by Megan Hustad
Once you got a reaction—exchanged strokes with someone, in other words—you had a transaction on your hands, and if that transaction followed a recognizable pattern, and neither party to the transaction was really clear about his or her true motives, then you had a game on your hands. Once a game was in play, you could analyze, categorize, and identify it (because the same games kept cropping up), and this, Berne argued in his 1964 bestseller Games People Play, was the key to more productive relations with your fellow man. The names Berne gave to the most common games tell you a lot about his worldview: Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch, was one. Then there was See What You Made Me Do; Alcoholic; Kick Me; Look How Hard I’ve Tried; Frigid Woman; Blemish; and I’m Only Trying to Help You, among many others. The roles were more basic: people acted as Parent, Adult, or Child.
It wasn’t long before Berne’s ideas got taken to work. In 1973, Everybody Wins: Transactional Analysis Applied to Organizations appeared. Its author, Dorothy Jongeward, was a transactional analysis disciple who believed that people used company time “to reinforce negative self/other concepts,” and that this might be a drain on company resources. Being able to call the games was both more efficient (less 9-to-5 time spent tangling with people’s personality issues) and, she felt, more in tune with the Age of Aquarius. Being liberated, and feeling good vibes, was important. Strange, then, that she spent so much time dissecting games with undercurrents of shame and self-loathing —games like Kick Me and Poor Me. There were many variations, Jongeward wrote, but most people playing these games were starting from positions like this:
“I’m stupid.”
“I don’t deserve to live.”
“I can’t do anything right.”
“I’m handicapped.”
“I’m ugly and clumsy.”
“I can’t help myself.”
“I feel sorry for myself.”
“It’s not my fault.”
So you’d be sitting at your desk, trying to get some work done, and before you knew it a broken, unhappy coworker would be trying to goad you into helping him feel better about himself. Or; feel even worse about himself, depending on his particular neuroses. People stuck on a negative self-concept just couldn’t help themselves.
With the benefit of advanced neuroscience, we now know that one of the fundamental assumptions of transactional analysis—that, as Thomas A. Harris put it in his hit I’m OK— You’re OK, “the brain functions as a high-fidelity tape recorder”—is incorrect. Humans tend to be selective, even creative, when recalling their own past experiences. The 1970s, however, was in thrall to the inner child.
Here’s how Jongeward described the game Schlemiel. Similar to Kick Me, Poor Me, or even Stupid, people played Schlemiel to get reassurance that they weren’t screwups or otherwise unworthy. The Schlemiel player just wanted to be loved, and tried to get proof of that love by first doing something klutzy. Here’s how Jongeward describes such a scene:
One young man was transporting a new piece of equipment from one tabletop to another. In the process he dropped it. After he dropped it, he went into a long performance about how dumb it was of him to do such a thing. “Here is a new piece of equipment worth several hundred dollars. No one has had a chance even to use it, and I am so clumsy that I dropped it and broke some of the important parts on it. How could I do such a dumb thing? I don’t know how people can stand to have me around here.”
Then she begins her analysis:
This young man’s pitch was not to evoke a kick or a scolding.
He was asking for something else. He was asking for forgiveness. His expectation was that if he put on a pitiful enough act, that if he could come on remorseful enough, someone’s nurturing Parent would eventually say to him, “Don’t worry about it, George, it is only a piece of machinery and no one was hurt.” Next week he may spill the ink on the freshly mimeographed programs.
Faced with such a situation, Jongeward suggested it was best to withhold the “forgiveness stroke” because being sympathetic would just keep the Schlemiel game going, and she couldn’t ad-vise enabling people to repeat the same silly patterns. Then she offers the example of a visiting sales rep who left a cigarette burn on your nice Formica-topped desk. That cigarette burn might look like an accident, but it wasn’t, not really. The sales rep would probably put on a big show about feeling bad about it and you’d tell him not to worry, that it wasn’t worth getting too upset over. And that, according to Jongeward, was playing right into that man’s hands.
