How ugly office work can get

 

HOW UGLY OFFICE WORK CAN GET.

Pretty ugly.

Quite ugly.

Utterly ugly.

Ugly ulgy.

 

Extraits du post "10 reasons why you have to quit your job this year", James Altucher :
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/01/10-reasons-why-you-h...

 

This was going to end badly. I would play chess all day in my office with the door locked. My boss would knock on the door and I would put my headphones on and ignore him. People would complain that the software I wrote didn’t work. My boss would say, “where were you yesterday” and I would say, “it was a Jewish holiday” even though there was none and he would say, “well…tell us next time if you leave.” It was bad behavior. I was a slave trying to escape but I didn’t know how. I wanted to start a business but I didn’t know what. I wanted to create something but I would play games all day, burning up the fuel in my brain.

You can’t make money without selling something real. You can’t make something real without first imagination manifesting itself in your head. You can’t have imagination without surrendering yourself to an idea that you want to create something of value to other human beings.

And now it’s too late. Now the course of history has finally written it’s next chapter. There’s no more bullshit. I’m going to tell you why you have to quit your job. Why you need to get the ideas moving. Why you need to build a foundation for your life or soon you will have no roof.

 

1) The middle class is dead. A few weeks ago I visited a friend of mine who manages a trillion dollars. No joke. A trillion. [...] He said, “look out the windows”. We looked out at all the office buildings around us. “What do you see?” he said. “I don’t know.” “They’re empty! All the cubicles are empty. The middle class is being hollowed out.” And I took a closer look. Entire floors were dark. Or there were floors with one or two cubicles but the rest empty. “It’s all outsourced or technology has taken over for the paper shufflers,” he said.

“Not all the news is bad,” he said. “More people entered the upper class than ever last year.” But, he said, more people are temp staffers than ever. And that’s the new paradigm. The middle class has died. The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam. [...]

2) You’ve been replaced. Technology, outsourcing, a growing temp staffing industry, productivity efficiencies, have all replaced the middle class. The working class. Most jobs that existed 20 years ago aren’t needed now. Maybe they never were needed. The entire first decade of this century was spent with CEOs in their Park Avenue clubs crying through their cigars, “how are we going to fire all this dead weight?”. 2008 finally gave them the chance. “It was the economy!” they said. The country has been out of a recession since 2009. Four years now. But the jobs have not come back. I asked many of these CEOS: did you just use that as an excuse to fire people, and they would wink and say, “let’s just leave it at that.”

I’m on the board of directors of a temp staffing company with $600 million in revenues. I can see it happening across every sector of the economy. Everyone is getting fired. Everyone is toilet paper now.

Flush.

3) Corporations don’t like you. The executive editor of a major news publication took me out to lunch to get advice on how to expand their website traffic. But before I could talk he started complaining to me: “our top writers keep putting their twitter names in their posts and then when they get more followers they start asking for raises.”

“What’s the problem?” I said. “Don’t you want writers that are popular and well-respected?”
When I say a “major news publication” I am talking MAJOR.
He said, “no, we want to be about the news. We don’t want anyone to be an individual star.”

In other words, his main job was to destroy the career aspirations of his most talented people, the people who swore their loyalty to him, the people who worked 90 hours a week for him. If they only worked 30 hours a week and were slightly more mediocre he would’ve been happy. But he doesn’t like you. He wants to you stay in the hole and he will throw you a meal every once in awhile in exchange for your excrement. If anyone is a reporter out there and wants to message  me privately I will tell you who it was. But basically, it’s all of your bosses. Every single one of them.

4) Money is not happiness. A common question during my Twitter Q&A, asked at least once a week, is “should I take the job I like or should I take the job that pays more money”.

Leaving aside the question of “should I take a job at all”, let’s talk about money for a second. First, the science: studies show that an increase in salary only offers marginal to zero increase in “happiness” above a certain level. Why is this? Because the basic fact: people spend what they make. If your salary increases $5,000 you spend an extra $2000 on features for your car, you have an affair, you buy a new computer, a better couch, a bigger TV, and then you ask, “where did all the money go?” Even though you needed  none of the above now you need one more thing: another increase in your salary, so back to the corporate casino for one more try at the salary roulette wheel. I have never once seen anyone save the increase in their salary.

In other words, don’t stay at the job for safe salary increases over time. That will never get you where you want – freedom from financial worry. Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind.

5) Count right now how many people can make a major decision that can ruin your life. I don’t like it when one person can make or break me. A boss. A publisher. A TV producer. A buyer of my company. At any one point I’ve had to kiss ass to all of the above. I hate it. I will never do it again.

The way to avoid this is to diversify the things you are working on so no one person or customer or boss or client can make a decision that could make you rich or destroy you or fulfill your life’s dreams or crush them. I understand it can’t happen in a day. Start planning now how to create your own destiny instead of allowing people who don’t like you to control your destiny. When you do this count, make sure the number comes to over 20. Then when you spin the wheel the odds are on your side that a winning number comes up.

