On 5. I'd take the higher $ regardless of what other people make. Even if I had the choice of taking a job where I'd make half what the lowest paid person makes in a company where employees are paid $120k on up or where I'd make the average in a company where they make from $40k - $60k. I'd take the $60k knowing I'd be the lowest paid in the company. I don't tie my self worth to how well I do in comparison to other people. I compare what I have now to what I can get tomorrow.
Think this way: Most things in the world are priced by how much somebody is willing to pay for them. So, if you are living someplace with a average salary of $70k and taking in $60K you might be able to buy less than a guy earning $55K where average income is $50K.
> So, if you are living someplace with a average salary of $70k and taking in $60K you might be able to buy less than a guy earning $55K where average income is $50K.
On the other hand, you might have more in the place with higher average income. Remember that buying isn't the only way that you can get things.
Compare NYC with North Dakota. Things cost more in NYC than in ND, which is bad if you're buying, but there is a lot more free stuff in NYC than ND.
Plus, there's more opportunity to move up in NYC than in ND. In some cases, that opportunity is worth something.
I'm actually from ND and live in NYC. I just wanted to point out that ND and NYC are such opposite extremes that this particular thought experiment doesn't work very well. Other qualitative factors are more important than financial considerations.
There are some things that you will nearly always pay the "world price" for, e.g. plane tickets. So tho' in a major metropolitan area food and rent may be proportionally more, those things are proportionally less. It all depends on what kind of thing you're into.
Excellent point. To make it slightly more concrete, I make vastly more now in Las Vegas than I did in North Carolina. Yet, in some ways I am worse off in a material way. I make more, but I pay much more for a smaller house, much more for electricity, and slightly more for food than I did in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Overall, I have less discretionary budget than before.
Of course, this is counterbalanced by having more opportunities in terms of career, education, culture, and entertainment.
That's definitely true (I live in NYC...) but misses the point of the observation. The point is that the same material stuff will make you happier in a context where other people have less.
People want to get ahead so what matters is the % relative to your surroundings. The amount doesn't matter as much as purchasing power. Money is illusory anyway -- just a social contract we agree to as a mechanism of exchange. People want expansion in various ways whether it is more money, more status, more goods, more sex, or even more religiousness. You can't stop that.
As to effectiveness -- that is dependent on your personal goals. Some people are very effective at chilling out and not doing much. Others are very effective at building business, or playing a sport, or programming, or whatever. Dependent on what you want emulate the ones succeeding in that and you will be "effective"
a) I was replying to the parent comment and not the story with comment
b) Some people get more enjoyment being more rich than their immediate community than just being rich. This is true for everything else apart from money. Some people want to have more knowledge than others etc...
> I'd take the higher $ regardless of what other people make.
Yes. I'll go a step further - I try to be the least educated, least skilled, most poorly compensated person in a room as often as possible. Holding to this habit means you keep looking for better and better rooms full of people as you improve. Serve in Heaven instead of Rule in Hell...
"I compare what I have now to what I can get tomorrow."
This is an interesting point. Everyone has their preference point. Some people (like startup founders) can live on ramen income of < $20k/year if there's hope that they'll one day strike it rich. Other more conservative people prefer their steady salary of $80-100k at Corporation XYZ since it offers them a sense of stability. In addition to the class risk/reward paradigm illustrated here, I think this also illustrates how some people place higher value on change (read positive growth) and in turn, discount the value of stability.
0. Lack Of Respect For Time- A person who does not respect time will be limited in what he can accomplish in this world, regardless of talent. Besides your own, if you don't respect other people's time, your integrity depletes by the second until there is none left. Almost everything else is a byproduct of this, positive or negative.
> if you don't respect other people's time, your integrity depletes by the second until there is none left.
It's interesting that you hi-lighted this. I just had an extremely annoying experience the other day with a VP in my company. Long story short, he decided to question what I was spending my time on and why client engagements took more than a 45 minute meeting like he experiences when doing a sales pitch(I perform most of the execution end of business relationships in my company -- things that take dozens of hours).
I decided after a couple meetings of having my time questioned like that that I had lost quite a bit of respect for him and will probably not suffer that kind of thing again without there being serious repercussions inside the company -- like a reorg so that we're no longer in the same management chain.
He absolutely didn't respect the 80 hour weeks I put in to keep the company afloat. Since that's time out of my personal time, and I could be doing something at another company for the 40 I'm supposed to be doing, it's a lack of respect for me.
> I just had an extremely annoying experience the other day with a VP in my company. Long story short, he decided to question what I was spending my time on and why client engagements took more than a 45 minute meeting
Ask him to do a client engagement and let you observe so you can do better in the future.
It's an interesting suggestion. However I perform execution end of deals (system integration, analytical methodology development, etc.) while he handles the paperwork behind the scenes. If he spends 60 minutes in direct contact with a customer it's amazingly long for him. We also do not have interchangeable skill-sets. As much as I'd like to do the "let's change places for a day" exercise, it just isn't plausible.
I believe I respect him when he says part of his job was particularly challenging and time consuming (like getting contracts executed). I don't particularly feel respected when I say something took a lot of time and effort and get asked, "like what?".
He thinks that it is. In telling you that you're taking too long, he's also saying that he has some constructive ideas about how to reduce that time.
He may need some help to "show you how it should be done", but you should insist that he do so because he has pointed out that this is an important issue.
You really don't want to argue about his competence.
Actually, I was thinking about this again today. I'm thinking of giving him some non-technical menial task that sucks up dozens of hours of my time every month and see if he can't get it done in 45 minutes. Not in a snarky way, but in a "you wanted to know what I do, here's a small sample" kind of way.
