you, and who now—maybe, hard to tell—didn’t even like you. That young people aren’t prepared for workplace realities is something a number of commentators have picked up on lately, and the list of reasons they haul out to explain this unpreparedness has become fairly familiar: indulgent ’80s and ’90s parenting practices, MySpace, a culture that prizes self-expression über alles, and an educational system that hasn’t kept pace with global standards. Fewer kids get jobs in high school and college now, too. Teen labor-force participation rates are falling, and some companies are even reporting that they’d rather hire a senior citizen than a younger worker, because older folks are doing the same jobs better.1 Then there’s the inconvenient truth that four years of college actually breeds many habits that are completely at odds with the demands of most offices. The more expensive your education, the more time you’ve spent luxuriating in the highbrow, chasing idiosyncratic intellectual fascinations down rabbit holes, and watching subtitled films. You’ve made your own schedule and surrounded yourself with people who dressed, acted, and thought very much like you. All this has led the author Mel Levine (Ready or Not, Here Life Comes) to claim that recent graduates generally “fail to identify at all with the world of adults.” One television executive I spoke to had this to say about the entry-level assistants that swung through her firm’s revolving doors: “They either get it, or they just don’t get it. And increasingly, they just don’t get it.”
From what I’ve seen, it’s not that young people enter the office empty-headed. Far from it. It’s that once they get over the initial shock of stooping to round up cardboard boxes, they sincerely believe their hard work and sparkling intellect will be sufficient ballast to weather any storms and succeed. They think only lazy or incompetent people get bypassed for promotion, neglected, or called into the corner office and told to please have a seat for the “It’s not working out, is it?” talk. Though I’ve personally witnessed this faith in pure diligence, though I embraced it myself when I got out of college (and for too long afterwards), I didn’t know—couldn’t have known�
��how prevalent it is. But according to a recent survey published by the Network on Transitions to Adulthood, more young people in 1997 believed that “hard work” was the ticket to success than did in 1985, even in 1973.2 In other words, my generation has clung more tightly to the notion of big rewards through hard work than our parents ever did.
This is pretty amazing. How is it that young people today, people who aren’t naive about anything else, can be so naive about making a living? Anyone who has spent any time at all in the corporate arena can tell you that diligence does not write the checks. I’m going to have to take a guess here—because how you’d study the fine shadings of this particular attitude I don’t know—but I think the problem is that this naivete is coupled with a potent cynicism about careers and careerism. Of course, looking askance at eager go-getters is nothing new. This generation’s cynicism is different from earlier strains of job ennui, however, because as one twenty-eight-year-old told me, it infects you “before you even walk in the front door.” For the 1950s Organization Man, cynical is what you became when you realized that the boss’s suck-up son-in-law was going to get that promotion instead of you. It’s what happened to you after big dreams got kicked down the sidewalk. Now you get spoon-fed cranked-up sardonic posturing every time you turn on the television. My generation, perhaps duly exhausted by being so aggressively marketed to our entire lives, has learned to follow any earnest expression of enthusiasm with “Nooo, I’m being sincere” because it will usually automatically be assumed otherwise. I could use numerous cultural references to illustrate this point, but here’s one that might do nicely: Gawker.com recently suggested Ironic Detachment Is the New Giving a Shit as a T-shirt slogan.
What this means for the office is that a chill creeps into the air whenever the subject of ambition comes up. Not long ago, Sarah, a former colleague of mine, landed a new job and was given the traditional perimeter tour of her new office. This meant fifteen minutes of stopping at every door and cubicle, and the requisite trading names, preliminaries, and nice to meet you’s. Later, over lunch with her tour guide, Sarah brought up one woman she couldn’t get a good read on. “So… Heidi, the blonde? Tall? What’s her story?” Her tour guide winced. “Heidi? Yeah, she’s good, smart. Real ambitious, though.” In the next month, four more people weighed in with the same assessment of Heidi, and every time, “She’s ambitious” was inflected the way you might whisper, “She has hepatitis B.” Hard to recall the particulars of how it’s transmitted, maybe, or what it does, exactly. You just know you should avoid intimate contact.
Earnest job ambition has indeed become unfashionable. “You just can’t seem to want the things you want,” Steven, a writing instructor, confessed to me. “It’s not smiled upon.” Steven’s assessment was partly a function of where he’d previously worked—the hyper-snotty halls of glossy magazine publisher Conde Nast—and the arty leanings of the crowd he ran with. But with that phrase—can’t seem to want the things you want—he put his finger on something significant, which is that this ironic detachment doesn’t run deep. Of course young people want to do well. Of course they don’t want their life choices to be severely constrained by lack of funds. Of course they’d like to see Rome. But they get pushed toward a mindset that privileges being cute and clever, plugging away, and uh, yeah, that’s about it.
Which just reinforces ignorance about the office. The idea of studying the art of working was lost on us. My first career-track job was at Random House, and I distinctly remember how we editorial assistants stood clutching manuscripts in the lobby, waiting for the elevator, and proudly professing to anyone who asked that we were mostly interested in “literary fiction.”3 We had no time for business books or leadership development books and happily left them to those without style, imagination, or the critical skills we thought made us, history and English majors, so fascinating. We didn’t work on Wall Street, or wear ties, so we didn’t think of ourselves as being, as they say, “in business.” After all, what could go wrong as long as we worked hard? How was it possible we didn’t know everything we needed to know? It wasn’t possible—we were quite sure of this.