6) Is your job satisfying your needs? I will define “needs” the way I always do, via the four legs of what I call “the daily practice”. Are your physical needs, your emotional needs, your mental needs, and your spiritual needs being satisfied?

The only time I’ve had a job that did was when I had to do little work so that I had time on the side to either write, or start a business, or have fun, or spend time with friends. The times when I haven’t is when I was working too hard, dealing with people I didn’t like, getting my creativity crushed  over and over, and so on. When you are in those situations you need to plot out your exit strategy.

Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. 100 years from now your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.

[...]

7) Your Retirement Plan is For Shit. [...]

10)  Abundance will never come from your job. Only stepping out of the prison imposed on you from your factory will allow you to achieve abundance. You can’t see it now. It’s hard to see the gardens when you are locked in jail. Abundance only comes when you are moving along your themes. When you are truly enhancing the lives of the people around you.

When every day you wake up with that motive of enhancement. Enhance your family, your friends, your colleagues, your clients, potential customers, readers, people who you don’t even know yet but you would like to know. Become a beacon of enhancement and then when the night is gray, all of the boats will  move towards you, bringing their bountiful riches.

–

Don’t believe me. Stay with a boss that hates you. A job that is keeping  you locked on a chain around your neck, tantalizing you with incremental increases in pay and job title. Stay in a culture that is quietly replacing the entire middle class. This is not anyone’s fault. This is the tectonic plates of economics destroying an entire suburban culture that has lasted for almost 100 years.

Until you choose yourself for success, and all that choice entails, you will be locked into the prison. You will stare into your lover’s eyes looking for a sign that he or she loves you back. But slowly the lights will  fade, the warmth of another body will grow cold, and you will go to sleep dreamless in the dark once again.

 

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A comment from "Werbtheherb" :

Great article as usual James. Really gets me engaged. We are all so hungry to find a "reason to live", a "purpose to our existence". We want to paint our ambitions. We find ourselves limited by our biology, this thing, this body with 2 hands, 2 legs, 2 eyes..when you think of the inifinite configurations that are possible, why this one? Absurd. Our biological urges are disgusting, with our salivy and mucus and excrement coming out of our anus.

We all know our intellect is so much more than the body we are in. That for me is the real prison. We try to escape the walls of corporations to express ourselves freely through our body. Our intellect wants to yell out, wants to spread beyond the confines of our biology. Our intellect is pure, everyone can reach within to feel the pureness of love, of good. Words can't describe it. It is warm, it is comfortable, it is infinite.

When I look all around, business, what people are doing, anything, it's all an expression of our will. It is infinite. We are all headed towards a realization of self. It is clear. We are headed towards a realization of what is within us. It's honest, good, loving, caring, it does not want to harm anybody, it's peaceful, perfect.

We are headed there at an accelerate rate today, we are trying to connect to each other, to learn as much and as quickly as possible, to know everything, to answer everything.

We are already mourning the death of our biology. We are dependant on medecine, on science, on technology, creations of our intellect. We are letting it express itself.

We want to control the sensory inputs to our brain. We want to let our intellect, our thoughts free.

I am an aerospace engineer, James. I make sure the control software on airctaft engines are safe. I work in a small company. I contribute to bringing people physically together, I am a piece of this self realization. (I think that bringing people physically together is an transitionary phase to bringing people's mind together, we will all be connected). We all are. Whether working in a 9 to 5 formula, or a person managing a trillion dollar. We are all contributors. You are contributing in a way I cannot grasp. You are mind stimulator. You are creating or disrupting synaptic signals in our brains. You are aiming at the essence of what drives us.

Was steve job's contribution by bringing the iphone to millions of people greater than the contribution I do when I churn through tiny bits of information to ensure that the software is safe? Is the contribution greater than the constant love I give to my girlfriend? the caress I give to her hand? The soft kiss to her lips?

Why look elsewhere? Why go and "free myself" from this 9 to 5 to start a company that will "help" people? Why can't I just appreciate what I have and what I am right now, this instant, this split second?

I work 9 to 5, I have 5 weeks vacation, I make 70k/year, I get to see my mom who lives near by whenever I wish and I get to cuddle in her arms, I get to enjoy a hot meal that brings back my childhood flavors. The only prison I know of is my body, and I take care of it so that it doesn't pain me, it allows my mind to be as free as it can. I exercise, I try to satisfy my sexual impulses, I keep it at bay. "Calm down monkey genes". "why are you urging me to be the king of the hill". "MY FOOD! I will get there first!!". "Sex with women, now, all of it" "OO OO OO"

Hahah, hope any of this made any sense. Love you James.

 

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