Bosses Week Quotes

This is so much harder than I ever thought it would be...because the thing is, even if you're just working part-time, your boss is going to expect a full week's worth of work, no matter how understanding she is. That's just the nature of the working world-things have to get done, babies or not. And if you're like me-if you're like any woman who ever did well in school and did well at her job-you don't want to disappoint a boss. And you want to do a good job raising your baby...It's not like you think it's going to be

My shift isn’t over until six,” I say glumly. “Hold on,” he says. He pulls a Blackberry from his coat pocket and taps out a text. It buzzes, and he taps out another text before stashing it back in his pocket. “I think you can take the rest of the afternoon off.” “I only have a week left, but my boss would kill me,” I say. “I’m your boss, Anna.” “What do you mean?” There’s that smile again, the one with all those teeth. “I just bought Walmart,” he says.

On May 26th, 2003, Aaron Ralston was hiking, a boulder fell on his right hand, he waited four days, he then amputated his own arm with a pocketknife. On New Year’s Eve, a woman was bungee jumping, the cord broke, she fell into a river and had to swim back to land in crocodile-infested waters with a broken collarbone. Claire Champlin was smashed in the face by a five-pound watermelon being propelled by a slingshot. Mathew Brobst was hit by a javelin. David Striegl was actually punched in the mouth by a kangaroo. The most amazing part of these stories is when asked about the experience they all smiled, shrugged and said “I guess things could’ve been worse.” So go ahead, tell me you’re having a bad day. Tell me about the traffic. Tell me about your boss. Tell me about the job you’ve been trying to quit for the past four years. Tell me the morning is just a townhouse burning to the ground and the snooze button is a fire extinguisher. Tell me the alarm clock stole the keys to your smile, drove it into 7 am and the crash totaled your happiness. Tell me. Tell me how blessed are we to have tragedy so small it can fit on the tips of our tongues. When Evan lost his legs he was speechless. When my cousin was assaulted she didn’t speak for 48 hours. When my uncle was murdered, we had to send out a search party to find my father’s voice. Most people have no idea that tragedy and silence often have the exact same address. When your day is a museum of disappointments, hanging from events that were outside of your control, when you feel like your guardian angel put in his two weeks notice two months ago and just decided not to tell you, when it seems like God is just a babysitter that’s always on the phone, when you get punched in the esophagus by a fistful of life. Remember, every year two million people die of dehydration. So it doesn’t matter if the glass is half full or half empty. There’s water in the cup. Drink it and stop complaining. Muscle is created by lifting things that are designed to weigh us down. When your shoulders are heavy stand up straight and call it exercise. Life is a gym membership with a really complicated cancellation policy. Remember, you will survive, things could be worse, and we are never given anything we can’t handle. When the whole world crumbles, you have to build a new one out of all the pieces that are still here. Remember, you are still here. The human heart beats approximately 4,000 times per hour and each pulse, each throb, each palpitation is a trophy, engraved with the words “You are still alive.” You are still alive. So act like it.

Here’s what I need to do to stay centered: sleep eight hours, exercise for forty-five minutes, and have both breakfast and dinner with my family. If I skip one or two of those things for a day or two, it’s OK. But that’s the routine. Also, every so often I need to read a novel (ideally one a week), go away for a romantic weekend with my husband (ideally four times a year), and take a two-week vacation with siblings and parents (once a year). If I can manage to do those things, I can usually stay centered no matter what storms are raging around me.

Last week my boss told me to rewrite a twenty-page proposal on engagement benchmarking. I turned it in and he wrote a note on the cover that just said, "No, no. Not this." I had no idea what he wanted, so I just put it off, and then when he came in this morning and told me he needed the final draft in a half-hour I printed out the exact same one as before, but this time on prettier paper. This afternoon he brought the whole team together to tell everyone I was the perfect example of being able to listen to constructive criticism.

I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty. My best friend Darcy and I came across a perpetual calendar in the back of the phone book, where you could look up any date in the future, and by using this little grid, determine what the day of the week would be. So we located our birthdays in the following year, mine in May and hers in September. I got Wednesday, a school night. She got a Friday. A small victory, but typical. Darcy was always the lucky one. Her skin tanned more quickly, her hair feathered more easily, and she didn't need braces. Her moonwalk was superior, as were her cart-wheels and her front handsprings (I couldn't handspring at all). She had a better sticker collection. More Michael Jackson pins. Forenze sweaters in turquoise, red, and peach (my mother allowed me none- said they were too trendy and expensive). And a pair of fifty-dollar Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles (ditto). Darcy had double-pierced ears and a sibling- even if it was just a brother, it was better than being an only child as I was. But at least I was a few months older and she would never quite catch up. That's when I decided to check out my thirtieth birthday- in a year so far away that it sounded like science fiction. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that my dashing husband and I would secure a responsible baby-sitter for our two (possibly three) children on that Saturday evening, dine at a fancy French restaurant with cloth napkins, and stay out past midnight, so technically we would be celebrating on my actual birthday. I would have just won a big case- somehow proven that an innocent man didn't do it. And my husband would toast me: "To Rachel, my beautiful wife, the mother of my chidren and the finest lawyer in Indy." I shared my fantasy with Darcy as we discovered that her thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday. Bummer for her. I watched her purse her lips as she processed this information. "You know, Rachel, who cares what day of the week we turn thirty?" she said, shrugging a smooth, olive shoulder. "We'll be old by then. Birthdays don't matter when you get that old." I thought of my parents, who were in their thirties, and their lackluster approach to their own birthdays. My dad had just given my mom a toaster for her birthday because ours broke the week before. The new one toasted four slices at a time instead of just two. It wasn't much of a gift. But my mom had seemed pleased enough with her new appliance; nowhere did I detect the disappointment that I felt when my Christmas stash didn't quite meet expectations. So Darcy was probably right. Fun stuff like birthdays wouldn't matter as much by the time we reached thirty. The next time I really thought about being thirty was our senior year in high school, when Darcy and I started watching ths show Thirty Something together. It wasn't our favorite- we preferred cheerful sit-coms like Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains- but we watched it anyway. My big problem with Thirty Something was the whiny characters and their depressing issues that they seemed to bring upon themselves. I remember thinking that they should grow up, suck it up. Stop pondering the meaning of life and start making grocery lists. That was back when I thought my teenage years were dragging and my twenties would surealy last forever. Then I reached my twenties. And the early twenties did seem to last forever. When I heard acquaintances a few years older lament the end of their youth, I felt smug, not yet in the danger zone myself. I had plenty of time..

Among university professors, for example, getting tenure is a major hurdle and milestone, and at most universities tenure depends heavily on having published some high-quality, original work. One researcher, Bob Boice, looked into the writing habits of young professors just starting out and tracked them to see how they fared. Not surprisingly, in a job where there is no real boss and no one sets schedules or tells you what to do, these young professors took a variety of approaches. Some would collect information until they were ready and then write a manuscript in a burst of intense energy, over perhaps a week or two, possibly including some long days and very late nights. Others plodded along at a steadier pace, trying to write a page or two every day. Others were in between. When Boice followed up on the group some years later, he found that their paths had diverged sharply. The page-a-day folks had done well and generally gotten tenure. The so-called “binge writers” fared far less well, and many had had their careers cut short. The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.

When my boss asked me why I was always late to work, I explained it was because I was 2 weeks late for birth. Late to birth, late to work. He docked my pay.

The best management is sometimes less management or no management at all. William Coyne, who led 3M’s Research and Development efforts for over a decade, believed a big part of his job was to leave his people alone and protect them from other curious executives. As he put it: ‘After you plant a seed in the ground, you don’t dig it up every week to see how it is doing.

Just because drivers and cooks in Delhi are reading Murder Weekly, it doesn't mean that they are all about to slit their masters' necks. Of course they’d like to. Of course, a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses — and that’s why the government of India publishes this magazine and sells it on the streets for just four and a half rupees so that even the poor can buy it. you see, the murdered in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want to be like him — and in the end he always gets caught by some honest, hardworking police officer (ha!), or goes mad and hangs himself by a bedsheet after writing a sentimental letter to his mother or primary school teacher, or is chased, beaten, buggered, and garroted by the brother of the woman he has done in. So if your driver is busy flicking through the pages of Murder Weekly, relax. No danger to you. Quite the contrary. It’s when your driver starts to read about Gandhi and the Buddha that it’s time to wet your pants.

Garrett had had a wife and four-year-old twins in Halifax, but the last call he’d ever made was to his boss. The last words he’d spoken into a telephone were a bouquet of corporate clichés, seared horribly into memory. “Let’s touch base with Nancy,” he remembered saying, “and then we should reach out to Bob and circle back next week. I’ll shoot Larry an email.

