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

by Megan Hustad

  This rattled around in my head for two reasons. First, Ereka evidently thought she could readily define the situation for Bill, a reasonable adult capable of drawing his own conclusions. Second, she was doing exactly what you need to do at the very beginning of entry-level employment: scrambling really hard to massage reality for people, to steer them toward a durable definition of you and what you’re capable of. You spoon-feed your story to whoever will bite. And then, very gradually and then all of a sudden—or so it seems—you have a track record, and your record begins to speak for you. You’re ready for the next thing once you’re ready to stop spoon-feeding. More important, you’re ready for the next thing once you stop wanting to manage people’s reactions to you. It’s a perfect 180-degree turnaround, but I’ve never encountered an admirable, honest, principled, ethical, ambitious, dare I say successful person who didn’t go through it. Such people are less interested in what you think of them because they’re more interested in their work—and in you, and how you’re doing, and if maybe there’s something they can do to help you out. The last thing they want to do is waste anyone’s time.

  Jessie Connors, who was eliminated in episode six, had a surprising take on her last moments on the show, one that suggested she’d picked up a few things during her short stint in Trump Tower. Her words are goofy, they’re sweet, but they also demonstrate a good grasp of getting in, getting out, and closing with a rueful snap. Here’s what she said from the back of the booted-off taxi: “I think that this life… life, and the universe, revolves around rules. There’s just rules to the universe, and it all comes back to people. It all… it all comes back. So I’m not worried. I’m happy.”

  That’s it. She was done. On to the next thing.

  Epilogue

  * * *

  THE BEST ARGUMENT for reading one hundred-plus years of success literature is that it helps you become re-enchanted with work. It’s the best antidote I’ve found to the cynicism that infects you before you even walk in the door. And it’s so effective because, as with any lasting piece of literature, it pulls and pushes you to a vision of your day as part of a grander story. For me, that re-enchantment began with Rivington Street.

  Throughout researching and writing this book, I lived in a small apartment on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Once the most densely populated area on record anywhere, the Lower East Side is a neighborhood steeped in lore. It even makes an appearance in one of the novels that helped cement the popular image of the venal, backstabbing striver. I could have written an entire chapter on What Makes Sammy Run?, but here’s all you need to know: The Sammy Glick of the title started his climb as a scrappy, know-nothing copy boy at a New York daily paper. In a few short, action-packed years he’s head of a major Hollywood studio, eating rare steaks, and about to walk down the aisle with a rich, beautiful redhead. To get to this place he’s cheated, scammed, lied, and basically displayed no scruples, loyalty, or true compassion whatsoever. The question—what makes Sammy run? why does he chase success at all costs?—is one that haunts the book’s narrator, a one-time coworker. So he goes snooping around in some old HR files and discovers the answer: Rivington Street. Rivington Street is what made Sammy run. He grew up in such noisy squalor, assaulted on all sides by poverty and anger and rotting-fish smells, that of course he wanted up and out and far, far away, as fast as his skinny legs could carry him.

  Sammy Glick’s putative address—136 Rivington—is no more. That entire block of tenements was torn down to make way for a terrifically ugly public high school years ago. My building, 210 Rivington, was built in 1900, and for better or worse, still stands proud at six stories and no elevator. The ground-floor facade is covered in a thick, industrial red paint that looks like it was applied by someone with cataracts. The graffiti on the front door almost enhances the place. On floors above and below, families with grown teenagers live in the same cramped layout I share with one roommate. The projects are right across the street. One of the kids who hangs around the building deals pot. He’s an extremely amiable guy. He’s always instructing his friends and customers to get out of the way when their stoop-sitting blocks my path to the front door, which is every day from 5:00 p.m. onwards, May to October. I also happen to know—though how this ever came up in our brief conversations is anyone’s guess—that he coaches a neighborhood girls’ softball team.

  I bring him up to lend this book some street cred. Actually, I bring him up because I like him so much it pisses me off that he’s not more ambitious. Maybe he enjoys being a happy-go-lucky smalltime pot dealer, maybe he likes living with his mom, but it doesn’t strike me as a strategy for the long haul. I want more for him, even if he doesn’t—yet.