The “est” movement went one further. Not only were people clumsy, and clumsy on purpose because life was just too disappointing, but they were assholes too. est—it was always lowercase—was started by a former car salesman who left his family, changed his name from Jack Rosenberg to Werner Erhard (because he thought it sounded more exotic, more powerful), and decided to start a movement and make some money while he was at it. (He was inspired by L. Ron Hubbard’s success with Dianetics.) The plan worked—for a while—and he became a sought-after pseudoguru, est stood for “Erhard Seminars Training.” Or, as writer James Kettle put it in his short book on est, you could also think of it this way: est stood for est, a form of the Latin verb “to be,” and the training was all about, you know, just learning to be. “est is NOW. You’re what you are, and that’s how it peels.”
Erhard said he wanted to help people get over anxieties, insecurities, anything that hobbled their effectiveness. While the goal sounded softball enough, the actual training was anything but. A typical est session involved sitting in a gray metal folding chair in a stuffy hotel conference hall for two days. There’d be two hundred fifty souls lined up in tight rows, sitting knee to knee, forbidden to use the facilities or eat or drink or smoke except at designated intervals designed with participants’ maximum physical discomfort in mind. People came away from est weekends with reports of sobbing, vomiting, fainting from exhaustion, and begging to use the bathroom and being denied. The lecture was usually delivered by one of Erhard’s disciples, and the standard script included phrases like this, delivered loudly into a microphone: “You people are cruds! You don’t have the sense to dry off. A fart in a windstorm has more intelligence; at least it lets it happen!” And: “How the hell are you ever going to be a winner if you’re always picking the wrong horse? You’re an asshole. You’re all of you assholes!” And: “There’s not a one of you doesn’t think he’s God Almighty and who isn’t lower than whale shit!”*
They paid good money for this—a few hundred dollars for your first seminar—and many people who felt it worked came back for more. Just how being likened to a fart in a windstorm proved beneficial is not entirely clear, but Erhard’s revelation was basically that people tried too hard to change the world, or themselves, or other people, and they should stop. Kettle tried to sum up the est philosophy by acknowledging that it was a mishmash of ideas stolen from other sources—“Zen, Gestalt, Yoga, Dale Carnegie, et cetera,” maybe with some guided meditation thrown in, “a bit of body awareness and relaxation, along with variations of exercises and ideas, some imagination, some fantasy, too,” and all of this “folded in with Eric Berne’s Games People Play” But say at the end of day two of the seminar, you hadn’t yet grasped what you were supposed to be getting out of est, so you spoke up and told the instructor that you weren’t quite getting it. The scripted response to that was, “Then you’re getting that you don’t get it.”
est had little to say to people who didn’t see their lives transformed. “Sure, there are some who are dissatisfied,” Kettle wrote. “So it didn’t work, but that, too, is the way it is. Get it? You are what you are. Accept it. Stop being, as the est people have colorfully put it, an asshole.”
All from Kettle’s firsthand accounts.
So what we have from the 1970s so far is: Don’t extend sympathy or forgiveness to people who screw up, and Don’t be an asshole. Not only is it very difficult to reconcile those two pieces of wisdom, or do both at the same time, but it’s very
hard to think along either line without becoming ugly and bitter. How can you think your coworkers are childish, manipulative slobs and still look forward to work in the morning? (That is, unless you are an asshole?) How is encouraging people to go with whatever mood they’re in, not worrying about anyone or anything else long-term, not just a recipe for more obnoxiousness and head-butting? By the time Winning Through Intimidation rolled out onto store shelves, the success rhetoric had taken a real Revenge of the Nerds turn. The book begins with the author Robert J. Ringer congratulating himself on his choice of title: “When I tagged my book with the label of Winning Through Intimidation, I knew that it would evoke a conditioned-response reaction from many, that the goody-two-shoes disciples of unreality would be offended,” but, because he was so fierce and uncompromising, he bravely forged ahead.