A six-week island getaway and a book deal any way I looked at it. I glanced over at Jeannie and she was giving me a death glare. Islands or Boss from Hell. Coconut Hell or Editorial Hell. Sand in my swimsuit crack every day for two months, or jeannie up my ass for the rest of my life.

Say you’re sitting in a cubicle and you hate your job. It’s terrible. Everyone around you is an asshole. Your boss is a dick. All of your work is just mind-numbingly soul-sucking. But in five minutes you are about to leave for your first vacation you’ve had in five years. You’re going to be gone for two weeks at this beautiful Bora Bora seaside bungalow. It’s literally the most lavish thing you’ve ever done in your entire life. How would you feel? You would feel great. Now imagine that you are in Bora Bora. You’re on this beautiful beach with amazing people, and you’ve had so much fun. In five minutes, you’re going to have to put down the piña colada with the little umbrella in it. You have to say goodbye to these people. You will go back to your terrible job and won’t take another vacation for another five years. How would you feel? You would feel terrible. Now, think about it. You’re sitting in the cubicle at the job that you hate and you feel awesome. And you’re sitting on the beach with a drink in your hand and you feel terrible. How you feel is entirely in your mind. Your mind has nothing to do with your environment. It has nothing to do with anyone around you. It is entirely your decision. Making a change in your life is as easy as making a decision and acting on it. That’s it.

One day a man walked into a London agency and asked to see the boss. He had bought a country house and was about to open it as a hotel. Could the agency help him to get customers? He had $500 to spend. Not surprisingly, the head of the agency turned him over to the office boy, who happened to be the author of this book. I invested his money in penny postcards and mailed them to well-heeled people living in the neighborhood. Six weeks later the hotel opened to a full house. I had tasted blood.

I shouldn’t use the word ‘car’, because this isn’t a car, it’s a minivan. A big, safe, screams it’s-for-a-family vehicle. I obviously got this in the divorce settlement, while he drives around in his new Mercedes, which is not for families. It’s for cheating bastards who only get their kids every other weekend and once during the week. Making

In fiction, characters could punch their bosses and get away with it. In real life, you lost your job, and then you were dining on Cup-a-Soup seven nights a week instead of four.

He used to love Mondays. There was nothing quite like tackling the week and showing it who was boss before the sun had a chance to reach the horizon.

There are two types of people in the world, those that would love to be their own boss and set their own hours, and those that are okay with just a few weeks of vacation every year.

Reno looked at Trina, who was slated to be the maid of honor, and that sparkle of excitement that had been in her eyes all week was gone. And he could just kick Shanks ass for putting his wife through this. And when Tommy found out. Geez.

I work at T-Town, which is about ninety-nine percent men, and all of them either are alpha personalities or think they are. That said, what we have here is the standard dynamic for sexual tension. I'm moderately good-looking. I have big boobs, and I get hit on by everyone from the pastor of my church to baristas at Starbucks, and by every single guy at T-Town except for my boss and the range master. I don't blame them and I don't judge them. It's part of the procreative drive hardwired into us, and we haven't evolved as a species far enough exert any genuine control over the biological imperative. You, on the other hand, are a very good-looking man of prime breeding age. Old enough to have interesting lines and scars--and stories to go with them--and young enough to be a catch. You probably get laid as often as you want to, and you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times women have said no to you. Maybe--and please correct me if I've strayed too far into speculation--being an agent of a secret government organization has led you to buy into the superspy sex stud propaganda perpetuated by James Bond films." "My name is Powers," I said. "Austin Powers." She ignored me and plowed ahead. "We're in the middle of a crisis. We may have to work closely together for several days, or even several weeks. Close-quarters travel, emotions running high, all that. If it's all the same to you, I'd rather not spend the next few days living inside a trite office romance cliche. That includes everything from mild flirtation to sexual innuendo and double entendre and the whole ball of wax." She sipped her Coke. The ball landed in my court with a thump.

Though he could not remember how he had been injured or how long he had been unconcious, his first thought was to call the office and find someone to cover his shifts. He had a busy week of beating people to a bloody pulp, and his victims weren't going to punch themselves in the face. He couldn't leave his bosses in the lurch. He was evil, but he was professional. Perhaps it was his dedication to his work that had built him such an impressive resume: fifteen broken jaws, fifty-seven legs, a hundred arms, and more noses than he could count. He had knocked out thousands of teeth, pushed a few people off bridges, and once buried a guy in concrete up to his neck. He had been nominated for the Goon of the Year nine times by OUCH (Organization of United Criminals and Henchman), and had won its highest honor, the Brass Knuckle, seven times. At the office, he showed up early and left late. He ate his lunch on the job, frequently beating people as he ate his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. You didn't get on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list by taking a sick day!

In the early months of World War II, San Francisco's Fill-more district, or the Western Addition, experienced a visible revolution. On the surface it appeared to be totally peaceful and almost a refutation of the term “revolution.” The Yakamoto Sea Food Market quietly became Sammy's Shoe Shine Parlor and Smoke Shop. Yashigira's Hardware metamorphosed into La Salon de Beauté owned by Miss Clorinda Jackson. The Japanese shops which sold products to Nisei customers were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen, and in less than a year became permanent homes away from home for the newly arrived Southern Blacks. Where the odors of tempura, raw fish and cha had dominated, the aroma of chitlings, greens and ham hocks now prevailed. The Asian population dwindled before my eyes. I was unable to tell the Japanese from the Chinese and as yet found no real difference in the national origin of such sounds as Ching and Chan or Moto and Kano. As the Japanese disappeared, soundlessly and without protest, the Negroes entered with their loud jukeboxes, their just-released animosities and the relief of escape from Southern bonds. The Japanese area became San Francisco's Harlem in a matter of months. A person unaware of all the factors that make up oppression might have expected sympathy or even support from the Negro newcomers for the dislodged Japanese. Especially in view of the fact that they (the Blacks) had themselves undergone concentration-camp living for centuries in slavery's plantations and later in sharecroppers' cabins. But the sensations of common relationship were missing. The Black newcomer had been recruited on the desiccated farm lands of Georgia and Mississippi by war-plant labor scouts. The chance to live in two-or three-story apartment buildings (which became instant slums), and to earn two-and even three-figured weekly checks, was blinding. For the first time he could think of himself as a Boss, a Spender. He was able to pay other people to work for him, i.e. the dry cleaners, taxi drivers, waitresses, etc. The shipyards and ammunition plants brought to booming life by the war let him know that he was needed and even appreciated. A completely alien yet very pleasant position for him to experience. Who could expect this man to share his new and dizzying importance with concern for a race that he had never known to exist? Another reason for his indifference to the Japanese removal was more subtle but was more profoundly felt. The Japanese were not whitefolks. Their eyes, language and customs belied the white skin and proved to their dark successors that since they didn't have to be feared, neither did they have to be considered. All this was decided unconsciously.

If you’re pitching your boss to let you work from home a few days a week, a common rebuff is how envious your coworkers would be if you were granted this special privilege. Why, it simply wouldn’t be fair! We all need to be equally, miserably unproductive at the office and suffer in unity!

An effective staff meeting has three goals: it reviews how things have gone the previous week, allows people to share important updates, and forces the team to clarify the most important decisions and debates for the coming week. That’s it. It shouldn’t be the place to have debates or make decisions.

I mean, all I do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it. I don't have to think at all. It's like I just put my brain in a locker before I start work and pick it up on the way home. I spend seven hours a day at a workbench, planting hairs into wig bases, then I eat dinner in the cafeteria, take a bath, and of course I have to sleep, like everybody else, so out of a twenty-four-hour day, the amount of free time I have is like nothing. And because I'm so tired from work, the 'free time' I have I mostly spend lying around in a fog. I don't have any time to sit and think about anything. Of course, I don't have to work on the weekends, but then I have to do the laundry and cleaning I've let go, and sometimes I go into town, and before I know it the weekend is over. I once made up my mind to keep a diary, but I had nothing to write, so I quit after a week. I mean, I just do the same thing over and over again, day in, day out.

I love you. How many times have you been asked, "How are you" today? It's a dreadful question. It's an absurd question. Knowing you and seeing what has happened in your life makes me stop in my tracks and catch myself before I ask anyone that question again. How the hell can you answer that question in the aisle of a supermarket? Come back to the house, you say. Bring your toothbrush and call your boss. You will need a week to hear the complete answer. And you will never be the same if you listen. It's the question that the entire human race reduces itself to each and every day, in each and every encounter, and without the intention of ever truly hearing the answer.

