How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work

by Megan Hustad

  I can understand if you’d prefer a slightly different tack. Some take a more Dada approach. At social events, where she’s surrounded by Ivy Leaguers, a former colleague of mine throws off comments like “I just assume everyone went to Yale unless they tell me otherwise” whenever the conversation allows. She herself did not attend Yale, and has never pretended to. But the phrase—it makes no sense, honestly—somehow neutralizes the air. If hearing “So where did you ..still causes your spine to stiffen, here are a few more suggestions for how to handle a legacy of state schools and cashiering jobs:

  Do highlight diligence rother than libertinism. The best self-deprecating remarks suggest nerdiness, anxiety, or a near-OCD level of desire to get things just right and just so. It’s always better to admit dedication to something that, doggone it, just didn’t work out for you in the end, than to toss off a “sorry, I’m still drunk from yesterday” type of remark. This is also why a time lag helps. If your self-deprecating stories are mainly about troubles experienced very recently, there’s not enough of a critical distance separating you, the narrator, from the projectile vomiter you were thirteen hours ago.

  That said, regularly claiming to be “super, super busy” is rarely a good idea. People notice when you say this a lot, and it’s usually regarded as boastful, and mildly annoying.

  Do keep it Simple. Long-winded stories can draw more condescension than you faced initially. Quick and pithy is better—especially when your self-deprecating comment comes on the heels of a compliment. Say someone tells you he likes your outfit; you say thanks and “Target. Juniors section.” This is preferable to going on about how, gosh, you haven’t been able to afford new clothes in so long, and you can’t wait for your mom to come visit in September so she can take you shopping. Quick also adds a slight veneer of mystery—if you’re generally a person who doesn’t lack for words, the shortest truth about the plainest of accomplishments can sound fairy-dusted.

  Of course, any deviation from the absolute truth should be so clearly false that no one would believe you anyhow. If it could be true (but just isn’t in your case), it’s best to avoid it. In other words, joking, “Yeah, cut it myself” when someone compliments your new hairstyle could be true. (I can personally attest to this.) Similarly, when someone expresses admiration or envy at the fact that you attended Brown, don’t say, “Yeah, I got in because Dad paid for a new dorm.” Could be true.

  Do say it with hands on hips, literally or metaphorically. In How to

  Read a Person Like a Book, the authors Nierenberg and Calero claimed that after reviewing thousands of hours of videotaped negotiating sessions, they could say with scientific certainty that people who were more conscious of their body’s subtle movements could—as long as they didn’t succumb to crippling self-consciousness—wield more influence over others than those who just flopped about, unaware of what their legs and arms were doing. “Think for a moment about someone you know well who normally assumes the hands-on-hips position,” they counseled. “Is that person by definition goal-oriented? Does he enjoy competition? For several years we have kept a record of executives who have attended our seminars. Approximately 75 percent of them will, when asking a question during the first hour of the seminar, assume a hands-on-hips position with their coats off or unbuttoned.” Striking this pose, you could state as many down-home proclivities as you’d like, express a preference for Kraft Singles over aged Gouda, or admit “I just don’t know,” and still suggest that you’ve arrived at a higher level of sophistication and reason than someone slouching with hands in pockets.

  Do it only when the attention is already on you, not when someone else is the subject of conversation and you just happen to have a similar story. You’re at a party or a bagel breakfast or some such company function, and someone’s regaling everyone with a funny humble beginnings story, and you experienced the exact same thing, just a little differently, only your story doesn’t end as well, or that impressively, and isn’t funny. Maybe don’t mention it. Smile, nod in recognition, mention you can sympathize, but do not spin your whole unpracticed yarn. Save it for another time, after you’ve rehearsed.

  In a similar vein: Don’t offer up your humble beginnings story as a rebuttal. I was once in a situation where an older colleague, licking her finger and flicking through resumes, said it was not worth considering anyone who hadn’t gone to the right schools. Either she didn’t know I didn’t go to the right schools, or she didn’t mind bugging me. (The small satisfaction of having correctly predicted that she was a closet snob wore off in about eight minutes.) In any event, I didn’t volunteer the information (“Hey, guess what? I went to…”), but just smiled and excused myself (“… have to get back to my desk!”). It’s a delicate calibration, but I’ve found that when people betray certain prejudices—confident they’re in a group where everyone shares the same background and views—and unwittingly disparage you as a result, they don’t always take it well when confronted with that fact. Regardless of how politely or charmingly they’re informed. They’ll either be really embarrassed (if they’re soft at heart), or just riled (if they’re total egotists).

  But still, whenever self-mythologizing: Do avoid folksy nonsense. Silas Lapham nearly loses the sympathies of his interviewer when he’s asked to describe the process by which his plant manufactures industrial-strength mineral paint. This is how he responds: “When folks come in, and kind of smell round, and ask me what I mix it with, I always say, ‘Well, in the first place, I mix it with Faith, and after that I grind it up with the best quality of boiled linseed oil that money will buy.” Needless to say, adding anything objectively false to one’s resume is also not smart. Anyone who tells you that everyone lies a little on these things is—duh— a liar.