  But back inside 210. Once you get inside the front door, the smell—still a big part of Rivington Street life—is always a surprise. Usually it’s some unholy blend of bacon, stale tobacco, and off-brand bleach, though there are subtle, day-to-day variations. The steps to my fourth-floor apartment are often littered with empty Cheetos bags, and once, a small pile of something I was relieved to realize was only rice and black beans. An ever-rotating cast of men bags up our trash and takes it to the curb twice a week. They’re subcontracted on the sly by Juan, our super. When I’m running out the door, and they’re there sorting junk in the entryway, I generally say hello. The most common response is, understandably, a grunt. Sometime last spring, when I was nearing a deadline and more harried than usual, I noticed a new man on the job. He had wire-rimmed glasses. He smiled at me, which was enough encouragement for me to toss off a “Hey, how are ya?” as I started my sprint up the stairs.

  “I am blessed,” he said. His accent suggested Africa, though the Caribbean may be a better guess. The next week, again, he smiled and said, “I am blessed.” Week three he went with: “I am blessed, and so are you.”

  Anyone worried that these were Chicken Soup for the Soul moments for me can go ahead and relax. That a sane adult male would consider himself blessed to be bagging trash for no thanks and five dollars, that’s something I’ll let stand for itself. It’s certainly possible that given where he’s been and what he’s seen, Rivington Street flows with milk and honey.

  But I do think of this man whenever I feel an unseemly amount of self-pity coming on. And here’s why he matters, as a counterpoint to Sammy Glick and everybody else who might tell you that striving to be successful is a fundamentally narrow, selfish undertaking. It’s usually taken for granted that the motivations for doing well are materialistic, ego-driven only: houses, vacations, Vera Wang wedding dresses. But it’s important to remember that there are some people striving for someone else’s sake, and they’re not always who you’d think, either; I’ve a friend who endures a draining job as a corporate lawyer because his elderly parents back home in Bulgaria rely on the checks he sends them each month. (Bulgaria’s state pension system, as you might imagine, is hardly going gangbusters.)

  There are cynics who’d look at the man bagging up garbage in the entryway and see first and last a reminder of the evils of colonialism and institutionalized racism—or if they stand at the opposite side of the political spectrum, an argument for stricter immigration policies. (They’d probably prefer Juan to return to Puerto Rico too.) But the man in the entryway didn’t seem to think along these lines. Should he start thinking of his life in terms of other people’s moral failures? Would it make the garbage smell less? Should he grab a gun and start armed insurrection? It’s always an option. Or does he have a better shot at improving his prospects—and those of his children—if he continues the slow process of swapping a crappy job for a slightly less crappy one? Repeating until he finds satisfaction?

  I know where the cynicism comes from, though. A couple of years ago there was a Citibank ad campaign that urged people to “Live Richly.” a sure way to get rich quick, the bus stop signs proclaimed, is to count your blessings. I had a hard time taking this advice from one of the globe’s largest financial institutions and the very bank that
subtracted $1.50 from my balance every time I couldn’t locate one of their ATMs. There’s something to be said for telling Citibank and their ad copywriters where to stick it when they use that word—blessings. But I also think we ought to believe that same sentiment from our man in the entryway. Believe that he truly considered himself blessed, believe that he knew what he was talking about, and that he understood what he was saying when he told me / was blessed.

  You can imagine my editor urging me to get to the point about the office now. Here’s the first one: If you think of your life as happening in separate compartments, as just about every outlet of popular culture tells you to do, then you’re in deeper trouble than this man. Magazine articles and television talking heads are constantly blathering on about different “tracks” to fulfillment and the good life, as if we could disassociate ourselves from crushing failure in one area long enough to fully glory in our success in another. This is a “Well, my job sucks, but I’m really happy with my boyfriend right now” kind of mindset. Whenever I hear it I find myself thinking, “Yeah, OK. Good luck with that.”

  I realize it’s supposed to be psychic balm: If you’re not happy with your job, you can still enjoy your life. (Jobs don’t define you, after all.) The correct response to this, like Citibank exhorting you to “Live Richly,” is located somewhere between befuddlement and angry suspicion. You spend more than half your waking hours under that bank of fluorescent lights. You may even eat two meals a day there. If your work is unsatisfying, you might as well go right ahead and let that dissatisfaction seep down into the cracks.

  And then let it rest there for a while. Then consider how much truth and beauty lies in compartmentalizing. Then ponder this notion: Your day at the office is not just about you and your life. Suppose you’re a white male born on Park Avenue, and your dad got you a job at his old college friend’s firm and you cleared $135,000 plus bonus your first year on the job. By reporting for work every day, you uphold both your family’s class status and the status quo. Or maybe you’re from Oklahoma, and your parents never finished college, or lived anywhere but Tulsa, but you wanted to work at Rolling Stone, and somehow you got the gig. Every time they glimpse the cover on the Barnes and Noble magazine rack, everyone who knows you from high school now has a different experience than before, and sometimes just passing that magazine rack makes them think twice about their own lives, and the choices that they made. Or maybe you grew up in a tenement on the Lower East Side, and you’ve decided to forgo that restaurant job and hang out on the stoop and sell pot instead.

  Everyone’s work choices have consequences far beyond our ordinary imagining. Then, I think it’s necessary to ask yourself: Even if I hate my job, do I consider myself blessed? The wire-rimmed-glasses man stopped coming about a month after he first appeared. I like to think he went on to something better, something that doesn’t involve literal garbage.

  You will never see yourself as blessed, I believe, if you believe your day at the office is your story and your story alone. I tried that; it doesn’t work. But regardless of how many hours you spend at the photocopier, if you see your standing there as part of a grander story, one in which you have historical agency, it’s hard to see it as entirely dull. It’s even possible to see it as an epic adventure—and yes, adventure in a swashbuckling, click your heels, skip-and-a-jump kind of way. So much is predetermined at birth: height, hair color, the arch of our eyebrows, our ability to carry a tune. We’re born at a specific geographic location to specific parents and into a specific position on the socioeconomic ladder. None of the things we’re born to may be to our liking. But we can try to change that last one—to trade up—and that’s a most intriguing opportunity. If you can’t love your work, you can at least fall in love with this process.

  There’s a passage in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise in which the protagonist, a privileged white student thinking deep thoughts at Princeton, is getting some advice. His mentor is trying to rouse the boy—he’s twenty—to reapply himself to his studies. Of course, the Monsignor says, the boy was too smart to adopt whole theories of life, or of success, but, “If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels.” Which is the fundamental message of the best success literature. Namely, that moving up means not believing that where you are is where you belong—while still, paradoxically, being grateful you have any place to stand at all. It means accepting that you have to start somewhere, and then you take steps, you do the next thing, then you keep doing the next thing until one day, you’re in scoring position, and formerly dim ambitions become the stuff of your everyday life.

  This next passage is a good example of the re-enchantment at work. It’s sentimental and slight, and the fact that it speaks to me doesn’t say much for my taste in poetry. It’s Conrad Hilton, again. (Who never intended his great-grandchildren to be heiresses, incidentally. He left his money to religious charities. Long story.) Hilton’s describing his first visit to Manhattan. He’s thirty years old, and he’s with a friend from the army:

  Bill and I took our embarkation leave in New York. This was my second metropolis, but most of the sagebrush had fallen from my ears… and New York didn’t scare me a bit.

  It was bigger. It was taller. The people seemed in a greater hurry and there were more of them. While San Francisco had welcomed me, New York was hidden by an impenetrable armor. “I don’t think an outsider could crack this town,”

  I observed sagely to Bill as we strode along Broadway. “It has been done,” he said, “but would be mighty difficult.”

  This decided, we registered at the Astor and had a beer.

  It has been done, and it’s worth doing again. We need another hotel chain like we need tuberculosis, but still, plenty of buildings that need building and things that need fixing and stories that need recording in this world. So please get back to work.

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION I’ve wondered what I ever did to deserve Amanda Cook. She wields her formidable intellect with such easy grace, and I owe worlds to her optimism and faith in this book. There are also days I wonder if Melissa Flashman could possibly be cloned, and if so, how many of her we could make, and what geopolitical hotspots could use her talents most. And throughout the final days of writing and editing this book, Bryan Curtis lived around the corner from me. A crisper illustration that life is not fair, that sometimes you just get lucky, I have yet to experience.

  I owe enduring gratitude also to Julie Doughty, for introducing me to My Super Sweet 16 and for telling excellent stories with rare humor. To Barbara Richard, for free paperbacks and life-sustaining conversation. Erik Benson, who to this very day, dreams twenty-one-year-old snot-nosed dreams with me. Andrew Bradfield bought dinner and gave lectures on the dialectic. Andrew Semans makes beautiful movies. Alex Tilney provided invaluable encouragement, not to mention a good demonstration of what this “natural elite” business is all about. Thanks also to Paul Craig, for his experiments in socialism. And to Jenny Bent, for greater insight into what it’s like to manage young minds.

  I have learned a tremendous amount from working with former colleagues Isabelle Bleecker, Stephen Bottum, Jason Brantley, Nicole Caputo, Chris Charlotten, William Frucht, Marty Gosser, Bette Graber, Chris Greenberg, Amber Hoover, Stephen McNabb, John

  Sherer, John Siciliano, David Steinberger, Diana Tesdale, Jennifer Thompson, and David Tripp. Ellen Garrison, Adam Pringle, and David Shoemaker were fantastic colleagues and remain better friends. As for former bosses, I am forever indebted to John Deen, who gave me my first job in New York. To Tina Pohlman and Edward Kasten-meier, who gave me my first job in publishing. Dawn Davis and Jenny Minton showed me how things get done. And Elizabeth Maguire pushed tremendous opportunities my way.

  Deep gratitude also to friends, interviewees, fellow travelers, and all combinations thereof: Lara Lea Allen, Kevin Arnovitz, Timothy Aubry, Holly Bemiss, Rebecca Berlant, Raoul Bhavnani, Tom Bissell,
Meredith Blum, Alicia Butler, Liz Cappelluti, Britt Carlson, Luke Dawson, Greg Dinkin, Ben Ehrenreich, Sarah Fan, Dan Firger, Gary Ford, Kristin Green, Carrie Hammer, Richard L. Harris, Vanessa Hartmann, Will Heinrich, Holly Henderson-Root, Evan Hughes, Andrew Hultkrans, Mikhail Iliev, David Johnson, Maris Kreizman, Jaime Leifer, Alexis Logsdon, Christian Lorentzen, Megan Lynch, Ben Lytal, Lorna Macfarlane, Dinaw Mengestu, Peter Neufeld, Benjamin Nugent, Heather Olander, Jamie Pallot, David Patterson, Amber Qureshi, Adrian Rodriguez, Thomas Scott, Ben Sigelman, Sam Stark, Alex Van Buren, Caspar van Vark, Dean Wareham, Patrick Whalen, Matthew Wilkin, Bunny Wong, and Aaron Zagha. If any portions of this book are remotely amusing, these people are the ones to thank.

  Thanks also to Will Vincent, Lisa Glover (for wonderfully enthusiastic production editing), Andy Heidel, Sanj Kharbanda, Lori Glazer, Bridget Marmion, and everyone at Houghton Mifflin.

  My parents, Stan and Karen Hustad, possess near inexhaustible reserves of grace and patience, and I’m so grateful for their support. This book would also not have been possible without the New York Public Library. That sounds like a standard-issue acknowledgments line, but it’s accurate. I’m more convinced than ever that public libraries are the lifeblood of a sane, civil society, so all rich, successful people reading this: Please give to your local library. Relatively timely completion of this book was also aided by the New York-based staff of UPS, Friend House Asian Bistro, the music of The Replacements, and all the inspiration provided by the rest of the Johnson-Hustad cabal. What beautiful role models, everywhere I look.