The practice of magic also demands the development of what is called the magical will. Will is very much akin to what Victorian schoolmasters called "character": honesty, self-discipline, commitment, and conviction. Those who would practice magic must be scrupulously honest in their personal lives. In one sense, magic works on the principle that "it is so because I say it is so." A bag of herbs acquires the power to heal because I say it does. For my word to take on such force, I must be deeply and completely convinced that it is identified with truth as I know it. If I habitually lie to my lovers, steal from my boss, pilfer from supermarkets, or simply renege on my promises, I cannot have that conviction. Unless I have enough personal power to keep commitments in my daily life, I will be unable to wield magical power. To work magic, I need a basic belief in my ability to do things and cause things to happen. That belief is generated and sustained by my daily actions. If I say I will finish a report by Thursday and I do so, I have strengthened my knowledge that I am a person who can do what I say I will do. If I let the report go until a week from next Monday, I have undermined that belief. If course, life is full of mistakes and miscalculations. But to a person who practices honesty and keeps commitments, "As I will, so mote it be" is not just a pretty phrase; it is a statement of fact.

So you’re going to be the Big Boss Lady?” I opened my mouth to make some quippy comment, but nothing came. So I just said, “Yeah. I am.” She gave a little nod. “You’ll be good at it. But if you ever tell anyone I said that, I’ll kill you.” I chuckled. “Fair enough.” For a long moment, I watched her watching the house. And then, very quietly, I said, “If you’re ready for me to…I don’t know, set you free or whatever, I can now. At least I think I can.” Elodie turned to me, her feet hovering just off the ground. “Where would I go?” “I don’t know.” “Would you…” She trailed off, and if I hadn’t known Elodie better, I would’ve sworn nervousness crossed her face. Then her lips moved so quickly that I couldn’t make out any of the words. “Whoa, slow down. My lip-reading skills aren’t that great.” She drifted closer. “I said, if you’re staying at Hex Hall, then…I want to stay, too.” I blinked. “For real? You want to stay tethered to me for all eternity? Because if you think for one second I’m letting you in my body again, you’ve got another think coming.” “I don’t want to be in your body anymore,” she said, before screwing her face up. “That sounded gross. Anyway, I just want to stay here. For now.” “Why?” She threw up her hands. “Because you’re my friend, okay? Because helping you and your loser crew these past few weeks has been…I don’t know, fun. And way more fun than I thought I could have dead.” I was weirdly touched.

How’s your first week so far?” Isabele asks. “Well, let me see,” I begin. “Chloe says my penmanship is shit, and I was only thirty minutes early this morning, which apparently means I’m late, but on the bright side, she thinks her non-fat, half-sweet, no-whip soy latte didn’t taste right and then she told me she’s not paying for it. Other than that, work is just fine.

I think the most difficult thing in teaching, as well as the most interesting, is to get the children to tell you their real thoughts about things. One stormy day last week I gathered them around me at dinner hour and tried to get them to talk to me just as if I were one of themselves. I asked them to tell me the things they most wanted. Some of the answers were commonplace enough... dolls, ponies, and skates. Others were decidedly original. Hester Boulter wanted 'to wear her Sunday dress every day and eat in the sitting room.' Hannah Bell wanted 'to be good without having to take any trouble about it.' Marjorie White, aged ten, wanted to be a 'widow'. Questioned why, she gravely said that if you weren't married people called you an old maid, and if you were your husband bossed you; but if you were a widow there'd be no danger of either. The most remarkable wish was Sally Bell's. She wanted a 'honeymoon.' I asked her if she knew what it was and she said she thought it was an extra nice kind of bicycle because her cousin in Montreal went on a honeymoon when he was married and he had always had the very latest in bicycles!

The enemy can use against you anything you feel you “have to have” to be happy. If you think you have to be married to be happy, the enemy can use that against you. If you think your boss has to change before you can enjoy your work, you’ll go year after year dreading it, thinking that’s why you can’t be happy. It’s good to have hopes and dreams. It’s good to wake up each day believing and expecting. But don’t wait for those things to come before you enjoy your life and find happiness. This is the day the Lord has made, not tomorrow, not when all your dreams come to pass, not when all the negative people are changed, but today. Understand, God has you exactly where he wants you. If you’ll learn to be happy where you are, God will take you where you want to be. He’s promised He will give you the desires of your heart. If there is something you really want, I would encourage you to put it on the altar. Just say, “God, I would really love to have this. God, You know the desire You put in me. I would love to be married. I’d love to see my spouse change. I would love to be promoted. But God, I’m not waiting on that to be happy. I’m happy right where You have me.” That’s the kind of attitude God is looking for.

She walked to the pool twice a day for a week, living on saltines and Crisco, and Pa never came home the whole time. By the eighth day she could circle her foot without stiffness and the pain had retreated to the surface. She danced a little jig, favoring her foot, squealing, “I did it, I did it!” The next morning, she headed for the beach to find more pirates. “First thing I’m gonna do is boss my crew to pick up all them nails.

Let’s say that you have committed to running every day for two weeks, and at the end of those two weeks, you “reward” yourself with a massage. I would say, “Good for you!” because we all could benefit from more massages. But I would also say that your massage wasn’t a reward. It was an incentive. The definition of a reward in behavior science is an experience directly tied to a behavior that makes that behavior more likely to happen again. The timing of the reward matters. Scientists learned decades ago that rewards need to happen either during the behavior or milli-seconds afterward. Dopamine is released and processed by the brain very quickly. That means you’ve got to cue up those good feelings fast to form a habit. Incentives like a sales bonus or a monthly massage can motivate you, but they don’t rewire your brain. Incentives are way too far in the future to give you that all-important shot of dopamine that encodes the new habit. Doing three squats in the morning and rewarding yourself with a movie that evening won’t work. The squats and the good feelings you get from the movie are too far apart for dopamine to build a bridge between the two. The neurochemical reaction that you are trying to hack is not only time dependent, it’s also highly individualized. What causes one person to feel good may not work for everyone. Your boss may love the smell of coffee. When she enters a coffee shop and inhales, she feels good. And her immediate feeling builds her habit of visiting the coffee shop. But your coworker might not like the way coffee smells. His brain won’t react in the same way. A real reward — something that will actually create a habit — is a much narrower target to hit than most people think. I

The honky-tonk bartender, who doubled as bouncer, waiter, and cashier, was in no mood to compromise. Mercy was not in him. He came out around the open end of the long counter, waddled threatening across the floor in a sullen, red-faced fury and began to shake the inanimate figure lying across the table with its head bedded on its arms. "Hey, you! Do your sleeping in the gutter!" If you gave these bums an inch; they took a yard. And this one was a particularly glaring example of the genus bar-fly. He was in here all the time like this, inhaling smoke and then doing a sunset across the table. He'd been in here since four this afternoon. The boss and he, who were partners in the joint - the bartender called it jernt - would have been the last ones to claim they were running a Rainbow Room, but at least they were trying to give the place a little class, keep it above the level of a Bowery smoke-house; they even paid a guy to pound the piano and a canary to warble three times a week. And then bums like this had to show up and give the place a bad look! He shook the recumbent figure again, more roughly than the first time. Shook him so violently that the whole reedy table under him rattled and threatened to collapse. "Come on, clear out, I said! Pay me for what you had and get outa here!" ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Seasons of life can make a big difference. Sometimes people are great believers while in college, but when they're young parents with their second baby and they're working sixty or eighty hours a week and their wife's sick all the time and the boss is on their back-they simply don't have time to reflect. And I don't think faith can develop without some contemplative time. If they don't make room for that, their faith is not going to grow and doubts will creep in.

What happens when that recently triggered mood lingers? You’ve been in a bit of a funk since that day, and now you look around the room during a staff meeting and all you think of is that this person’s tie is hideous, and the nasally tone of your boss is worse than nails on a chalkboard. At this point, you’re not just in a mood. You’re reflecting a temperament, a tendency toward the habitual expression of an emotion through certain behaviors. A temperament is an emotional reaction with a refractory period that lasts from weeks to months. Eventually, if you keep the refractory period of an emotion going for months and years, that tendency turns into a personality trait. At that point others will describe you as “bitter” or “resentful” or “angry” or “judgmental.” Our personality traits, then, are frequently based in our past emotions. Most of the time, personality (how we think, act, and feel) is anchored in the past. So to change our personalities, we have to change the emotions that we memorize. We have to move out of the past.

Colby Lane and Pierce Hutton had the manager of Tate’s apartment building open his door for them. They knew that Tate had come back from Tennessee, and that he’d saved Cecily from Gabrini, but nobody had seen him for almost a week. His answering machine was left on permanently. He didn’t answer knocks at the door. It was such odd behavior that his colleague and his boss became actually concerned. They were more concerned when they saw him passed out on the couch in a forest of beer cans and discarded pizza boxes. He hadn’t shaved or, apparently, bathed since his return. “Good God,” Pierce said gruffly. “That’s a familiar sight,” Colby murmured. “He’s turned into me.” Pierce glared at him. “Don’t be insulting.” He moved to the sofa and shook Tate. “Wake up!” he snapped. Tate didn’t open his eyes. He shifted, groaning. “She won’t come back,” he mumbled. “Won’t come. Hates me…” He drifted off again. Pierce and Colby exchanged knowing glances. Without a word, they rolled up their sleeves and set to work, first on the apartment, and then on Tate.

