How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work

by Megan Hustad

  (This left me less annoyed than weirdly discouraged, because it was a forceful reminder of my low status. If she’d needed my business half as much as I needed hers, she’s right—she probably wouldn’t have taken that call.)

  Don’t burst someone’s bubble just because you value truth and honesty so much. This one also dates back to Lord Chesterfield, who told his son not to take it upon himself to correct an ugly woman who spoke of herself as if she were beautiful. Most functioning adults rely on small self-delusions to get through the day (this has been confirmed in recent scientific studies on happiness), and as long as their “mistake” makes them more comfortable and remains a victimless crime, it’s better—and strategically smarter—for you to just let it be.

  Do let your friends do the defending for you. This is a corollary function of the Master Mind. You say nothing about your strong heart and good intentions. Your Master Mind, either by invitation or simply because they care, will go out of their way to sing your praises. Either way, more convincing than going on about your own virtues.

  Don’t, after the fact, belittle those who called you on your mistakes. In the

  movie Bright Lights, Big City, the head fact checker who fires the main character is depicted as a faintly ridiculous, curt, sour, birdlike old spinster. In Jay Mclnerney’s book of the same name, he does not caricature her so. Perhaps because Mclnerney knew that having his narrator mock the person who caught him out would make that narrator too much of a brat—and a predictable brat at that.

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  Early in The 7 Habits, Covey describes the many people who feel worn out by the demands of their job: The executive who doesn’t know his own kids, the unhappy singleton, the guy who can’t keep the weight off, the hard worker so threatened by other people’s promotions that he can barely see straight. He hints that they were unhappy because they occupied a fundamentally dependent position; they were dependent on the health of the global economy first and foremost, the fortunes of the company after that, and the whims of their boss most immediately. The tone and texture of their day is determined by other people and larger forces.

  And perhaps this is why not bothering to defend yourself is so powerful. Say you’re sitting there in your cubicle, and you’ve messed up, and you know it, and your job is on the line because you’ve got very little leverage, and your boss is a screamer. And then in the face of this Sturm und Drang, you take a risk. You’ll be sitting there, seemingly about to shrink from whatever the overlords have in store, and then from this dependent position you produce behavior that lifts you above it all. You say yes, you did it, it was your fault. You act as if your fortunes are completely independent of the organization, as if you answer to some different, higher calling. Of course you’re sorry. Of course. But you don’t need all the gold stars anymore—maybe you’ll pick and choose which gold stars you’re going to go for.

  And that’s a major step to putting junior-level employment —maybe even corporate life altogether—behind you.

  10

  The Uses of No

  * * *

  Donald Trump and “You’re Fired”

  My number one instinct was not to be a jackass.

  And I think I achieved that.

  —KWAME JACKSON

  TUCKED SOMEWHERE IN THE middle of Trump: The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump describes sitting with his mom and watching the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on TV. His mother is enraptured, misty-eyed, proud just to be witness to the spectacle, even from the vantage point of a family room couch in Queens, New York. Then his father, Fred, enters the room and says, “For Christ’s sake, Mary. Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.” This explained a lot, Trump wrote in 1987, about how he himself saw the world. His father was turned on only by efficiency and competition, while his mother was moved to tears by opulence and pageantry. The Donald had grown into the perfect synthesis.

  When The Apprentice started drawing huge Nielsen ratings in early 2004—number one among total viewers and number one among adults ages eighteen to forty-nine specifically—a number of theories were floated as to why the show was such a hit. Producer Mark Burnett had already proved his mettle with Survivor; but that didn’t explain why a bunch of unknowns sit-ting in a cramped wood-paneled conference room comparing returns on initial investment was drawing 20.7 million viewers every week. Trump was famous, but you couldn’t say he was terrifically well liked. The formula for The Apprentice didn’t deviate much from standard reality TV fare: sixteen type A’s camping out in tight sleeping quarters, pretty women wearing less clothing than is normal, rivalries, sexual tension, and emotional meltdowns.

  When asked to explain the show’s success, Trump gave credit to the good care of Jeff Zucker, president of NBC. (In Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, the book published on the heels of this ratings triumph, Trump gives a shout-out to the “brilliant” Zucker and his team no fewer than eleven times.) Zucker in turn told the press that the show worked because of Trump’s personal charisma. That answer didn’t really satisfy anyone either. In a 2005 interview with the business writer Robert Slater, Trump came closer to a definitive answer. During the taping of the first Apprentice episode, he remembered, in the final board-room scene, the words just came tumbling out of his mouth. “David, you’re fired,” he’d said. It wasn’t planned or scripted, but it worked. He liked the sound of it, and so did everyone else on set. “Those two words are very beautiful. They’re very definite. You can’t come back and say, ‘Well, let’s talk it over.’ It’s, like, over,” he explained. “You know, I’m not even so sure that the show would have been a huge success had we not done that.”