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  Quentin Crisp, a writer and latter-day Oscar Wilde who spent much of his life around and sometimes under the poverty line, had some interesting insights for those who, despite their best efforts, were still embarrassed by humble circumstances. He was a master at making do, and once claimed that if you could survive on cocktail-hour peanuts and champagne, and knew where the good parties were, you’d have no need for a day job. But even the poorest of the poor had nothing to fear from noxious socialites, Crisp claimed, because which conversation is going to be more interesting: the one that starts, “An amusing thing happened as I was driving down the Champs Elysees the other day ..or the one that begins, “An amusing thing happened as I was sleeping in the bus station last night…”?

  Which suggests to me that if fortune didn’t hand you the material for bus station stories, you may want to go get yourself some. Go fail at something, if you can do it without hurting anyone. Then read the next chapter to help you recover.

  9

  On Defense

  * * *

  The Dark Heart of The 7 Habits

  of Highly Effective People

  If you’re going to bow, bow low.

  —A piece of “Eastern wisdom”

  as per Stephen Covey

  ON A TUESDAY MORNING in June, Paul’s boss stops by his desk and asks, “Do you have a minute? In my office?” And so Paul gets up, reflexively wipes his hands on his pants, and follows his boss into her office. Seated, she folds her arms, leans in, and proceeds to accuse him of flouting the policy on freelance work—and to explain that she suspects this was deliberate, because the two of them had discussed this policy in April. Paul hadn’t seen this talk coming, and doesn’t feel his boss’s stance is at all justified. “So I tell her that actually, when we renegotiated my contract back in April, she gave me blanket permission to freelance as long as I kept up with my obligations here, and it was my understanding that I wouldn’t need approval for every individual project. So… I felt I had operated well within the bounds of that agreement, and, furthermore, we had discussed this particular freelance piece two weeks earlier—I had brought it up then precisely because I saw how she might think it’d be an issue. But basically I said that whatever it looked li
ke, subterfuge or lack of respect for her policies, I could assure her that that was just not the case.”

  Did it work? “No.” What happened? “She exploded.” Advice from the success-lit canon is pretty thin when it comes to defending yourself. A lot of books talk about recovering from Failure, capital F, or what to do when you lose your warehouse in the Great Chicago Fire (rebuild it), or when you’ve made the umpteenth electric light bulb and it still doesn’t work (try again). But not much has been written about those moments when you’ve done something dumb—or just pushed your luck, or made a mistake—and get called on it. The New Thought people didn’t discuss mistakes much, presumably because they believed that dwelling on them was a recipe for making more.47 Dale Carnegie’s line on blunders was to “talk about your mistakes first,” but that was only in the context of calling someone else on theirs. In all the strivers’ literature, you find an impatience with setbacks that borders on physical revulsion—Budd Schulberg put it best in What Makes Sammy Run? when he wrote that Sammy Glick “always made you feel that any confession of failure was on a level with admitting that you had a yen for nothing but female dogs and ten-year-old corpses.”

  Novels about zealous professional climbers often include a scene that shows how ingeniously they cover their mistakes. This is a solid narrative device; the scramble to avoid detection has more comedy (picture a The Secret of My Success-style madcap, rapid change of clothes in the elevator, don’t let the boss know you slept with his wife scene) and it also holds more dramatic tension than other narrative structures (the entire, tangled plot of The Bonfire of the Vanities rests on “Master of the Universe” Sherman McCoy’s unwillingness to fess up to a hit-and-run). Then there are those sitcom scenes where the blundering, stammering, aw-shucks corporate underling gets called to the mat and is yanked from the brink of disaster by some unforeseen twist—usually some bigger blunder happening offscreen. All of which leads you to the notion that if you’re really smart, you should be able to talk your way out of anything.

  Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the best advice for dealing with the inevitable screwup comes from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. My distaste for Stephen Covey runs deep; coming of age white, middle class, and mid western in the 1990s meant having a copy of The 7 Habits somewhere in your house, and being ashamed of it. My senior year of college I worked at a Barnes and Noble bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota, where this book was never, ever allowed to go out of stock. Wander into any garage sale and you’d find at least one dog-eared copy. (It was never far from a copy of M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled and Robert Fulghum’s All l Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Together they formed a nice stack.) To me, wanting to be “highly effective” seemed as ambitious and interesting as shopping for a good deal on car insurance, or getting your teeth professionally cleaned every six months, or looking forward to next week’s episode of ER.

  Say the words “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” today and most people under forty giggle. But pretending Covey never happened just isn’t possible—or, it turns out, wise. His ideas were adopted by multiple Fortune 500 companies that have a deep reach into the American living room, he has advised U.S. presidents and sold millions of books, and though walking to the register with his book in hand made me physically uneasy, it seemed flat-out intellectually dishonest not to do so. As I discovered, Covey addresses himself specifically to the lost souls in the office park, the men and women comfortable with using terms like “team building” and “facilitating long-term client relationships.” When Covey tries to describe what he is up to, he explains the benefits of his principles this way:

  In harmony with the natural laws of growth, they provide an incremental, sequential, highly integrated approach to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness. They move us progressively on a Maturity Continuum from dependence to independence to interdependence.

