you got to play the game and yeah well that's even from you when you just said
to me you said you know sometimes you you it's not right to turn a blind eye
on things and it's like sometimes you have to if you want to get yourself to a
position like my well it seems to me that you're making a distinction between
discipline and strategy like and and and and like impulsive moral responding you
know like let's say that you are in a situation where you have a boss who's
intolerable and maybe what you'd like to do you know the resentment has built up
over five years and you'd like to go in there and and yell at them and tell them
everything you think and you think well that's the truth it's like well it's
actually it's not a very sophisticated truth because you're doing as shallow
and impulsive analysis of this situation like it would have been the case that
you've already compromised yourself in 500 ways and I'll get back to the
playing the game issue because you do have to discipline yourself to and and
you have to discipline yourself to some degree by allowing yourself to do
arbitrary things that are part of the system right that's necessary part of
discipline and discriminating that from compliance with unethical activity is
very difficult so that's a hard situation but let's say you're you're
you're going to counsel someone who has an intolerable boss and they come in and
they're right at the end of their tether because maybe that's why they come for
counseling they say I really want to tell that son of a bitch what I think of
him and you think well wait a second here okay first of all you've already
eradicated from the list of reasonable possibilities that decision by failing
to say small things that you could have said all the way along and it's not like
you can just all of a sudden blurt all of that out now and that wipes the slate
clean in that constitutes truth it's too unsophisticated so let's think okay so
what is it that you want well I don't want this job anymore it's like okay now
let's actually have a strategy about this then you don't want this job
anymore can you get another job well I don't think so
well so you can't just quit well no I can't
because then I don't have any money and my family depends on the job it's like
okay so you can't just stop this that's not a viable solution you go out of the
frying pan into the fire or you know you suck you you substitute one set of
unethical actions for another set of unethical actions that are even worse
that's not helpful all right so let's start thinking about what exactly it is
that you want it's like well maybe I want a better job I want to work for
someone who's more reasonable okay so what's stopping you well I don't
have my CV in order my resume isn't up to date well why is that well I haven't
done it for five years and I don't like doing it well why is that well because
I'm kind of embarrassed about it because it has holes in it and it shows where
I'm lackadaisical and where I'm not prepared it's like okay how many things
are there like that well there's a bunch of things and they're all associated
with how I procrastinated in the past it's like okay what are we going to do
to rectify that so I'll say to people why don't you update your CV that's what
we'll do first because if you're going to look for a different job I'm not
saying you're gonna look for a different job but if you're going to look for a
different job you're not going to unless you're CVS
updated so why are you so not going to unless you can get a good recommendation
from this boss that's a Terran and so that's right there's new god there's
Tanis strategic actions that you're gonna have to take in order to make
yourself able to move laterally or up and the truth is isn't going in and
yelling at your boss and telling them everything you think about them the
truth is trying to figure out the very very difficult process of how you put
yourself in a better position and now that out like one of the things that's
quite fun about this lecture tour is the letters that I receive or the stories
that people tell me about switching jobs because they do realize that they're and
I often talk to people about consulting their resentment resentments are really
useful emotion like it's really dangerous it's one of the most dangerous
psychological states I believe but it's unbelievably useful because resentment
usually only means one of two things it either means quit whining and and take
it on because you're immature or it means you're allowing yourself to be
taken advantage of and you have something to say or do
and so you want to sort out the first part and find out if you're just being
immature and you can think that through and you can talk to people but in that
but if it's the second it's like no you've compromised yourself in a variety
of ways and you have to figure out how to get out of that and if you're
resentful that's evidence that you have in fact done that okay so now that issue
would be well how can you set your life up so that you can be without that
resentment and so that's when you start to develop a strategy for you know and
and it there's actually an adventure in this too I mean I've had a number of
clients who have been in jobs that they didn't like at all and you know they
were terrorized by someone for example and they were also working below their
hypothetical level and we'd put together a plan it's like okay you're gonna make
three times as much money in in five years that's the plan but like that's
not gonna be simple so you there's education you got to educate yourself
maybe formally because you've got holes you got to fix up your resume you've got
to you've got to overcome your fear of being interviewed you have to start
sending out like 50 resumes a week on a regular basis and be prepared for a 99%
rejection rate you you're going to look for a different job it's probably going
to take six months to a year and almost all of that is going to be rejection you
got to steal yourself from for that and prepare and maybe this is going to be a
three year process it's no trivial thing but you know it's almost inevitably I
can't remember a single example where the consequence of that very careful
detailed strategic thinking wasn't massively substantive improvement in
socio-economic positioning and a great movement towards a an improving
trajectory and and and there's advantages even along the way because
even before that happens the fact that you're taking genuine
steps to put yourself in a better situation immediately starts to reduce
your resentment even if it isn't having positive consequences to begin with but
you have to be realistic about it's like look it's gonna be hard to update your
CV because you're embarrassed about it and you should be right so no wonder
you're embarrassed about it and then well of course you don't want to go be
interviewed because you're not very good at it and there's holes in your story
and and your and you can be made nervous easily and
you're not a very good advocate for yourself so there's a lot of improvement
that needs to be done there and and then you have to withstand the the the
punishment of being constantly rejected when you apply for jobs because the
baseline rejection rate you know for the for the typical job applicant is like 99
percent it's like the rejection rate for everything is this gonna work
no but if you do it a hundred times it might work once that's and that's all
you need that's exactly it you you you only need that once and so
the truth there isn't to yell at your boss the truth there is to get your life
together yeah