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“It’s crazy at work” has become their normal.
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Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.
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People are working more but getting less done.
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It’s time to stop celebrating crazy at work.
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The modern workplace is sick.
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Anxiety isn’t a prerequisite for progress.
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your company should be your best product.
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Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be this epic tale of cutthroat survival.
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You can play with your kids and still be a successful entrepreneur.
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The business world is suffering from ambition hyperinflation.
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Everyone wants to be a disrupter these days.
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Being comfortable in your zone is essential
Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.
Way too many people simply can’t get work done at work anymore.
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People are working longer and later because they can’t get work done at work anymore!
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That work should “just be about work.” That’s just ignorant. Humans are humans whether they’re at work or at home. Don’t Be the Last to Know When the boss says “My door is always open,” it’s a cop-out, not an invitation.
What the boss most needs to hear is where they and the organization are falling short.
If the boss really wants to know what’s
going on, the answer is embarrassingly obvious: They have to ask!
“What’s something nobody dares to talk about?” or “Are you afraid of anything at work?” or “Is there anything you worked on recently that you wish you could do over?” Or even more specific ones like “What do you think we could have done differently to help Jane succeed?” or “What advice would you give before we start on the big website redesign project?”
The fact is that the higher you go in an organization, the less you’ll know what it’s really like. It might seem perverse, but the CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance.
So the next time you ask an employee to go pick some low-hanging fruit —stop yourself.
it’s still frequently seen as heroic to sacrifice yourself, your health, and even your ability to do your job just to prove your loyalty to THE MISSION. Fuck the mission. No mission (in business, anyway) is worthy of such dire personal straits.
Being short on sleep turns the astute into assholes.
Managers need double the empathy, not half a ration.
Better yet, just skip out on cheating sleep. Get a good eight hours every night, even when you’re first getting started.
In the long run, work is not more important than sleep.
We ask reasonable people to make reasonable choices, and the company will be reasonable right back. That’s balance.
The idea here is that by focusing on the person and their work, we can avoid hiring an imaginary person.
It’s common in the software industry to blame the users. It’s the user’s fault. They don’t know how to use it. They’re using it wrong. They need to do this or do that. But the reality is that specific designs encourage specific behaviors. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design.
As we progress, we separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves and toss out the nonessentials.
First it starts as an outlier. Some behavior you don’t love, but tolerate. Then someone else follows suit, but either you miss it or you let it slide. Then people pile on—repeating what they’ve seen because no one stepped in to course correct.
If you don’t want gnarly roots in your culture, you have to mind the seeds.