  And a bit later:

  They become the basis of a person’s character, creating an empowering center of correct maps from which an individual can effectively solve problems, maximize opportunities, and continually learn and integrate other principles in an upward spiral of growth.

  The kind of writing, in other words, that drives kids to crystal meth. (Not even the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit talked like this.) But Covey’s first big idea—and the substance of the first habit—can be stated much more succinctly: Highly effective people react differently than regular folks. They don’t follow the usual stimulus-response schema, and they never say so-and-so or this-or-that “made me do it.” They never imagine that any situation compels them to react any particular way, but instead believe they always have a choice as to how they’re going to react. From this point on, if you read The 7 Habits closely, you’ll find an implicit endorsement of saying, essentially, the hell with all the “you should always stand up for yourself’ advice. Most of the wisdom of the last fifty-odd years, Covey claimed, was shallow and misleading. What’s your best defense? Maybe none at all. What’s the best way to justify your course of action? Maybe don’t even bother, he says. How and why not bothering to explain yourself works to your advantage is the secret, dark heart of The 7 Habits—and what lifts it to a higher plane of uncomplicated genius.

  Our first instinct when confronted with trouble is to make sure we don’t get blamed for it. Being wrong is something that happens to C students—and hardly anyone is a C student anymore.

  Then there’s the understandable fear that you won’t get far if someone’s unhappy with you or your work. “Your ability to focus seems delayed for a second,” said Tom, a branding consultant, “and you can almost feel the sentences move around in your head, shuffling like a deck of cards, rearranging themselves so you’ll be ready to spew forth a good excuse.” This, of course, is on those happy occasions where you realize your mistake before someone else does. More often you’re caught out simply by running out of time. Confrontations over missed deadlines are the stock footage of corporate American drudgery—a tall, bespectacled man in a tie, brandishing a manila folder, strides purposefully into the frame yelling, “Ferguson, that report I asked you about Friday!”48 These occasions generally include presentation of the following facts: so-and-so asked you to produce something, you assured them you would do it, and then you didn’t. You failed to (a) do it in time, (b) do it correctly, or (c) do it without having it adversely affect your handling of sixteen other tasks.

  It might be useful at this point to mention some of the ways people express their disappointment—because without extensive experience, it can be hard to ascertain what’s normal. Sometimes there’s simply a sincere expression of dismay—sadness, really, that the world is not what it could be. Sometimes the moment takes an unexpected turn, as when Mary had to answer to an older colleague for delivering a report riddled with typos. “I said no, I didn’t have dyslexia. And she said, ‘Well, I think you might.’ And recommended I get tested.” I was once asked, by someone very red in the face and standing two feet in front of me, if it was physically possible for the basic guidelines concerning elementary office procedure to penetrate the thickness of my skull, his hand hitting his own forehead to demonstrate how it might be accomplished. (I can’t even remember what I’d done—or more likely, neglected to do—to bring this on, but I do recall it was about 9:15 in the morning, and there was an audience.) Sometimes objects, including but not limited to coffee mugs, manila file folders, and staplers, are thrown. Yelling is very common but even more so is a stiff, silent formality that communicates they’re having a hard time sharing physical space with you at that moment. “I don’t understand what’s so difficult about this” is another popular phrase with frustrated superiors. It can come in a slow staccato (I. Don’t. UnDer. Sta-and. What’s. So. Diffi. Cult), or rattled off quickly (though with so many hard consonants in rapid succession, that gets spitty).

  So Stephen Covey, Habit One: “Be Proactive.” Proactive people realize
that their response cannot be dictated to them by someone else’s accusations or meltdown.49 On pages 90-91, where the index instructs us to look for wisdom on mistakes, we find this: “The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it. This literally turns a failure into a success. ‘Success,’ said IBM founder T. J. Watson, ‘is on the far side of failure.’ ”

  This is undoubtedly why some snicker when Stephen Covey comes up. It’s simply difficult to imagine that acknowledging your mistake “instantly” is sufficient to answer the bundle of insinuations in a phrase like “Am I the only one who does any goddamned work around here?” as Anthony—and all of his colleagues— used to hear from his boss. Many people cope with such situations by reaching back to the tricks they learned as high school debaters: “You explain what happened, stress any mediating circumstances, and correct any misinformation that spilled out in the course of their accusation.” (This was explained to me by an actual high school debate-team champion.)

  The logic of this approach is sound: They are unhappy with the state of affairs, so you inform them everything is not what it might seem, and figure this will calm tempers and set things right. “You just go down the list and pick off their objections one by one, like you’re at a shooting gallery.”

  Bringing up “the list” is telling, because increasingly people discover their blunders over e-mail. Conveying their displeasure in writing allows accusers to both avoid face-to-face confrontations and get wordy. (Anger always encourages eloquence.) With no constraints on time, or the need to pause for a response the way one would in regular spoken conversation, there’s no need to limit oneself to a single primary grievance. Here’s a typical example of the confrontational e-mail, sent by an author when he discovered that a prepublication book mailing hadn’t gone off without a hitch: