>> (un-mic'd) ... in front of an audience as big as this one.
I was quite nervous as I am now.
It was even worse, because it was my first talk in English, and as you have probably
realized by now, English is not my first language.
So I was really on the verge of a nervous breakdown when one of my best friends approached
me and said ,don't worry, just start with hello, finish with thank you ,and everything
will be all right.
[laughter] I asked him, how can you be so sure that everything
will be all right?
And he told me, you'll see, because no one cares.
[laughter] That day I realized two things: That first,
no one will ever care what I have to say unless I'm able to engage them with my idea and the
second that sometimes if you follow some simple rules, everything will be all right.
Someone that I admired put himself in front of an even larger audience with this one,
with just a phrase on the his back, and that phrase you could read think different.
That was a sentence a slogan that my teenage mind quickly translated into break the rules.
And today I will break the rule with starting with hello and I will start with thank you.
Thank you very much for being here today.
Thank you very much for attending this talk.
It means a lot to me because even if you don't realize it, you are giving me one of the most
important things that you have, one of the most valuable assets, which is your time.
I am really grateful for that and I hope that someday I will be able to pay back this loan
to you with some of my own time.
I know that some of you might be thinking, pay me with time?
Hm, they say that time is money.
Show me the money!
I disagree, OK?
Time is not money.
You cannot put money in a van, you cannot earn -- you can earn more money, but you cannot
earn more time.
More time means less money.
And that's why as someone will advise you to go home and take your repo with you.
OK, you might be thinking about who are you?
And now I realize that after having talked for three minutes, I haven't introduced myself.
So let's do it in the traditional super-group way.
Hello, I'm Rafael, and I'm a workaholic.
I've been working for quite a while now and I'm here today to share with you some of my
findings, I've been a developer for as long as I can remember.
It started as a hobby that I loved and then I thought that, if I can work doing what I
love, it would be like never doing a day's work in my life.
Oh, man, I was so wrong!
[laughter] During my first job, as a developer, I hit
the field with quite a big imposter syndrome, OK?
I thought that all those years working on my own projects were not enough, that me,
a hobbyist turned into a professional was not really worth it.
I was an imposter.
Everyone will know that I was not at the level of my coworkers, they will find out and they
will fire me.
So I tried to overcompensate by working long hours every single day.
This is a picture of me as seen by my coworkers of that time.
I must say that was pretty accurate.
I was always the first one arriving at the office in the morning and the last one leaving
in the evenings.
I was working a lot every single day, working long hours for months during Saturdays and
Sundays, and during holidays, I never took a day off.
And I found after several months of working really hard, that if you do what you love
for a living, 20 hours per day, you will end up loving it a little bit less.
[laughter] And I quit.
So let's stop for a moment and analyze my case.
I was working long hours every day, just to try to hide an underlying problem, but no
one noticed.
They thought that I was an engaged employee.
I got really amazing good reviews and bonuses.
Everyone was astonished with my engagement, with my performance, how committed I was.
They all thought that I was engaged but I was not a worka Holick.
And being a workaholic is not.
-- I know that sometimes we joke about work ahollism and sometimes we use the term and
sometimes we just play with the concept.
So let's make things clear, being a workaholic is as bad as being an alcoholic.
In fact, work addiction shares some of its features to other addictions, like displaying
excessive behaviors and disregarding other significant domains in life.
This is critical.
We workaholics tend to put apart many important things in life just to be able to work a little
bit more.
During my big time as a workaholic, I ended up weighing 120 kilos, because of not exercising.
I drift apart from my friends because I had no social life and I even lost my long-time
partner because I was never home.
Now, let me tell you a little secret, OK?
And you have probably found out by now because of all of these little logos in the slide,
I work for Badoo, Badoo is the largest social discovery network in the world.
Sometimes when you work a lot, and you never go home and your significant other will get
bored and will end up socially discovering someone else.
[laughter] It probably also didn't help that I stink
a bit.
But the worst thing at all is that I was not enjoying it.
Workaholic tendency may be energized by high personal standards and not by enjoyment of
work.
When workaholics fail to meet their own expectations they may feel incompetent, so even after working
as hard as I have ever worked my in any life.
I was unable to meet my own expectations and I felt really incompetent.
Which if you remember my imposter syndrome made things even worse drawing me into pa
vicious cycle and if I tell you that every moment I knew that I was working way too much,
I had all the things in my environment telling me that I was working too much, then you will
probably ask me, why didn't you stop?
And that's a really, really good question with a very simple answer.
I didn't stop because I was not able to stop.
I couldn't help, but working nonstop.
Stopping was the problem and this has been proven to be one of the main differences between
engaged employees and people who, like me, have a problem.
When you are doing any kind of activity, there are two main reasons why you might want to
stop.
The first one because you are not enjoying it any longer.