  Honestly, it seems cosmically dumb to elevate Trump to the status of Dale Carnegie or even Stephen Covey. Before all this, Trump was regarded by many as a lightweight—more showman than business philosopher. He’s no Bill Gates, and hardly Warren Buffett, whose investment approach earned him the admiring nickname “the Sage of Omaha.” Still, Trump had been a man of letters for some time—along with the bestseller The Art of the Deal and the billionaire book, there’s Trump: The Art of the Comeback, Trump: The Art of Survival, Trump: How to

  Get Rich, and a few more that don’t have his name in the title. Trump has also tried at various times to paint himself as a hardscrabble climber who defied the odds, a task made more difficult by the fact that his father, Fred, was a millionaire several times over.52 Everyone expected The Apprentice to be just another stab at self-mythologizing. While Burnett said he actually considered the show educational programming—it was going to show people how making it in America was done—hardly anyone expected Trump to deliver much in the way of wisdom.

  He didn’t, really—at least not quite as intended. What Trump and his wannabes did best was serve as object lessons in how to lose jobs. “You’re fired” nicely illustrates a principle that is rarely displayed quite so baldly, which is that people who are able to stay perched somewhere near the top for any amount of time—in addition to posing right and working hard and observing carefully and being resilient and optimistic and owning up to their mistakes—have a sophisticated understanding of rejection. They say no easily, convincingly, without unnecessary apologies. And when told no themselves, they don’t crawl under the duvet with a copy of The Bell Jar.

  It’s worth spending some time with Trump because losing jobs is important. It’s important because there comes a time, after you’ve been introduced to the broom, and endured the humiliations, and watched enough marginally competent egomaniacs do what they do best, and with any luck, watched enough talented people do what they do best, and you’ve stayed way too long at the Christmas party two years in a row, when you look around and realize that you’ve nothing left to learn in your current position. You need to be promoted or exit the building.

  Learning how to lose a job is also important because job security is a relic of the past, and yet many people fear being without a salaried position for any length of time. (“Don’t
ever quit until you’ve got something else lined up,” they’ll tell you.) In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests walking out can be a wise move, not least because there’s a(nother) law of diminishing returns at work: the longer you stay put at a job that doesn’t satisfy, the less likely it is to evolve into something satisfying—either for you or your employer. I’ve seen employees lauded for their loyalty, but I’ve seen an equal number—if not more—tacitly deemed dead wood.

  My friend Sam has a four-year rule: every four years he must jump ship. For me, the decisive moment came when I was waiting in line to pay for my breakfast, to-go, at a deli on Twenty-eighth Street, just around the corner from my office. Nice, well-lit place, friendly staff, fresh bagels; and as I stared distractedly at the counter lady, all I could think was, “No more Bagel ’N Schmear. I don’t want this in my life anymore. That’s it. I’m done here.” Smart people, I now realize, start laying the groundwork for this moment long in advance. They slowly, subtly start firing themselves. It’s a process that means paving the way for their replacement, not doing their job, and judicious deployment of no. Before going any further, I should add: This is a good time.

  Firing people is fun, or at least beneficial—that was the wisdom percolating when Trump was just a puppy on the real estate development scene in the late 1970s and early ’80s. In Secrets of a Corporate Headhunter; John Wareham suggested that humans tended to make heroes out of ruthless people because at the end of the day, in our unguarded private selves, we all “enjoy the smell of blood on the floor.” He told company executives that while they shouldn’t act capriciously, or start firing people willy-nilly, they nevertheless shouldn’t be afraid to use rejection to fluff up a bigger cloud of mystique around themselves. “The capacity to take ruthless action is admired because most people have no such ability,” he wrote. “Ruthlessness appeals to the darker side of our nature. We feel that we should not admire it, but secretly we do——Firing doesn’t damage an enterprise at all: it is good for morale, inspiring of loyalty and awe, and exciting to everyone—not least, the person fired.”

  It was a sentiment you might not expect to last beyond the American Psycho cultural moment, but it proved to have legs. The forced ranking system that many Fortune 500 companies championed meant that every year the bottom 10 percent of all employees were systematically cycled out. The standards for judging performance were called “the 4 E’s”: “high Energy level, the ability to Energize others around common goals, the Edge to make tough yes/no decisions, and the ability to consistently Execute and deliver on promises.” It was gooey busi-nessese for what became a galvanizing policy. “That was very controversial,” Jack Welch admitted to Fortune in 2006. “Weed out the weakest. It’s been portrayed as a cruel system. It isn’t. The cruel system is the one that doesn’t tell anybody where they stand.” In 2001’s Good to Great, the author and strategy consultant Jim Collins made the distinction between ruthless and rigorous. When firings couldn’t be avoided, he said, to delay them any longer than strictly necessary was far from compassionate. “To let people languish in uncertainty for months or years, stealing precious time in their lives that they could use to move on to something else, when in the end they aren’t going to make it anyway—that would be ruthless.” But to deal with those people “right up front” and allow them to start making other plans, that was rigorous, and it was the hallmark of a healthy company.