During its first week in stores, Battlefield 3 sold more than 5 million copies. The financial people at Electronic Arts established that the game had added about $370,000 to the company’s coffers—significantly more money than Avatar, one of the most lucrative films ever, earned during its first weekend in the theaters. For the uninitiated, the numbers may seem sky-high, but they were exactly in line with what the bosses at Electronic Arts had predicted. Battlefield 3 was just more proof that computer games are big business.

The week after my happy Tin Man 5k, I learned that a friend had died of a heroin overdose, possibly a suicide. He and I had attended the same weekly recovery group for years. His death stunned everyone who knew him, myself included. A few days later, a friend’s boss shot himself in the parking lot of a nearby police department. Both events rattled me. While mourning the losses, I worried the knives in the kitchen drawer might jump out and stab me. I asked Ed to hold me. “I need to tie myself to the planet, so I don’t spin off.

If we sold a business opportunity: * Most people hate their job. * Most people need more money. * Most people would like to be their own boss. * Most people want to be rich. * Most people would like to work three weeks out of the month but get paid for four. * Most people want more time with their children. * Most mothers hate warehousing their babies in daycare. * Most jobs don’t pay enough. * Most people start with this package. * Most people want to pay fewer taxes. * Most new distributors get their convention ticket right away.

MY FIRST ASSIGNMENT AFTER BEING ORDAINED as a pastor almost finished me. I was called to be the assistant pastor in a large and affluent suburban church. I was glad to be part of such an obviously winning organization. After I had been there a short time, a few people came to me and asked that I lead them in a Bible study. “Of course,” I said, “there is nothing I would rather do.” We met on Monday evenings. There weren’t many—eight or nine men and women—but even so that was triple the two or three that Jesus defined as a quorum. They were eager and attentive; I was full of enthusiasm. After a few weeks the senior pastor, my boss, asked me what I was doing on Monday evenings. I told him. He asked me how many people were there. I told him. He told me that I would have to stop. “Why?” I asked. “It is not cost-effective. That is too few people to spend your time on.” I was told then how I should spend my time. I was introduced to the principles of successful church administration: crowds are important, individuals are expendable; the positive must always be accented, the negative must be suppressed. Don’t expect too much of people—your job is to make them feel good about themselves and about the church. Don’t talk too much about abstractions like God and sin—deal with practical issues. We had an elaborate music program, expensively and brilliantly executed. The sermons were seven minutes long and of the sort that Father Taylor (the sailor-preacher in Boston who was the model for Father Mapple in Melville’s Moby Dick) complained of in the transcendentalists of the last century: that a person could no more be converted listening to sermons like that than get intoxicated drinking skim milk.[2] It was soon apparent that I didn’t fit. I had supposed that I was there to be a pastor: to proclaim and interpret Scripture, to guide people into a life of prayer, to encourage faith, to represent the mercy and forgiveness of Christ at special times of need, to train people to live as disciples in their families, in their communities and in their work. In fact I had been hired to help run a church and do it as efficiently as possible: to be a cheerleader to this dynamic organization, to recruit members, to lend the dignity of my office to certain ceremonial occasions, to promote the image of a prestigious religious institution. I got out of there as quickly as I could decently manage it. At the time I thought I had just been unlucky. Later I came to realize that what I experienced was not at all uncommon.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

Let me ask you three questions,” he said. “And then you’ll see it my way. Question One: What’s the worst thing that you have ever done to someone? It’s okay. You don’t have to confess it out loud. Question Two: What’s the worst criminal act that has ever been committed against you? Question Three: Which of the two was the most damaging for the victim?” The worst criminal act that has ever been committed against me was burglary. How damaging was it? Hardly damaging at all. I felt theoretically violated at the idea of a stranger wandering through my house. But I got the insurance money. I was mugged one time. I was eighteen. The man who mugged me was an alcoholic. He saw me coming out of a supermarket. “Give me your alcohol,” he yelled. He punched me in the face, grabbed my groceries, and ran away. There wasn’t any alcohol in my bag. I was upset for a few weeks, but it passed. And what was the worst thing I had ever done to someone? It was a terrible thing. It was devastating for them. It wasn’t against the law. Clive’s point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners—young, black—have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we noncriminals perpetrate upon one another all the time—bad husbands, bad wives, ruthless bosses, bullies, bankers.

I came to love the way Morrie lit up when I entered the room. He did this for many people, I know, but it was his special talent to make each visitor feel that the smile was unique. “Ahhhh, it’s my buddy,” he would say when he saw me, in that foggy, high-pitched voice. And it didn’t stop with the greeting. When Morrie was with you, he was really with you. He looked you straight in the eye, and he listened as if you were the only person in the world. How much better would people get along if their first encounter each day were like this—instead of a grumble from a waitress or a bus driver or a boss? “I believe in being fully present,” Morrie said. “That means you should be with the person you’re with. When I’m talking to you now, Mitch, I try to keep focused only on what is going on between us. I am not thinking about something we said last week. I am not thinking of what’s coming up this Friday. I am not thinking about doing another Koppel show, or about what medications I’m taking. “I am talking to you. I am thinking about you.” I remembered how he used to teach this idea in the Group Process class back at Brandeis. I had scoffed back then, thinking this was hardly a lesson plan for a university course. Learning to pay attention? How important could that be? I now know it is more important than almost everything they taught us in college.

Brian closed the condition book, pressed his fingers to his tired eyes. Like Paddy, he wasn't quite sure he trusted the computer, but he was willing to fiddle with it a bit. Three times a week he spent an hour trying to figure the damn thing out ith the notion that eventually he could use it to generate his charts. Graphics, they called it, he thought, shifting to give the machine a suspicious glare.Timesaving and efficient, if you believed all the hype. Well,tonight he was to damn tired to spend an hour trying to be timesaving and efficient. He hadn't had a decent night's sleep in a week. Which had nothing to do with his job, he admitted. And everything to do with his boss's daughter.

Anyway, I should probably get going.” That big, beautiful man leaned forward in his chair, his eyes sweeping over my face and the hair that had gotten pretty wavy because of the humidity. I had almost forgotten I’d put a silver glitter clip into it that morning to keep it out of my face. “You’re gonna leave me here alone?” “You really want me to keep you company?” His response was a long, long look. For some reason, it made me feel oddly vulnerable. He thought I was pathetic. I knew it. But pathetic or not, well, he was kind of hinting he wanted me to keep him company. “I can stay if you want.” He didn’t say he wanted me to, but… he just kept right on looking at me. So I took it as a yes. “Okay, I’ll stay.” It was the right answer. He took a sip of his drink. “Good.” Well, it looked like I was staying a little longer now. With our conversation still nipping at the back of my head, I asked him again, “So, you’ve really never had a girlfriend? Not in forty-one years?” “Nope.” “Not even in high school?” He shook his head. “Not once?” “Nope.” He gave me this face that almost seemed like a challenge. Like a dare. “I’ve got two numbers on my phone that don’t belong to somebody who’s got a dick. One’s the lady that cleans my place once a week…” “Who’s the other?” I asked, trying to ignore the edge of jealousy waiting around the corner of his answer. That got me another snicker. “You, who the hell else?” “Me?” I leaned forward then. “Since when? You’ve never called my cell.” “Since always. Just ’cause I don’t call you doesn’t mean I don’t have it.” I couldn’t help raising my hands up to my heart and settling them there, this huge smile coming over my face. “Does this mean… Boss, are we friends? Outside of work, of course.” His face went totally serious for a moment before he tossed his head back and laughed. “Get the fuck outta here, Luna. Christ.” We were. We were so totally friends. He was my boss too, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t be friends when we weren’t at the shop. Or during lunch. Or when my life tried to fall apart on me a little. Me and Rip. Friends. I’d take it. I’d take it every day of the year, forever.

my roommate, Nev “Catfish” Schulman, wanted me out of our East Village two-bedroom; my parents weren’t talking to me ever since I’d stuck my dad with a thirty-thousand-dollar rehab bill. I took baths every morning because I was too weak to stand in the shower; I wrote rent checks in highlighter; I had three prescribing psychiatrists and zero ob-gyns or dentists; I kept such insane hours that I never knew whether to put on day cream or night cream; and I never, ever called my grandma. I was also a liar. My boss—I was her assistant at the time—had been incredibly supportive and given me six weeks off to go to rehab. I’d been telling Jean that I was clean ever since I got back, even though I wasn’t. And then she promoted me.

The fall of 2017, one of our leaders, who unbeknownst to us, struggled with alcohol addiction and fell off the wagon on a business trip. He immediately entered rehab. What should we tell his staff? His boss believed that we should follow the Netflix culture and tell everyone the truth. Human Resources insisted that he should have the right to choose what he shared about his personal challenges. In this case, I agreed with HR. When it comes to personal struggles, an individual’s right to privacy trumps an organization’s desire for transparency. Here we didn’t take the most transparent route. But we didn’t spin either. We told everyone that the guy had taken two weeks off for personal reasons. It was up to him to share more details if he chose.