Ringer, who would go on to write Looking Out for No. 1, then described how his education in real life—life as it was really lived, you know, not as described in namby-pamby self-help books—started out during his undergraduate days, when he was ostracized by the smarter, taller, more sexually successful students. What he learned at “Screw U,” he wrote, was that there were basically three types of people in the world. Some would announce their intention to leapfrog over you and let you choke on their dust, and then they’d do just that. Others might tell you that they weren’t really interested in cutting corners, leapfrogging over you, or reaching for your stash of poker chips, and would proceed to do it anyhow. The third type would give you every assurance that they weren’t going to do it, and sincerely meant you no harm, didn’t really want to have to, but through happenstance and “extreme rationalizing,” they’d end up reaching for your stash too. In short, nice guys always lost, so you better watch it, and listen close. Now that he’d learned a thing or two, Ringer wanted his readers to consider themselves warned. “That sound you hear behind you is me,” he concluded, “breathing down your neck.”
And that’s the fundamental problem with all of the above. Where all the 1970s success-lit authors went wrong is in taking their systems one step too far.40 There’s a line between an ability to notice patterns in people’s behavior and congratulating yourself—even getting high on—your ability to “see right through them.” These writers went crashing right through it. Once you start seeing your day as a series of petty, predictable interpersonal games, people become pawns—chumps whose hopes and fears do not need to be taken seriously. Being so quick to categorize gets you Dilbert coffee-mug wisdom on one end of the spectrum, Sudanese warlord wisdom on the other. Neither is appropriate for the office.
Do be determined to see coworkers as endlessly fascinating, multifaceted individuals, regardless of how reliably they work your nerves. I was recently on the subway without the crossword or an iPod, staring up at the ads that run the length of the car near the ceiling. Most were for ESL classes, podiatrists, and attorneys specializing in lead-paint-poisoning claims. One was for a new book that promised to teach you how to get rid of the irritating people who were ruining your workday. Two things immediately struck me as wrong. One, if your day is being “ruined” by annoying colleagues, perhaps you have deeper emotional issues you may want to look into first. Two, the day you rid yourself of that last irritating person is probably the day before a brand-new one steps off the elevator onto your floor.
8
Self-Deprecation
* * *
The Art of Humble Beginnings Stories
The trick of the successful ingratiatory is to let modesty
reflect the secure acceptance of a few weaknesses that
are obviously trivial in the context of one’s strengths.
—EDWARD E. JONES
ONE OF THE MORE INTERESTING aspects of corporate life is communing with people who remember their SAT scores. You’ve conveniently forgotten yours. Their fathers supervised clinical trials in pediatric oncology. Your father teaches phys ed. They got red, hand-me-down Audis for their sixteenth birthdays. You got $100 and a beige cable-knit sweater. They interned on Capitol Hill. You kept busy painting houses that same summer.
These disparities don’t have to cause much trouble. For one, “it’s easy to gain advantages that have nothing to do with money,” says Lane, a former lawyer turned freelance writer. “In college”—he went to Harvard — “a group would be standing around talking plans, and someone would casually mention they were off to Paris for a long weekend. Now, you’d never say, ‘Gee, I could never afford that.’ Instead you’d respond with how much you were absolutely loving some obscure eight-hundred-page novel, and were looking forward to holing up in your dorm room all weekend. And reading.” This way, Lane and the Paris-bound could pretend they’ve simply made different lifestyle choices, and no one had to be self-conscious about money or lack thereof.
Once careers and salaries enter the mix, this technique does not cut it. In the aggregate, college is the great equalizer (it greases the wheels of upward mobility, and pumps more people into the knowledge economy), but in smaller, more personal interactions, it can become a divider. Some went to colleges that impress people, others attended schools that don’t impress, and when individuals from these two factions meet, assumptions about respective intellectual capacities tend to get made. In some circles, where one attended college comes up during cocktail conversation long, long after graduation. (If you had told me as a twenty-year-old University of Minnesota student that this would be the case, I would have snorted in disbelief.) You can always see this particular line of inquiry coming, however—the chin lifts, the throat’s cleared, and the delivery is remarkably consistent: “So. Where did you go to school?”