  By the time The Apprentice rolled around, American workers had become surprisingly comfortable with layoffs en masse. (Who Moved My Cheese? was basically written to talk people down from the ledge after being downsized.) Here was the chance to see firing on a more intimate scale. There was technically no job for the Apprentice candidates to be fired from—as was repeated many times, it was just a thirteen-week-long job interview. But the phrase picked up momentum every time Trump said it. In episode two: “This is a tough one—you’re fired.” Episode three: “It’s over, don’t you think it’s over?” Episode five, Trump adds that it’s too late for the firee to appeal. Episode six: “I didn’t like what she was doing, and it was repulsive to me. But worse, was the way you took it… And I have to say, you’re fired.” Trump claims that within weeks strangers started yelling, “You’re fired!” after him as he walked down Fifth Avenue. He’d hear it out of the mouths of children, from tourists at Trump Tower, and from the African street vendors that sell knockoff Gucci handbags on midtown Manhattan sidewalks. Some commentators mused that it was odd that displaying such cutthroat behavior seemed to make Trump more, not less, approachable.

  What Trump recognized, though, is that being agreeable doesn’t necessarily make a person more likable. There are a number of obstacles getting in the way of employees saying no and it’s worth dispensing with them right away. Many good employees don’t actually believe that you can say no to anything a colleague or boss asks you to do without said colleague or boss automatically resenting you. It also means changing established patterns, because when you’re trying to gain recognition in the beginning, saying no is completely counterproductive. You can’t prove you’re capable of doing something by not doing it. Saying no is also an uncomfortable stretch for all former good students in the office—it feels like defying the teacher, or not turning in your homework. For still others, saying no arouses vague dread that it amounts to tempting fate—“what if I say no, and no one else asks me to the prom ever again?” is the unspoken fear. For most people I talked to, the reluctance to say no came down to not wanting to be seen as not nice. “I have trouble with saying no,” admitted Cynthia. “And it’s not even that I have an articulate position on the subject. I suppose I like being helpful. And I suppose I’d prefer if everyone acted more like me, at least in this regard.”

  Here’s where saying yes all the time turns from sweetness and light into something else. Every office has one person who if you just say to him, “Hey, can you help me with this?” will drop whatever he’s doing and give you his time—a can’t-say-no person. Send him an e-mail asking for a quick favor, or even a complicated one, and you’ll get an answer within the hour. And so with a steady trickle of requests he soon gets overwhelmed—and sometimes, ends up doing his colleagues’ work for them. Looking back on her time as an editorial assistant, Cynthia recalled being at the office past 9:00 p.m., working on an editing job that a senior colleague had asked her to tackle. He had his own assistant, but for whatever reason—Cynthia wasn’t sure, and never asked—the assistant wasn’t tackling this assignment for him.* Cynthia reasoned that her pitching in would be rewarded. It wasn’t. (“Instead, it became more like, ‘Oh, Cynthia will do it,’ whenever something onerous came up.”) Before long, an office’s most accommodating types get the sense that not only have they lost control of their day, but they’ve lost some of their colleagues’ respect as well.

  Trump has left a considerable paper trail documenting the many ways he keeps his days to himself. He incorporates daily diaries into his books (a typical entry: “4:00 p.m. I call back Judith Krantz”), and stresses how much he hates it when minutes get frittered away. This means no computer on his desk. No e-mail (“E-mail is for wimps”). No intercom (extraneous technology and button-pushing—he hollers instead). He does not drink alcohol, and never has. He skips parties (“I rarely go out, because mostly, it’s a waste of time”). When Trump recognized he was sufficiently established that people would come to see him, he began saying no to leaving the office. All his meetings now take place at Trump Tower.

  A lot of people see this and think, well, OK, that’s fine, but still can’t do it. Because they’re perfectionists. Perfectionism helps immensely at the outset of a job (“She’s marvelous. She

  This is one of those times when asking a question might have come in handy.

  catches all my typos”) and then starts to get in the way. (“She’s great with the details,” any superior reluctant to promote you can then say. “But, you know, I’m not sure she gets the big picture.”) Perfectionism becomes corrosive when it
means you don’t budge from your seat until you get everything just so. When you’d rather contribute zilch than create a product that’s not flawless from every angle. Or when it means you won’t delegate because you suspect no one else can do it as well as you. In the 1972 Instant Secretary’s Handbook, a sensible woman named Martha Luck pointed out that acting this way—she called it wanting to be indispensable—was maybe just a neurotic tic. She was referring specifically to how some secretaries got a private thrill out of not sharing information, like where certain files were stored, so that things wouldn’t go smoothly on their days off. The neurotic secretaries reasoned that this would impress upon people how necessary they were to the vital functions of the office. It was a way of securing their jobs, and it followed a sound logic: If they couldn’t be replaced, they wouldn’t be let go. But they failed to consider that if they couldn’t be replaced, they wouldn’t necessarily get promoted either.

  Even those who’d mastered the broom, Andrew Carnegie said in his 1885 janitor speech, needed to get a little uppity at some point. “Faithful and conscientious discharge of duties assigned you is all very well,” he said, “but the verdict in such cases generally is that you perform your present duties so well, that you would better continue performing them. Now, this will not do.”