I know a lot of people like me. People who work overtime, never turning down additional work for fear of disappointing their boss. They're available to friends and loved ones twenty-four seven, providing an unending stream of support and advice. They care about dozens and dozens of social issues yet always feel guilty about not doing "enough" to address them, because there simply aren't enough hours in the day. These types of people often try to cram every waking moment with activity. After a long day at work, they try to teach themselves Spanish on the Duolingo app on their phone, for example, or they try to learn how to code in Python on sites like Code Academy. People like this -- people like me -- are doing everything society has taught us we have to do if we want to be virtuous and deserving of respect. We're committed employees, passionate activists, considerate friends, and perpetual students. We worry about the future. We plan ahead. We try to reduce our anxiety by controlling the things we can control -- and we push ourselves to work very, very hard. Most of us spend the majority of our days feeling tired, overwhelmed, and disappointed in ourselves, certain we've come up short. No matter how much we've accomplished or how hard we've worked, we never believe we've done enough to feel satisfied or at peace. We never think we deserve a break. Through all the burnouts, stress-related illnesses, and sleep-deprived weeks we endure, we remain convinced that having limitations makes us "lazy" -- and that laziness is always a bad thing.

Rusty had two kids he was less eager to lock up, and the nocturnal stakeouts had made for a long week. On Tuesday, out of riot-night boredom, Carney gave him a new title: associate sales manager. Knowing his boss wouldn’t get around to it, Rusty went ahead and ordered the name tag. While he awaited its arrival, he taped an interim version onto a Pan Am Junior Captain pin he’d obtained somewhere. “What do you think?” It looked okay. “It looks great,” Carney said. Business was slow anyway. Elizabeth had bought some books for Rusty’s little ones and Carney handed them over. “What’d you, loot these?” Carney had asked when she pulled them out of the shopping bag. That would be a sight: Elizabeth climbing into the window display, stepping over broken glass to grab some shit. Wouldn’t put it past her,

Rich Purnell sipped coffee in the silent building. Only his cubicle illuminated the otherwise dark room. Continuing with his computations, he ran a final test on the software he'd written. It passed. With a relieved sigh, he sank back in his chair. Checking the clock on his computer, he shook his head. 3:42am. Being an astrodynamicist, Rich rarely had to work late. His job was the find the exact orbits and course corrections needed for any given mission. Usually, it was one of the first parts of a project; all the other steps being based on the orbit. But this time, things were reversed. Iris needed an orbital path, and nobody knew when it would launch. A non-Hoffman Mars-transfer isn't challenging, but it does require the exact locations of Earth and Mars. Planets move as time goes by. An orbit calculated for a specific launch date will work only for that date. Even a single day's difference would result in missing Mars entirely. So Rich had to calculate many orbits. He had a range of 25 days during which Iris might launch. He calculated one orbital path for each. He began an email to his boss. "Mike", he typed, "Attached are the orbital paths for Iris, in 1-day increments. We should start peer-review and vetting so they can be officially accepted. And you were right, I was here almost all night. It wasn't that bad. Nowhere near the pain of calculating orbits for Hermes. I know you get bored when I go in to the math, so I'll summarize: The small, constant thrust of Hermes's ion drives is much harder to deal with than the large point-thrusts of presupply probes. All 25 of the orbits take 349 days, and vary only slightly in thrust duration and angle. The fuel requirement is nearly identical for the orbits and is well within the capacity of EagleEye's booster. It's too bad. Earth and Mars are really badly positioned. Heck, it's almost easier to-" He stopped typing. Furrowing his brow, he stared in to the distance. "Hmm." he said. Grabbing his coffee cup, he went to the break room for a refill. ... "Rich", said Mike. Rich Purnell concentrated on his computer screen. His cubicle was a landfill of printouts, charts, and reference books. Empty coffee cups rested on every surface; take-out packaging littered the ground. "Rich", Mike said, more forcefully. Rich looked up. "Yeah?" "What the hell are you doing?" "Just a little side project. Something I wanted to check up on." "Well... that's fine, I guess", Mike said, "but you need to do your assigned work first. I asked for those satellite adjustments two weeks ago and you still haven't done them." "I need some supercomputer time." Rich said. "You need supercomputer time to calculate routine satellite adjustments?" "No, it's for this other thing I'm working on", Rich said. "Rich, seriously. You have to do your job." Rich thought for a moment. "Would now be a good time for a vacation?" He asked. Mike sighed. "You know what, Rich? I think now would be an ideal time for you to take a vacation." "Great!" Rich smiled. "I'll start right now." "Sure", Mike said. "Go on home. Get some rest." "Oh, I'm not going home", said Rich, returning to his calculations. Mike rubbed his eyes. "Ok, whatever. About those satellite orbits...?" "I'm on vacation", Rich said without looking up. Mike shrugged and walked away.

Well, sister, here’s the truth, and it may or may not surprise you that I’ve given this answer before, but it remains true. You aren’t going to find the time to pursue your goals; you’re going to make the time to pursue your goals. And the first thing you’re going to need to accept is that you are in control of your schedule. Yes, you, high-level executive. Yes, you, mama of four. Yes, you, college student with twenty-seven events this week. Yes, you, entry-level assistant with a demanding boss. You are in control of your schedule. In fact, there isn’t one thing in your life or your calendar right now that you didn’t allow to be there. Let that sink in for a second. Being overscheduled? That’s on you. Not finding time to feed yourself? You. Spending two hours a night watching TV or scrolling Instagram as a way to relax? Also your choice.

You may be thinking, Why don’t you call a bank? Don’t they loan money to businesses all the time? Yes, they do. But not after they’ve heard a story like mine, in which a long-established but barely profitable company enters a downward spiral. Banks want one thing: their money back, with interest. They only want to do business with a company that has a good plan to pay them back, and plenty of collateral available if that plan doesn’t work out. They aren’t interested in propping up a company that’s in trouble. And clearly I’m in trouble. Everything is wrong here—the fact that I’ve survived for many years without building up a healthy cash reserve indicates bad management, and our disappearing sales indicate incompetent marketing. Showing up, hat in hand, at a bank, when I may be out of business in a few weeks, would show a serious lack of judgment on my part.

You’ve wanted me for five years and I’ve sort of wanted you maybe for, like, three and a half weeks, so really, it’s no skin off my back . . .” I pressed my tongue into the side of my cheek. The fucking mouth on this girl—unbelievable. “So.” She tapped her little impatient foot. “What’s it going to be?” I held her eyes, trying to make her look away first, but she didn’t. It was a power struggle and I was losing. Licked my bottom lip, shook my head and shrugged. “You heard the boss—” The other girl sort of tumbled off my lap onto the couch as I stood up and stepped towards Magnolia, slipping my arms around her waist. She gave me a defiant look, chin in the air. “Don’t you do that again.” “Fuck, you’re demanding . . .” “Oh, you have no idea . . . But you’re about to—” She gave me a tight smile as she nodded towards the door. “Let’s go. You’re going to take me home and put me to bed.

Tate was sprawled across the bed in his robe early the next morning when the sound of the front door opening penetrated his mind. There was an unholy commotion out there and his head was still throbbing, despite a bath, several cups of coffee and a handful of aspirin that had been forced on him the day before by two men he’d thought were his friends. He didn’t want to sober up. He only wanted to forget that Cecily didn’t want him anymore. He dragged himself off the bed and went into the living room, just in time to hear the door close. Cecily and her suitcase were standing with mutual rigidity just inside the front door. She was wearing a dress and boots and a coat and hat, red-faced and muttering words Tate had never heard her use before. He scowled. “How did you get here?” he asked. “Your boss brought me!” she raged. “He and that turncoat Colby Lane and two bodyguards, one of whom was the female counterpart of Ivan the Terrible! They forcibly dressed me and packed me and flew me up here on Mr. Hutton’s Learjet! When I refused to get out of the car, the male bodyguard swept me up and carried me here! I am going to kill people as soon as I get my breath and my wits back, and I am starting with you!” He leaned against the wall, still bleary-eyed and only half awake. She was beautiful with her body gently swollen and her lips pouting and her green eye sin their big-lensed frames glittering at him. She registered after a minute that he wasn’t himself. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked abruptly. He didn’t answer. He put a hand to his head. “You’re drunk!” she exclaimed in shock. “I have been,” he replied in a subdued tone. “For about a week, I think. Pierce and Colby got my landlord to let them in yesterday.” She smiled dimly. “I’d made some threats about what I’d do if he ever let anybody else into my apartment, after he let Audrey in the last time. I guess he believed them, because Colby had to flash his company ID to get in.” He chuckled weakly. “Nothing intimidates the masses like a CIA badge, even if it isn’t current.” “You’ve been drunk?” She moved a little closer into the apartment. “But, Tate, you don’t…you don’t drink,” she said. “I do now. The mother of my child won’t marry me,” he said simply. “I said you could have access…” His black eyes slid over her body like caressing hands. He’d missed her unbearably. Just the sight of her was calming now. “So you did.” Why did the feel guilty, for God’s sake, she wondered. She tried to recapture her former outrage. “I’ve been kidnapped!” “Apparently. Don’t look at me. Until today, I was too stoned to lift my head.” He looked around. “I guess they threw out the beer cans and the pizza boxes,” he murmured. “Pity. I think there was a slice of pizza left.” He sighed. “I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.” “Yesterday!