Right under our noses, though, was about a century’s worth of books that plainly and convincingly argued otherwise. There was a great deal we needed to know—about hierarchies, organizational politics, and how to deal with the fact that your boss maybe didn’t even like you. There are shelves and shelves of books on how to channel ambition justly, how to speak distinctly, how to think more strategically, and how to pay closer attention so the world and its opportunities don’t pass you by. Thousands of chapters that tell readers how to secure a financial future and perhaps grow wiser while they’re at it. Millions of pages that tell us that hard work isn’t going to cut it. Most of these books have perfectly straightforward titles—How to Win Friends and Influence People, for example—so they’re not hard to spot. But we weren’t moved to pick them up. Not only did we not have much interest in “success literature” (as some critics call it), but we studiously avoided it.
How this blase posturing hurts people who have to work for a living has fascinated me for a while now. When I started my research for this book, and began polling friends and acquaintances on whether they’d read How to Win Friends or any similar book, the most common response was “Oh gosh, I’d be embarrassed to be seen in public with it.” They regarded success literature as the exclusive reserve of ultraconservatives and finance majors, in other words. A handful had read these books, but only secretly. One guy I talked to recalled that as an awkward teenager, he had procured a copy of Larry King’s How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere, hoping it might alleviate his silent suffering in social situations. He was so embarrassed by the book—even worried what his dad might think—that he handled it like porn and kept it under his bed.
Most people I drilled on this subject avoided success literature—which I’ll continue to call it because I can’t think of anything better—for “the obvious reasons.” This phrase became a refrain; I kept hearing it in conversation after conversation. The “obvious reasons” for sidestepping these books were essentially threefold: They didn’t have anything to say that anybody with a scrap of common sense didn’t already know (“Have a firm handshake, or be more aggressive—who doesn’t get that?”); they preyed on people’s insecurities and were therefore exploitative (“Like diet pills”); and last but not least, these books were avoided because they were, so very often, so very poorly written. They were universally perceived to have a rah-rah, up-with-middle-management, dumbed-down huckster sensibility. Then there was the sheer boredom factor. Horatio Alger, rags to riches, up-by-your-bootstraps, you’ve come a long way, baby!, blah, blah, blah—it’s the white noise of American culture and it registers on our consciousness like brushing our teeth registers on our consciousness. That is to say, it doesn’t. Ironic detachment is the new giving a shit.
All these objections to reading these books I had anticipated, because they weren’t that different from how I used to think myself. But I never expected to hear what a Los Angeles screenwriter told me: “I don’t go there because every person’s situation is so unique, and the context for the problems they’re facing is so unique, that I just think… general prescriptions are basically bogus.” I paused for a second when I heard this, over the phone. Had he read any of these books? No, he hadn’t. (“The obvious reasons.”) Remembering how I struggled mightily to understand what made bosses tick, and having seen so many friends and even competitors fret about making rent and staying late and coworkers named Dan and feeling trapped, all without turning into one of those “Me, bitter? I’m not bitter!” caricatures, I became more firmly convinced that sidestepping the Careers/Self-Improvement shelf was perhaps not a sign of our superior intellect.
Our cynicism really did make us more naive. The truth is that employees in Internet start-ups, the offices of Vogue, law firms, nonprofits, Kmart—pretty much any place where you trade a portion of your day for money—all face simi
lar problems, and they’re the problems people have been wrestling with for decades. The look,- sound, and texture of these problems may be different, but human nature just doesn’t change all that quickly. I’ve now had dozens of conversations with people about their experiences at work, hopes and plans for work, even their fears and misgivings about work, and I can assure you that no one’s experience is unique. And ignorance about organizational dynamics doesn’t just result in funny-ha-ha slip-ups and blooper outtakes—though those are common enough. It leads to intelligent, well-educated, sometimes quite worldly individuals hitting their twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth birthdays wondering why they don’t have professional lives they’re proud of.
It’s difficult for me to summarize the fallout because it invariably devolves into glib snippets: So you get stuck in a cubicle for eight years? Gee, that’s tough. Failing at the office sounds flaccid and beige; more YouTube skit, less Greek tragedy. The lived reality, though, is plenty heartbreaking.
“So are you one of those people who defines themselves by their job?” someone once asked me. The right answer was clearly no. No, I wasn’t that boring, that lacking in compassion, that blind to the rich tapestry of human experience. But, I wondered, surely what you do for half your waking hours has some bearing on your life.4 And then I wondered: Is it possible that middle-class young people have been suckered into adopting a cynical detachment that they can’t afford? I mean literally cannot afford? The tenderhearted and creatively inclined most of all, because they tend to gravitate to industries where “people skills” make the most difference. Social mobility in the United States is on the decline, middle-class incomes are stagnant, and you can only lunge at the occasional zero percent introductory APR offer stuffed in your mailbox so often.
