Sources: The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead (YouTube)

Intended audience: People in their 20s and 30s who are ambitious.

On the Presentation of Self in the Workplace

Many of the pieces of advice are good; there are a few about appearances that I do find a little too curmudgeon-like.

  • Don’t suck up
    • If you are in politics, that’s part of the game. But in general, this is a bad idea.
    • Good people will detect sucking up, and they will downgrade you.
    • It’s also a terrible way to spend your life. Your vocational life is one of the most important parts of your life. Don’t pretend.
  • Don’t use first names with people considerably older than you until asked, and sometimes not even then
    • Murray’s own line: “When strangers call me by my first name, I sometimes ask them to refresh my memory, for they, I suggest, apparently know me better than I know them.”
  • Excise the word “like” from your spoken English
    • “A surprising number of senior executives in corporations that make soap or machine tools are picky about good English,” he writes.
  • Stop “reaching out” and “sharing,” and other prohibitions
  • On the proper use of strong language
    • He supplies a list of commonly confused word pairs, getting which wrong can count against you among those who know better: disinterested/uninterested, envious/jealous, nauseous/nauseated.
  • On piercings, tattoos, and hair of a color not known to nature
  • Negotiating the minefield of contemporary office dress
  • Office emails are not texts to friends
  • What to do if you have a bad boss
  • The un-entitled shall inherit the earth
  • Manners at the office and in general
  • Standing out isn’t as hard as you think
    • As a young person, you probably think that you need a break in order to really stand out. From the perspective of someone at the top, it looks completely different.
    • What they yearn for: someone who comes to work every day on time, treats coworkers well, stays positive, is reliable. If work is not done by 5:00, you will finish the job; you don’t brag about it — not a lot of people are doing it.

Thinking and Writing Well

Side note: I find the materials from the University of North Carolina pretty useful.

  • Putting together your basic writing toolkit
  • A bare-bones usage primer
  • Writing when you already know what you want to say
  • Writing when you don’t know what you want to say
  • Don’t wait for the muse
  • Learn to love rigor

Formation of Who You Are

I really love this section, and it reminds me of Josh Reeves’ Stanford ETL talk (getting internships and exploring), the book Grit (developing resilience), and the importance of embracing serendipity from Ben Casnocha.

  • Leave home
    • Jump out of the nest, and learn the real world.
    • You need to get used to a standard of living below the one you had at your parents’ house.
  • Recalibrate your perspective on time
    • “Friends are going to law school, and they will be on partner track,” and that’s not a very impressive argument. Maybe by staying out, you will discover that you don’t like law, and that’s not a waste of time for defining your vocation.
  • Get real jobs
    • If you never got a real job — flipping burgers, bussing tables — you have never been in a supervisor-subordinate relationship.
    • If you never have that experience, and you are unhappy with your boss, you need to think about whether you are actually a victim or self-absorbed and naive.
  • Confront your inner hothouse flower
    • In life, you will have to deal with rough situations. In those cases, you will need resilience. You need to be able to bounce back, and you want to train yourself to learn those muscles.
    • You have to put yourself in situations where you feel way out of your comfort zone. He recommended two approaches: the first is the military. The second is to buy a one-way ticket to some alien place, find a job, and live there for 3 years — long enough that you are no longer a stranger.
  • Think about what kinds of itches need scratching
  • Being judgmental is good, and you don’t have a choice anyway
    • In an age that eschews the word “judgmental,” he insists that a good life, indeed any sort of human life, is impossible without judgments, regular and often severe. Without judging, how can one determine what is “vulgar, unseemly, and dishonorable,” words he is keen to see gain greater currency than they now have? As requisites for the good life, he brings in the cardinal virtues: courage, justice, temperance and prudence.
  • Come to grips with the distinction between “can do” and “may do”
  • Come to grips with the difference between being nice and being good
    • Being nice is just a momentary act of kindness. Aristotle emphasizes phronesis — being able to look ahead at the long-term consequences of decisions. He argues that you can’t be good unless you have considered the long-term consequences.
  • Don’t ruin your love affair with yourself

The Pursuit of Happiness

There are essentially four domains within which humans achieve deep and lasting justified satisfaction with life as a whole, which is a good Aristotelian definition of happiness: Family, Faith, Community, and Vocation. You don’t have to be happy with all four of them, but you should be happy with at least three.

  • Show up
  • Take the clichés about fame and fortune seriously
    • At some point, you have to remember that fame and fortune are very trivial in a happy life. This is very hard to convince young and smart ambitious people of.
    • All fame and fortune do is relieve your ambition anxiety.
  • Take religion seriously, especially if you’ve been socialized not to
    • In the past 50 or 60 years, bright kids have consistently been educated to be atheists. Young people don’t even think about it. You can be an atheist; don’t be an unreflective atheist.
    • Religion requires an intellectual world. The more you interact with religious people, the less you can conclude that there’s nothing there — there’s a sense of disquieting confidence. And given that religion is one of the sources of happiness, you should at least try this.
    • “There are ways of knowing that transcend intellectual understanding. They exhibit in their own personae a kind of wisdom that goes beyond just having intelligence and good judgment.”
  • Take the clichés about marriage seriously
    • Find your soulmate. The definition of soulmate is someone who you really really like, but also have a strong attraction to.
  • Be open to a startup marriage instead of a merger marriage
    • There are three important things that matter: punctuality, thriftiness, orderliness. The important thing is that the two of you are on the same side of the spectrums, not exactly the same.
  • Watch Groundhog Day repeatedly
    • Remember:
      • Vocation: find something you love to do and do it very well
      • Family: find your soulmate
    • If you do those two things, everything else is a rounding error. Having a satisfying life is not the glitz, not the glamour, but the participation in the world and the intimate relationships you have.