The New Machine. Imagine you are sitting at your desk at work and the boss comes to you and gives you this proposal. “We just bought a new machine for the company and we need to train someone to operate this new machine. You would have to go to night school three days a week for nine months to learn how to operate this machine. We wouldn’t pay you for going to night school, but when you graduated from night school, you would be our machine operator and you would get a $1,500 per month raise. What do you think?” Most people would reply, “Yes! I could spend three nights a week for nine months in training so that I could get a $1,500 a month raise.” And isn’t that what your network marketing opportunity offers? If you really dedicated yourself, three nights a week for nine months, you should have enough distributors and customers to easily earn $1,500 extra per month. Now, your current job doesn’t offer the opportunity to work three nights a week and get a huge raise, but our network marketing opportunity does.

A second reason why it is hard to choose what is essential in the moment is as simple as an innate fear of social awkwardness. The fact is, we as humans are wired to want to get along with others. After all, thousands of years ago when we all lived in tribes of hunter gatherers, our survival depended on it. And while conforming to what people in a group expect of us – what psychologists call normative conformity – is no longer a matter of life and death, the desire is still deeply ingrained in us.7 This is why, whether it’s an old friend who invites you to dinner or a boss who asks you to take on an important and high-profile project, or a neighbour who begs you to help with the school cake sale, the very thought of saying no literally brings us physical discomfort. We feel guilty. We don’t want to let someone down. We are worried about damaging the relationship. But these emotions muddle our clarity. They distract us from the reality of the fact that either we can say no and regret it for a few minutes, or we can say yes and regret it for days, weeks, months, or even years.

you have to understand something about presidential elections in general. The politicians devise strategies and court donors years in advance. At the same time, newspapers and networks carefully decide which reporter they’ll match with which candidate. Trump wasn’t part of anyone’s plan. For that matter, neither was I. Five days into my New York trip, while I was running an errand, I got a call from a friend at work. “Hey, Katy. Heads up,” the friend said. “Deborah Turness [my boss] is going to assign you to Trump full-time. [David, another boss] Verdi is going to call. If you don’t want to do this, you better figure out what you’re going to say to get out of it. Don’t let on that I told you, but get ready.” Anxiety. Indecision. Italy. My vacation with Benoît is in just over a week. On the other hand, as good as life can be in Europe, there’s also a lot of professional boredom. It would be nice to get some TV time. And New York is unbeatable in the summer. I hung up and paced the sidewalk. Then I called a friend from CBS. “They want me to cover Trump full-time,” I told him. My friend had covered Romney in 2012. “What do I do?

I rewrote and re-sent the email—not to the head of the school now, but to his boss, the director of Field Service Group. Though he was higher up the totem pole than the head of the school, the D/FSG was pretty much equivalent in rank and seniority to a few of the personnel I’d dealt with at headquarters. Then I copied the email to his boss, who definitely was not. A few days later, we were in a class on something like false subtraction as a form of field-expedient encryption, when a front-office secretary came in and declared that the old regime had fallen. Unpaid overtime would no longer be required, and, effective in two weeks, we were all being moved to a much nicer hotel. I remember the giddy pride with which she announced, “A Hampton Inn!” I had only a day or so to revel in my glory before class was interrupted again. This time, the head of the school was at the door, summoning me back to his office. Spo immediately leaped from his seat, enveloped me in a hug, mimed wiping away a tear, and declared that he’d never forget me. The head of the school rolled his eyes. There, waiting in the school head’s office was the director of the Field Service Group—the school head’s boss, the boss of nearly everyone on the TISO career track, the boss whose boss I’d emailed.

Since Modi's Mumbai sign-off, much commentary has been focused on the brand-dilution potential inherent in its scandals. MS Dhoni doesn't think we should worry: 'IPL as a brand can survive on its own.' Shilpa Shetty, 'brand ambassador' of the Rajasthan Royals, tweets that we should: 'Custodians of Cricket must not hamper d Brandvalue of this viable sport.' Hampering d Brandvalue, insists new IPL boss Chirayu Amin, is the furthest thing from his mind: 'IPL's brand image is strong and nobody can touch that.' Harsha Bhogle, however, frets for the nation: 'Within the cricket world, Brand India will take a hit.' Not much more than a week after Modi's first tell-all tweets, the media was anxiously consulting Brand Finance's managing director, Unni Krishnan. Had there been any brand dilution yet? It was, said the soothsayer gravely, 'too early to say'. He could, however, confirm the following: 'The wealth that can be created by the brand is going to be substantially significant for many stakeholders. A conducive ecosystem has to be created to move the brand to the next level… We have to build the requisite bandwidth to monetise these opportunities.' Er, yeah… what he said. Anyway, placing a value on the IPL brand has clearly been quite beneficial to Brand Finance's brand.

Later that week, I was bicycling down a pavement in the City of London when I passed a company called DLE, which stands for Davis Langdon & Everest. Hmm, I thought, as I skidded to a halt. I took a deep breath and then confidently walked into their ultraclean, ultrasmart reception, and asked to be put through to the CEO’s office, saying it was both urgent and confidential. Once I had the CEO’s secretary on the line, I pleaded with her to help me get just two minutes of her boss’s time. Eventually after three attempts, due to a combination of pity and intrigue, she agreed to ask the CEO to see me for “literally two minutes.” Bingo. I was escorted into a lift and then ushered into the calm of the CEO’s top-floor office. I was very nervous. The two head guys, Paul Morrell and Alastair Collins, came in, looking suspiciously at this scruffy youngster holding a pamphlet. (They later described it as one of the worst-laid-out proposals they had ever seen.) But they both had the grace to listen. By some miracle, they caught the dream and my enthusiasm, and for the sake of £10,000 (which to me was the world, but to them was a marketing punt), they agreed to back my attempt to put the DLE flag on top of the world. I promised an awesome photograph for their boardroom. We stood up, shook hands, and we have remained great friends ever since. I love deals like that.

Back to Copper Cliff: on the eastern limit of the town, really not a defined edge, the town ended, and a few feet later the smelter—the the heart of Inco’s operations in the Sudbury area—rose up. Huge buildings humming and whining, acre after acre of industrial devastation, hot metal and slag cars to-ing and fro-ing. Row upon row of blast furnaces, molten metal being carried in giant ladles the size of small submarines by overhead moving cranes, with bits of white-hot crap falling out of them, and the mind-numbing hiss of mighty industrial production, punctuated by warning horns, and all viewed through a smog of sulphur dioxide so potent that it would sting your eyes, nose and throat to the point of tears. Workers wore “gas masks” that were little more than cloth nose and mouth covers, dipped in some solution intended to neutralize the paralyzing acidity of sulphur dioxide. They did not work. My dad worked here, and when he later became a shift boss in the Orford building and I was a summer student at Inco, he showed me through this inferno (not Dante’s; that’s only in fiction). This was the real deal and the guys who worked there pretty much all succumbed to some form of lung disease—emphysema, cancer, COPD, you name it—anything you can get from inhaling eight hours a day, five days a week, concentrated S02 and S03, not to mention the particulate crap that filled the air.

Arrange for supplies to be delivered every day. You’ll have to write up a schedule for the men. Have Cookie plan a menu this afternoon.” Frank’s eyes widened. He looked as if someone had just run over his favorite dog. “Boss, you’re not taking Cookie with you.” It was more of a plea than a question. “No one else can cook for shit. What am I supposed to feed them?” “But without Cookie, one of the boys will have to cook for those of us left behind.” “There’s enough stuff frozen to get everyone through a week.” “Ah, jeez.” Frank’s shoulders slumped. “Why’d you have to take Cookie with you?” Zane ignored the question. Frank knew he was stuck on the ranch. With Zane gone, Frank would be in charge. “I’ll have the two-way radios with me. With the new tower in place, you’ll be able to reach me any time.” Frank was still grumbling about losing the ranch cook for a week. “Want to trade?” Zane asked flatly. His foreman pressed his lips together. They both knew taking ten novice riders out on a fake cattle drive through wilderness was nothing short of five kinds of hell. June weather was usually good, but there was always the possibility of a freak snowstorm, a sizable flash flood, spooked cattle, bears, runaway horses, snakebite and saddle sores. Frank slapped him on the back. “You have a fine time out there, boss. The boys and I will keep things running back here.” “Somehow I knew you were going to say that.

