Like watching a good lawyer defending a guilty man

Is the world really upsetting us, or are we upsetting ourselves by what we tell ourselves about it? Most likely, the latter. Other people are not the sole source of our negative feelings. The onus is on us. The call is coming from inside the house. We need to take responsibility for improving our situation, not wait for other people to change so we feel better. There's an interesting study from a clinical psychology journal about this issue. Concerned about the use...

Dilbert's boss once sat him down for his annual performance review and said the following:We can't give you a raise because you didn't do anything noteworthy this year. To which the engineer responds: It only seems that way because I'm so good at my job that I make it look easy and never complain. Meanwhile, his frazzled coworker storms in and yells: My job is a nightmare! And the boss just smiles and says: See, why can't you be more...

Running lean, being scrappy, working agile, growth hacking. All of these buzzwords have broad cultural appeal and adoption, but unfortunately that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Consider the following hypothetical scenario at a modern organization. Ask yourself if you have ever worked at a place where this happened. The company constantly forces employees to do more with less, so people get burned out. When people get burned out, they quit. When people quit, the company takes all the work...

We work in a corporate system where everyone is suffering together, and is conditioned to expect it as the norm, and that makes it hard for us to gauge the true level of burnout. Digiday, in their annual agency culture and employment report, included a chapter about firms trying to do more with less. One survey respondent made a comment that broke my heart:You feel like you're drowning, but it's okay because you look around and see that everyone else...

Speed is a powerful source of leverage. If you’re fortunate enough to be the first one through the door, then it puts you in a position where you can achieve a goal that would otherwise be insurmountable. Hell, even if your work isn’t the best in the world, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got the first mover advantage. Everyone else is forgotten. Here’s one of my favorite case studies of this. At the height of the second world war, the military...