Breaking news: Quiet quitting is all the rage
with the TikToks and the Gen Z's.
Only quiet quitting is not a new phenomenon.
It's how your lazy co workers that didn't getting promoted for decades.
Right now there's a lot of hype about quiet quitting
and a lot of misconceptions about what quiet quitting is.
And maybe a lot of professionals that are about to get themselves fired
for quiet quitting the wrong way.
We don't want that to be you.
So we're going to talk about it all in this video.
As always, the timestamps will be below so that you can get to
the part that's most interesting to you.
Shall we begin with the basics, what is quiet quitting?
Essentially quiet quitting is opting out of hustle culture
(over performing and working all the time)
and setting more effective and meaningful work life boundaries
so that you get to enjoy your life and not just base your identity off of
work,
which is all things we've been talking about on my channel for years.
I told you it wasn't new.
What is new is that we didn't have the term quiet quitting before.
But I'm going to come back to that in just a few minutes because
the discourse around quiet quitting and what it is has, of course,
taken a turn. I have a rant about how quiet quitting is being
discussed by the critics. Of course not everyone is out there like
"Quiet quitting movement, let's all rejoice!"
No, there are a lot of critics of quiet quitting.
You've probably noticed the bombardment in the media and
in videos and everywhere abound quiet quitting.
And a lot of the subtext of the conversations and the coverage
when it comes to criticisms of quiet quitting is this
Nobody wants to work these days.
However, this premise relies on the fact that being lazy is defined as
refusing
to over perform overwork, burn yourself out and sacrifice yourself
and everything about your life, including your relationships in order to
service the company's needs. And if that's the definition of lazy we're
working with, I'm totally happy for us to all be lazy AF in order for this
to make sense. We need to look at the subtext of who benefits from us,
overworking and overachieving. And who is most concerned about prospective
losses in productivity and profitability. I'm sure you can tell me in the
comments who benefits from that now, knowing what quiet quitting is what
quiet quitting is not. And the fact that it's not new, we need to discuss
why quiet quitting is having such a moment in the cultural zeitgeist for
this to make sense, I think that we really need to zoom out. And this is
something I want you to practice in your career success strategy and how
you think about problems and decisions you're facing at work for this to
make the most sense, we need to throw back to the olden days, the golden
era where a dust job was nine to five, when a single income could support a
whole family comfortably. And there was real opportunities for economic
advancement. Now, because it's my area, I really want to focus on the work
culture aspects. But obviously, there's a lot of socio economic things that
have happened. I'll make passing mention but I just want to caveat that
this is my opinion. And I'm pulling facts from memory. I am not an
economist, and I did not do deep research to prepare for this. So please,
if you're basing decisions off of this fact, check for yourself, please,
since I was olden days, where a nine to five was truly a nine to five on a
lot of things about our working culture has changed, especially since the
turn of the century. Everyone has email now. And we're constantly connected
to it through our smartphones, where we can just get to email we can get to
instant messaging, we can get to work apps, we can do our jobs on the go,
which of course has led to this always on culture. Think of how often
you're able to go for dinner with friends with no one touching their
phones, no one replying to an email, no one replying to just as one quick
message, it just doesn't happen anymore. And as this technology enabled us
to work from everywhere, liberating us from the office, we also saw the
rise of glamorization of hustle and the emergence of hustle culture. I know
a lot of you are also in the tech world, which is the world that I was in
and we see through media and through social media, the glamorization of
startup life, hashtag startup life and this potential to strike it rich
along with those things. And along with those developments and our working
culture, we also have a workforce that has been trained to overachieve.
Ambitious professionals are entering the workforce with a focus on getting
the highest test scores having the most extracurricular activities and over
achievement as a badge of honor. And of course, all of these things, and
many more, I'm sure have unfortunately created a dramatic increase in
burnout, especially over the past couple of years, we have seen a marked
increase in discussion of burnout, and you would think that remote work
would solve a lot of these problems. After all, we're not commuting every
day. We're working from the comfort of our own homes, we have so much less
stress now only we don't necessarily have less stress and that time that
you're not spent commuting might be time that you're expected to be spent
in meetings, many of the professionals that I worked with found themselves
working much more when everyone was working remotely because their boss
said, Yeah, you're home anyway, we'll have that meeting at eight o'clock at
night. And they didn't feel like they could say no. And obviously,
subsequently we've had the return to office are to trying to balance remote
work, hybrid work or being forced back to office that you don't want to go
to hearing that we have the great resignation, talent shortages, there has
been so much going on. From a work culture perspective, honestly, it's hard
for most people to keep up with. And then of course, we have financial
stuff underlying all of this play. Over the past two decades, we've had the
tech bubble burst, we've had the great recession, the housing market
collapsed, we have growing affordability issues, which has led to a
situation where right now the average price of rent in Manhattan is more
than $5,000 a month, whereas the average salary in New York City is just
under $58,000 per year. And I use the New York market because that's where
I live. But this is not unique. And when you're a high paid tech employee,
your salary brings you really far when you move to North Carolina, which
also impacts housing prices and affordability within those markets. And I
also think that I would be remiss to not mention the social pressures that
we feel through social media, a lot of people feel like they need to prove
themselves or they need validation, you need to be living in Insta worthy
life in order to be successful. So you're supposed to have an incredibly
successful career where you're paid an exorbitant amount of money so that
you can buy all designer things, go on luxurious vacations, and spend all
of this time with your friends while you're working all the time. And
through all of this the reality for most people has been this you work your
ass off and you struggle anyway then we have this new term introduced quiet
acquitting where you're not quitting your job, you're still getting your
paycheck, but you've opted out of overachieving, you're just gonna coast
along professionally so that you can live a good life because all of that
stuff is even worth it. Which leads us to the misconceptions of quiet
quitting. Now, I tackle this one earlier, but I want to talk about it
again, because I know that I'm going to have some objectors. So what I want
to do is I want to translate this for you quiet quitting has been viewed by
some people as being lazy. You just don't want to work anymore. But that's
not true. In reality, when you're quiet, quitting the right way, what quiet
quitting really is, is working smart, not hard. And we've had that slogan
around for ages. Similarly, not everyone has always wanted to get promoted
into the C suite in the career that was not true 40 years ago, and it is
not true now. And I think what quiet quitting does is it normalizes working
smart instead of working hard, which let's face it, people say they don't
practice it often. And it also expands the definition of success to not
just rely solely on professional success, because when professional success
is the only version of success, I personally think that's very unhealthy
and quite toxic. And I'd love to know your thoughts on that.