Yes,” her boss responded, “one for us and one for the customer.” “I’m sorry, so you are saying that the client is asking for a copy and we need a copy for internal use?” “Actually, I’ll check with the client—they haven’t asked for anything. But I definitely want a copy. That’s just how I do business.” “Absolutely,” she responded. “Thanks for checking with the customer. Where would you like to store the in-house copy? There’s no more space in the file room here.” “It’s fine. You can store it anywhere,” he said, slightly perturbed now. “Anywhere?” she mirrored again, with calm concern. When another person’s tone of voice or body language is inconsistent with his words, a good mirror can be particularly useful. In this case, it caused her boss to take a nice, long pause—something he did not often do. My student sat silent. “As a matter of fact, you can put them in my office,” he said, with more composure than he’d had the whole conversation. “I’ll get the new assistant to print it for me after the project is done. For now, just create two digital backups.” A day later her boss emailed and wrote simply, “The two digital backups will be fine.” Not long after, I received an ecstatic email from this student: “I was shocked! I love mirrors! A week of work avoided!” Mirroring will make you feel awkward as heck when you first try it. That’s the only hard part about it; the technique takes a little practice. Once you get the hang of it, though, it’ll become a conversational Swiss Army knife valuable in just about every professional and social setting.

Onboarding checklists Business orientation checklist As early as possible, get access to publicly available information about financials, products, strategy, and brands. Identify additional sources of information, such as websites and analyst reports. If appropriate for your level, ask the business to assemble a briefing book. If possible, schedule familiarization tours of key facilities before the formal start date. Stakeholder connection checklist Ask your boss to identify and introduce you to the key people you should connect with early on. If possible, meet with some stakeholders before the formal start. Take control of your calendar, and schedule early meetings with key stakeholders. Be careful to focus on lateral relationships (peers, others) and not only vertical ones (boss, direct reports). Expectations alignment checklist Understand and engage in business planning and performance management. No matter how well you think you understand what you need to do, schedule a conversation with your boss about expectations in your first week. Have explicit conversations about working styles with bosses and direct reports as early as possible. Cultural adaptation checklist During recruiting, ask questions about the organization’s culture. Schedule conversations with your new boss and HR to discuss work culture, and check back with them regularly. Identify people inside the organization who could serve as culture interpreters. After thirty days, conduct an informal 360-degree check-in with your boss and peers to gauge how adaptation is proceeding.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction? A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic? In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we’d been hit with a series of three smaller, random events—the first of which would threaten the future of Pixar. To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds. An hour later, Oren and his boss, Galyn Susman, were in my office, trying to figure out what we would do next. “Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality began to sink in, the company’s leaders gathered in a conference room to discuss our options—of which there seemed to be none. Then, about an hour into our discussion, Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie.

In November, 1960 it would be Nixon versus Kennedy. Frank Sinatra introduced Judith Exner to John Kennedy on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. A few weeks later, Sinatra introduced Judith Exner to Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. Exner became involved, as William Safire put it, in a “dual affair with the nation’s most powerful mobster and the nation’s most powerful political leader.

She’d worried at the beginning when she first met them that there were too many patrones. But within weeks she was sure that there was really one boss, and that the other three were working for her.

two days of pay on the first-year anniversary grew to four weeks of pay by the tenth-year anniversary. Additionally, five-year employment anniversaries were celebrated with a cake, ten years with a monogrammed silver platter with the name Pepperidge Farm and the date inscribed on the bottom, and fifteen years with a monogrammed

Ditch the baggage If you stay focused on the past, then you’ll get stuck where you are. That’s the reason some people don’t have any joy. They’ve lost their enthusiasm. They’re dragging around all this baggage from the past. Someone offended them last week, and they’ve got that stuffed in their resentment bags. They lost their tempers or said some things they shouldn’t have. Now, they’ve put those mistakes in their bags of guilt and condemnation. Ten years ago their loved one died and they still don’t understand why; their hurt and pain is packed in their disappointment bag. Growing up they weren’t treated right--there’s another suitcase full of bitterness. They’ve got their regret bags, containing all the things they wish they’d done differently. Maybe there is another bag with their divorce in it, and they are still mad at their former spouse, so they’ve been carrying resentment around for years. If they went to take an airline flight, they couldn’t afford it. They’ve got twenty-seven bags to drag around with them everywhere they go. Life is too short to live that way. learn to travel light. Every morning when you get up, forgive those who hurt you. Forgive your spouse for what was said. Forgive your boss for being rude. Forgive yourself for mistakes you’ve made. At the start of the day, let go of the setbacks and the disappointments from yesterday. Start every morning afresh and anew. God did not create you to carry around all that baggage. You may have been holding on to it for years. It’s not going to change until you do something about it. Put your foot down and say, “That’s it. I’m not living in regrets. I’m not staying focused on my disappointments. I’m not dwelling on relationships that didn’t work out, or on those who hurt me, or how unfairly I was treated. I’m letting go of the past and moving forward with my life.

On paper, the people now choose the party nominees for president. And yet, the process seems to have come full circle. [back to party bosses choosing] Voters theoretically get to pick the candidates, but in practice they rarely get the opportunity. In most cases, the contest is over in a few weeks after a burst of activity in a handful of states. How did the reform movement [late 60s, early 70s] get so far away from the plan? The answer is that there was no single plan, nor a single entity hat could craft a system to meet the original intent of the reformers. [To democratize the process]

Schedule a sit-down with your direct boss and establish what she expects you to be focusing on in the first days and weeks of the job. Take written notes and determine—this is especially important—what your deadlines are. … Then be sure to request feedback about how you’re doing. A few weeks after you’ve started, schedule another meeting with your boss. Don’t say, “Am I doing okay?” Say, “I’m really enjoying my job. Are there any suggestions you’d offer?

Everyone seemed to have more to do than was possible in a forty-hour week. This was by design. “Microsoft’s theory is if it takes two people to do a job, hire one,” Shannon explained. “It’s a stated policy. I’ve seen it in memos. It’s called the N-minus-one policy.” In the abstract, the approach made good sense. For all the complaints about workers lacking initiative, most bosses disliked employees who did too much or broke with tradition or set their own priorities. At Microsoft most managers, finding themselves shorthanded, had no choice but to let their people run away from them. Smaller numbers of people, especially on a huge project such as NT, made communications between teammates easier. And it helped the bottom line. Microsoft earned twenty-five cents on every dollar of sales mainly because it offered hot products in a growing market, but the company also knew how to pinch pennies.

A demanding boss is not a micromanager. Asking for reports is not micromanaging. Expecting updates is not micromanaging. Asking for one meeting a week is not micromanaging someone. Spending time communicating about tasks, deliverables, deadlines, successes, failures, growth opportunities, and, yes, even family—is not micromanaging in any way. So,

Jesus put it this way: “Stop allowing yourselves to be agitated and disturbed” (John 14:27 AMP). Notice it’s a choice we have to make. He didn’t say, “I will make sure your circumstances are perfect. That way you can be happy.” He said, in effect, “The things upsetting you right now don’t have to upset you. The people aggravating you, even if they don’t change, they don’t have to aggravate you.” If you’ll make adjustments and change your approach to life, you can be happy in spite of those circumstances. I’m asking you today to stop allowing negative people and disappointments and inconveniences to steal your joy. You have to put your foot down and say, “This child gets on my nerves—I love him—but I will rise above it. I won’t let this control me.” Or, “This grumpy boss jumps down my throat for no reason, but I’m not letting him ruin any more of my days.” That’s what it means to not give away your power. You have to be determined to enjoy your life.

Leading up to the announcement, the boss did what the boss does best: he built excitement. The press followed him around like a waddle of deranged penguins, just as it had for years. They swallowed his Twitter-announced promises for a “big surprise” the next Tuesday, or Friday, or the week after like they were slurping down pickled herrings, only to see the dates come and go, only to get fooled again.

What if you did and said all the right things, but you still get a no from your boss in your pay rise negotiations? The truth is, most of the time you are probably going to get a no. But in this week’s MONEY AND INVESTING show Andrew Baxter points out that it doesn’t actually end there. Most people may just throw in the towel and just give up after their boss says no, but there is a way to approach it differently.