The second one because you think that you have done enough.
These are known as stop rules.
The first one enjoyment stop rule and the second one, the enough stop rule.
So for instance, let's say that you love chocolate, everyone loves chocolate, right and you have
access to an unlimited amount of chocolate, then you will start eating and you will stopafter
a while when it was no longer enjoyable.
You will not keep eating it until you have reached your goal with the day or month or
whatever.
Until you end up eating the whole lot, right?
It has been proven that workaholic employees work like this, just like this boy, until
they have put enough into the work trying to reach some of their own goals that are
basically unreachable.
You cannot eat the whole lot of chocolate, right?
On the other hand, people that are engaged, motivated, enjoy what they're doing, they
find it fun and they stop working when it's no longer fun.
So we can say that workaholics use enough stop rule to stop working and engaged employees
use the enjoyment stop rule and for you as readers it's really important to tell whether
one rule is being used or the other because you want people who are really motivated of
what they're doing.
You don't want people like me who work a lot, get great results, but quit after three months,
right?
You might be this boss, you might be the one who said, well, I'm being paid to make sure
everyone works hard.
I want everyone working hard for me.
My job is work hard.
Well, you are a terrible boss and you need to learn a few things.
Workaholic employees experience more interpersonal conflict at work, they are less satisfied
with their jobs, they work more they have poorer social relationships outside work,
they experience low life satisfaction and they have high levels of job strain and health
complaints and they work hard, that's true, but they work hard in response to feelings
of low self-worth and insecurity and because they must do so: Not working evokes distress
and negative emotions such as irritability, anxiety, shame, and guilt.
You will agree with me that this is a bad type of working hard.
And you will soon regret, if you allow this.
If you don't prevent this, why?
Because you will need to spend a lot of time and money, a lot of resources finding a replacement
when your guy or girl quits.
And then while you are looking for a good replacement, you will find that you need to
have all your workforce coping with the extra load and they will also get burned and once
you find someone who is good enough, you will need to provide training and support and more
time, and all this because you were not able to prevent that.
So although it's really difficult to estimate the real cost of employee turnover it's been
calculated to be 1.5 times the annual salary of the position in question and this doesn't
take into account the loss of profit that you might have because you might be losing
someone that is working in a really key position for your company.
And you might have to delay projects because of that.
So by allowing someone to work long hours every single day like I did, until the moment
that he or she is exhausted and burned out and quit his job, you might be creating a
real important financial problem to your company, just to try to squeeze a little bit more time.
So in this context, I will agree with you: That time is money.
Specifically, more time is less money.
So you might be wondering, now, what can I do?
Because I cannot just again to the employee and tell him to stop working, he will just
panic.
It will be like waking up a sleep walker, right?
He will feel all these bad emotions and probably collapse or something?
Don't you worry.
That won't happen.
When I quit that first job I was lucky enough to land a new one and I got a position in
a really good company, there, after a while on the same procedures that led me to burn
out in my previous job, my manager came to me and asked to have a really serious problem.
She was trying to tell me that I had a problem.
That working so much was an issue and it was not good for the company.
Of course at that moment I thought that I didn't have any problem.
I disagreed.
So she did something wonderful.
She dared me to just switch off my mobile phone next Saturday.
Just nor a while and I thought, easy-peasy, I can do that.
So then on the following Saturday, while I was walking in the park, I remembered that
conversation, took out my phone, shut it off, put it in my pocket and I thought, this is
terrible.
[laughter] I was feeling all kinds of withdrawal symptoms,
like phantom things in my pocket, it was like a silent call, pick me up, check your email.
Take a call.
So I recognized that I had a problem.
And I accepted it and acceptance is the first step to face an addiction, right?
So after I accepted that I had a problem, I was able to start in with that, so I start
having more weekends and I was able to establish better boundaries between my work life and
my personal life and finally I was able to start using the enjoyment stop rule to decide
when to call it a day and today I am no longer a workaholic.
[applause] And this was just thanks to a really great
manager who was brave enough to come to me and have the serious conversation.
So try to be that great manager.
And more importantly, try to create an environment where you don't promote workaholism and to
do that, you just need to follow two simple rules and everything will be all right.
The first one do not compliment people who work long hours.
Do not use long hours as an argument to justify a promotion or a salary raise.
In fact, if you need to promote or give a salary raise to a suspected workaholic, make
sure that you make clear that this is in spite of working long hours and not because of that
and take advantage of that conversation to set goals about working hours and follow up
on your next one-on-ones.
And even more important, second: Be a leader.
Be the one who shows the way.
Be the one who leads by example.
Do not work long hours.
Work hard, but stop when it's no longer enjoyable.
Go home and let everyone aware that you are going home, that it's time to stop working,
and you expect them to do the same.
And just one phrase: Leads go home, and take your reports with you.
Thank you very much.
[applause]