Another thing that I've heard in terms of pushing back on quiet quitting is
that people who quiet quit are selling themselves short. However, I
strongly disagree with that. I think that quiet quitting means that you're
very focused on true productivity and true impact, which I'm going to come
back to you in just a few minutes. But I think selling yourself short is
only giving yourself one version of your life and not living the life that
you truly want to live. Look. I know people who love to hustle, they derive
joy, meaning and fulfillment from working all the time, and they love the
hours that they spend doing the work that they enjoy. However, just because
that is an option doesn't mean it's the only option. Sometimes selling
yourself short would be giving yourself an insufficient amount of time to
develop the relationships that you want with your family, your friends,
your partner, your children, I mean, I can have a whole separate rant on
the marginalization of working parents in this but I'll save that for
another time. Or perhaps in all the time that you're not working. You're
exploring hobbies or side gigs or something else and allowing your true
talents and your true creativity and your true passions to really thrive
while maintaining your job that pays the bills on the most annoying
misconception and kind of backlash against quiet quitting is that it
requires underperforming, you're stealing hours from the company. When you
accept a job offer. You are not signing away your life. If you're in the
United States, you're probably expecting a 4045 hour workweek like back in
the olden days and to meet the requirements of your role meeting the
requirements of your role is not underperforming. It's meeting
expectations. meeting expectations is the point in what world has over
achieving and over exceeding and getting like the highest performance
rating possible been normalized meaning expectations should be the
expectation otherwise, you have the wrong expectations. And if your
expectations are substantially higher, your job description, your hours and
your pay need to reflect that. And when your team meets expectations that
you set and you set the payment for isn't enough for you. That's not a dumb
problem. That's a huge problem. Maybe you need to get more staff, or maybe
you need to rethink the pay balance and the requirements. Sorry, that one
is a particularly touchy one. For me, in my opinion, quiet, quitting is not
anti work. It's about acknowledging that work is work, and it's not your
life. And this brings me into the next misconception. And this is actually
for people who are planning to quiet quit or have quietly quit, because if
you do it the wrong way, you complete your job in danger, quiet quitting
should be just that quiet. No one should notice, unfortunately, a lot of
the advice that I see and the way that it's been positioned, it's just, you
know, scale back start just settling in to meet the expectations. However,
when you have gone from overachieving and overworking, quite frankly, and
you suddenly drop your hours and the impact that you're making, the
perception is going to be that you're not meeting expectations. Even when
you quantitatively look at it, you are perception management is very
important, just like how slacker Chad has barely worked, but has been
perceived as being high potential and has been given opportunities,
promotions and big pay increases, you working less does not have to
coincide with a decreased perception in your performance.
In fact, I think when you do this the right way, the perception about your
performance should actually go up. Now another misconception that I see is
that quiet quitting is completely detaching from any career ambition that
you have. Now that might be the point is that this is going to be personal
to you. Success is an individual definition. And I want you to know what
career success and life success is for you. That's really important.
However, when you are quiet quitting, it does not mean that you have to
step off of the promotion track, it does not mean that you have to step
away from getting great performance reviews. And it absolutely does not
mean that your patients stagnate because you're just mediocre, you can
maintain career ambitions, you can expect to be paid more and to be paid
well in order to fund your life and the fulfillment that that money is
going to bring through travel and experiences that you want to have. And
that actually brings me into the next point, how do you quiet quit the
right way. This is something that I get into detail to help you uncover in
my career glow up book, which you should definitely preorder it comes out
in January. But obviously we need something to work with right now is that
we can get you quiet quitting without putting your job at risk and
hopefully getting you working less getting paid more and being perceived
even better. So first of all, you need to have clarity on the tasks that
you're doing, what expectations are you meeting, there are likely tasks
that you do on a regular basis that no one is going to notice, unless
they're not done. These are the tasks that you are going to just meet your
expectations and move on. There might even be tasks that if they weren't
done, no one would notice. What I'm saying is there might even be some
tasks that you're currently doing that you can stop doing entirely when you
quiet quit. However, there is going to be a set of tasks and KPIs or
embryos that have a high priority. Maybe it's on the company's goals. It's
on your boss's goals. It's associated with compensation. These are areas
that I encourage you not just settle in and meet the baseline, but to
uncover your unique awesomeness and find a way to create a strategic high
impact. strategic impact isn't something that takes a lot of time. In fact,
it will be done with the time that you free by doing everything else to
that meets expectation standards. But because these are going to be high
visibility tasks that really allow you to create an unendurable impact, you
will still be perceived by your boss, by the leadership team by your
colleagues as being a high performer. And this of course is going to show
up on places like your performance reviews, your opportunities that you're
given, if you're being considered for promotion, and it should also be
showing up when it comes to pay raises. Ultimately, to quietly quit. What
you need to do is you need to look to what your lazy co workers been doing
this whole time and learn the lessons from them. In fact, I want you to go
and watch this video right now so that we can get deeper into it.