On Central Park West, a woman searching for just the right superlative for the man who is guiding New York through the greatest disaster ever to hit an American city finally said, “He’s not like a god; he is God.” . . . He has achieved what political observers would have told you two weeks ago is impossible. He is not only respected, but revered. And not only revered,

In a particularly creepy twist, Kristen’s former employer revealed that the company’s Australian branch had fired Kristen two weeks before our Chile trip. Why? Because she’d assaulted her boss, Lucas, at a company outing. Apparently she shoved the tiny man into a shelf of liquor bottles following an altercation. Another disturbing detail:

If the CEO is taking only two weeks’ vacation, of course his employees feel the unlimited plan doesn’t give them much freedom. They’re bound to take more time off with three allotted weeks than with an indefinite number and a boss who models just two. In the absence of a policy, the amount of vacation people take largely reflects what they see their boss and colleagues taking. Which is why, if you want to remove your vacation policy, start by getting all leaders to take significant amounts of vacation and talk a lot about it.

TEACH LEADERSHIP CLASSES at Amazon for our most senior executives. I also speak to interns. Across the spectrum I get the question about work-life balance all the time. I don’t even like the phrase “work-life balance.” I think it’s misleading. I like the phrase “work-life harmony.” I know if I am energized at work, happy at work, feeling like I’m adding value, part of a team, whatever energizes you, that makes me better at home. It makes me a better husband, a better father. Likewise, if I’m happy at home, it makes me a better employee, a better boss. There may be crunch periods when it’s about the number of hours in a week. But that’s not the real thing. Usually it’s about whether you have energy. Is your work depriving you of energy, or is your work generating energy for you?

boss, but you don’t need to spend ALL your time with them. If you implement every single idea, tool, and technique in this book, the time you dedicate to managing your team will come to approximately ten hours a week, and those ten hours should save you enormous lost time and headaches later. I’ll also suggest you block out about fifteen hours a week for you to think and execute independently in your area of expertise. That leaves another fifteen hours in a forty-hour work week.

I told you I was a journalist!” “I never thought you’d work here,” I say. “Started two weeks ago, actually.

Our faces portray the emotions our colleagues and bosses expect. We gladly show those that earn points and brilliantly hide those that do not. Nothing is real about it; it's business and we're supposed to feel okay about it for at least 60 hours per week. If you're lucky, you get used to it. You become highly-skilled at it until you're an invincible corporate giant -- king of a mountain that means very little in the end.

St. Clair is never going to marry. I know that from working a year with him. Hell, I'd known it after working for him a week. He dated like a tomcat. Over the past couple of months I'd set him up on dates nearly every week.

I’d sat here, eleven months, three weeks and two days ago, and overheard a conversation between St. Clair and Conway. Conway recommended me. St. Clair doubted I’d last the month,

You’re the CEO,” she says, voice tense. “You work for Acture Capital?” “I’m one of the co-owners, yes,” I say. “We acquired the Globe a few weeks ago, though negotiations have been on-going for over a year.

In a week or five years, the hurricane will hit, and the results will be the same. One day I’ll be trapped in darkness with no way out, and when that’s a reality, squinting won’t do a goddamn thing. The darkness will be the only color I’ll see. Or will I lose that, too? Blindness is the absence of sight, after all, and black is a color.

I want to operate on a 90-day time frame, starting with 30 days to get on top of things,” he told her. “Then I will bring you a detailed assessment and plan with goals and actions for the next 60 days.” Michael updated her regularly on his progress. Pressed by her to make a call on a major systems purchase after three weeks, Michael held firm to his schedule. At the end of 30 days, he delivered a strong plan that pleased his new boss.

The back of my neck heats. “Then as your boss, I’m ordering you to get started on the updates Yakura wants. Time is of the essence.” Her entire body tenses. “Of course. I’ll get right on that as soon as I submit my two weeks’ notice, asshole.

Analysts photocopied, proofread, and assembled breathtakingly dull securities documents for ninety and more hours a week. If they did this particularly well, analysts were thought well of by their bosses. This was a dubious

Victor St. Clair is nothing like that. He speaks as if there’s ice in his throat, chilling the words on the way out. The glacial blue of his eyes is devastating when they’re turned on you in disapproval. I fear that above all else. I’ve been his assistant for eleven months, three weeks, and two days.

Miles stood next to me to make sense of his notes for me. He pointed to the board. “It is separated into chapters, as you can see. The first grid under each chapter states the object, conflict, and emotion. After that are the characters and their connections. Then there are plot points, locations, phrases and conversation prompts. Or at least there should be.” He sounded discouraged. Just seeing all the remnants of the words he had erased had me feelings sucker punched for him. “How long does it usually take you to outline?” “Normally a few weeks, but this took months, and it was all for naught,” he sighed. “What happened?” He longingly looked over the mostly empty board while he ran his hand over his head. “I’ve felt a bit paralyzed. The raging success of silent stones caught me off guard, as did Isabella. I think I’ve been so afraid to finish the next book for fear it won’t live up to the first one, or to Isabella’s expectations, that I’ve been playing it safe.” “Aren’t you in charge of Isabella?” “No, darling.” He let the darling stand instead of correcting himself and changing it to Aspen. “She is very much in charge of her story. I am only her medium. And she let me know that she wasn’t exactly happy with eh direction I was going.

Felix has six people reporting to him. Each of them have ten people under them who, in turn, manage teams of about a dozen people who are client facing. Felix realized that while the tathastu of the company (revenue) came from the market, the tathastu of the employee (salary) came from the head office via the boss. Hence the gaze was typically upstream not downstream. People were more interested in boss management than customer management. To change this orientation, when he became head, Felix put the names of his six team members on a notice board in front of his desk. "You are the people who will help me succeed if I help you succeed," he told them in a team meeting. Next to each one's name he put down their individual short-term goals, first personal and then professional. Every week he would take time out to discuss these goals. As the months passed, he noticed each of his team members had similar sheets of papers on their notice boards, with the names of their respective team members. They were mimicking downstream what they were experiencing upstream. Were they being sincere or strategic? Felix did not know, but at least he ensured that his people focused a little more of their attention downstream than upstream.

He served in the military in Operation Bright Star and some other ones, which explained the haircut and how he dressed, not T-shirts but always button-ups like he’s the boss of something. After he got home from the Middle East he used the benefits to get his business degree at Mountain Empire, which is how he knew about starting enterprises. He had a list of everything he was an expert on. Mrs. McCobb said anybody would be a fool not to hire him, which they did, about every other week: medical supply store, gas station, lawn and tree service, flooring company, and other places he worked while I was living there, the years before that, and still to this day, if I had to guess. The pay at those places was lousy and he was too overqualified, plus knowing a lot more than his supervisors. A man can’t stay long in a situation like that.

When you go to a job interview, nobody is really interested in your background, but on what you can actually do and how committed you are in applying disciple and self-control to learn, improve your results, and improve the relationships and communication inside the company where you work. Therefore, having a PhD but no capacity to empathize or work on new methodologies means nothing, which is why so many people with PhDs work as supermarket cashiers and bartenders, or can't even find a job. Prepare your Curriculum in such a way that anyone can see in the front page all the things you have done and studied on your own, and add to the information the topics you actually studied and can apply. Your employer doesn't care if you went to university for it or learned from a laptop while in pajamas during a Sunday morning. He cares about what you can do to improve his results. If he raises your salary after you make him rich, great, and if not, you can use that opportunity as leverage to a better opportunity with a much higher salary. But always remember that, as an employee, your purpose is not to get a salary but to make your boss rich. The salary is a bonus you get from that intention. If you want to become rich yourself, you have to start your own company and work as many hours as your boss did and employ people who aren't willing to make you rich because they only care about their own salary, people who in many cases have diplomas but can't do anything useful. You will be surprised with how many useless people there are in the world, which is why interviews can last weeks and months before someone is selected for a position.

Another time, when my freelancing was slow, I sent out résumés, something I’m prone to do whenever I feel panicky. Sure enough, I was offered a job within a few weeks. The offer—writing marketing materials for a local bus line (okay, I didn’t say I was offered an interesting job in two weeks)—was for more money than I’d ever made in my life. But how could I afford to give up all that time? Was I really ready to forgo my freelancing career? Once again, I demanded a clear sign. I needed to know within 24 hours because that’s when I needed to give my employer-to-be a yea or a nay. The very next morning, Travel + Leisure, the magazine I most wanted to write for, called to give me an assignment. I hung up, shouted “Yes!” and did the goal-line hootchie-koo. But my guidance must have been in the mood to show off that day, because not 15 minutes later, another magazine I’d never even heard of, let alone sent a query to, called and wanted a story about Kansas City steaks. I had to call and tell my would-be boss, “Thanks, but no thanks.

They don’t call the boss and say, “Sorry, I’m uninspired today. As soon as the inspiration hits me, I’ll be in.

He asked these companies if he could interview people who they thought best exemplified work-life balance. What he discovered after interviewing these people was that they actually worked an average of nine hours more per week than their counterparts did. They valued job satisfaction over work-life balance. So, when you focus your efforts to improve your people’s satisfaction level with their jobs, versus the number of hours they work, think of the upside.