This tension explains why debates about where to find the best pizza in New Haven can be so irritating. A University of Texas grad had to endure one of these discussions during a conference-room celebration of her twenty-third birthday. She was working at a Washington, D.C., newspaper at the time. As plates of dry chocolate cake got passed around, and she sat there chewing silently—“why was everyone talking about this? why so animated?”—it slowly dawned on her that this conversation was actually designed to advertise that all of its participants had gone to, or were somehow extraordinarily familiar with, Yale. Maybe referring to Yale without actually saying the word “Yale” had been the whole point—or else she’d underestimated how strongly these adults felt about New Haven restaurant culture. She tried to swallow, choked on her cake, and got a friendly slap on the back.
Given how much Americans love to toss people from vastly different backgrounds into the same room together, you might think there’d be more popular wisdom on how to handle these situations—situations in which your list of accomplishments is, by conventional meritocratic standards, inferior. There should at least be some cliche as tried and true as “Have a firm handshake,” but there isn’t. Flailing about trying to find something to brag about that might even the score, as some people choose to do in these moments, rarely works out well. You can’t, for example, start explaining how amazing Austin barbecues are because your point gets tangled in the subtext: Do you actually want to talk about homecookin’, or are you just too dense to realize that regional cuisine is not, in fact, what they are talking about?
The only way to stumble through these conversations, I’ve come to believe, is to slyly, very slyly suggest that any soft spots in your resume are beside the point. Your overall prowess, in fact, is such that not only can you not be reduced to a particular educational institution, but any mistake, unfortunate incident, or humble circumstance in your past only testifies to your superior skill overall. And biographies of executives and industry leaders suggest that the best way to announce your greatness —and emerge from best-pizza-in-New-Haven discussions unscathed—is not to talk about how big and strong you are. Quite the opposite. Read magazine profiles dating back to the robber baron era, or former General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s Straight from the Gut, any variety of capitalist memoir (if you will), and you’ll find self-deprecation
is the way to go. But the humiliating experiences of more than a few of my friends, not to mention my own, suggest that successful self-deprecation is a delicate art. Do it wrong and you risk looking like the nonentity those born smarter, richer, or luckier may already think you are. Do it slightly wrong and you sound resentful. Do it correctly and you spin those historical liabilities into gold.
Self-deprecation as career tactic first took the form of the “humble beginnings” stories of the late nineteenth-century industrial magnates. When the novelist William Dean Howells published
The Rise of Silas Lapham in 1884, he had the self-made man of the title living in chichi Boston but still picking the Vermont hayseed out of his teeth. The book opens with Silas Lapham, mineral paint tycoon, being interviewed for the local paper. “Any barefoot business?” his interviewer asks. “Early deprivations of any kind, that would encourage the youthful reader to go and do likewise?” The reporter thinks it all rather ridiculous, but Lapham is more than happy to regale how his frail, saintly mother worked her fingers to the bone, how much he learned from Poor Richard’s Almanack, and how the beginnings of his now globe-spanning empire—outlets in South America, Australia, India, China, and the Cape of Good Hope—could be traced to an accidentally discovered paint mine on the edge of the old family farm.
Horatio Alger also dabbled in the barefoot business. His 1881 biography of James Garfield opens on the future U.S. president, age four, stumbling shoeless and “earnestly” from a small, crudely constructed log cabin into the surrounding forest. So too Dale Carnegie, who managed to pack the suggestions that he lacked shoes, received an inferior education, and enjoyed only childhood’s simplest pleasures into a single sentence: “Years ago when I was a barefoot boy walking through the woods to a country school out in northwest Missouri…” opens a chapter of How to Win Friends and Influence People. For his part, Napoleon Hill once described the backwater he grew up in as a place dominated by “feuds, moonshine, and stupidity” (no great business leader himself, he knew this gambit well). As the years went on, variations on the childhood-was-rough theme grew more varied. In his bestselling 1984 autobiography lacocca, the former Chrysler chairman reminisced at length about the Great Depression, and how school kids had called him a tomato-pie-eating dago “wop.”41 Jack Welch has remarked that while his parents weren’t exactly poor, they were poorer than he wanted them to be. He also mentions that he stuttered as a child, and was a bit of a momma’s boy. And Bill Gates, though born into money, has made no attempt to suppress publication of a 1977 mug shot that shows him to be a grinning, decidedly geeky twenty-two-year-old.