> Not in a snarky way, but in a "you wanted to know what I do, here's a small sample" kind of way.
I think that that is too abstract and too small and likely to be irrelevant to his concerns. (If he cared about whatever task you're thinking of, he'd have mentioned it.)
He's given you a specific case that he thinks is a big deal. Why won't you address it?
This isn't about you. It's about him.
BTW - If he thinks that something can be done better, it doesn't matter if said thing is technical and he's not. Again, stop questioning his competence.
> I think that that is too abstract and too small and likely to be irrelevant to his concerns. (If he cared about whatever task you're thinking of, he'd have mentioned it.)
I think the problem is that he is simply ignorant of what people actually have to do when creating complex technical things. I think he honestly thinks that he can go do a couple of client meetings, get some paperwork signed for some custom work and there's vending machine in the back that spits out custom software. The thousands of hours of mind numbing things like, looking at trace logs, or defining a controlled vocabulary so that your team and the customer's team can even communicate on the same level, are absolutely not within his sphere of understanding. In those matters he's as incompetent as I am in his arena. The difference is that I know that and don't disparage him when he says things like "executing this NDA really took a huge amount of effort." I have no idea if executing an NDA involves anymore than 5 minutes of actual work and lots of thumb twiddling or if it's an active, engaged process one can spend hundreds of hours on. I know that he thinks that when he does a 30 minute deal closing meeting, that he did all the work to make it happen and should get all the credit. Never mind the last 6 months by our engineering team working nights and weekends to fulfill a custom customer requirement.
> He's given you a specific case that he thinks is a big deal. Why won't you address it?
I'm not quite sure I follow. The way I see it, I have relatively few ways to address it:
1) Tell him to go F off, which I'm not sure does anybody any good.
2) Do the "let's trade jobs for a day" thing. But the only things that he would be able to do, because mine is a job that requires lots of domain knowledge in nearly every task, are the most meanial and time consuming ones. I'm not sure it'll provide the right kind of impression if I give him a task like "here's a list of 20,000 numbers, find all the ones with a non-numeric character in it".
3) Reorg this part of the company so interactions are limited. This might be the only direction that prevents undue internal conflict and keeps us in our respective lanes.
4) Ignore him and hope he learns to respect other people's work. In my experience this doesn't happen since this kind of behavior is largely ego driven.
5) Openly confront him (different from #1). This is the direction I'm presently going, but it's annoying and time consuming. I don't particularly feel the need to justify or explain the details of my job to him (especially when he won't understand the details anyway), senior mgmt already holds my work in high regard and that's who I have to answer to ultimately. The other departments in the company also work well with me and respect me. However, I'm rapidly moving towards #1 or #6.
6) Quit. But as a senior manager in my company, and the only person with domain experience with our customer base plus the technical training to be able to handle several different roles at once, I know that it would sink the company (which as a shareholder does me no personal good, and would put a number of people out of work who I'm responsible for). I think that would be irresponsible unless I knew there was a reasonable replacement to fill in for me.
> This isn't about you. It's about him.
It sure is, a small company like ours doesn't have the time or resources to ego stroke an employee.
> BTW - If he thinks that something can be done better, it doesn't matter if said thing is technical and he's not. Again, stop questioning his competence.
I'm not sure I follow. People are competent in their own areas and incompetent outside of that. I think he's quite competent in his as far as I can tell. He's not competent in mine. He's not offering suggestions for improvement -- which I'm always open to, from anybody regardless of field. He's openly questioning why a complex 6 week project he handled the contracting for takes 6 weeks of active, hands-on work, and not 45 minutes, a hand shake and a signature so I can then move on to help him with another sales pitch. It's stupid and unreasonable. For goodness sakes, he's been with the company for a few years now and to my knowledge has never even installed the software!
I don't mean to be that guy who interjects quotations into HN discussions with plenty enough original insight, but Malcolm X makes a similar observation in his autobiography:
"I have less patience with someone who doesn't wear a watch than with anyone else, for this type is not time-conscious. In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure."
I'm hoping he's trying to be facetious in this article because the only "ineffective habit" that I see in this article is #1. And, I could argue that is not always a bad thing because of the quality-of-life benefits you get from seeing the 'big game' or spending time with your friends.
#2 and #6 are pretty much saying the same thing. Both speak to how people tend to be over-optimistic with work they're planning to take-on and are unable to take into account of the possible delays to doing that work. Also with #2, It's not clear if he's saying that planning itself is a ineffective habit or if its just the inability to take into account future events.
I'd lump #3 and #4 together as both of these are symptoms of the same problem as well, seeking constant distraction.
#5 is poorly described as it does not describe a habit. He should call this the "keeping up with the Jones's." Either way, I don't really agree that this make people ineffective. Misguided? Maybe.
Sounds more like "7 habits of highly bored people" :) But in addition to word-playing with the title, why don't I also say something useful for a change.
Why is everyone so concerned with efficiency? One might say "that machine is efficient" or "this machine is not efficient". Why is that? Well, machines are created and owned by humans for a specific purpose -- a coffee-maker makes coffee; a CPU processes logical operations; a carriage horse drags around a cart full of spoiled rich humans :)
We can talk about efficiency of things we own but we can no longer own humans. In a civil society, humans are owners of services that they exchange under conditions of a free and fair market.
There, I said it. Now stop talking about efficiency of humans. Start creating efficient things that efficiently do all the things we hate so we can all be a bunch of lazy fucks :)
#1 should not be procrastination. It should be "Bad Prioritization" instead. This is because, procrastination in itself is not a bad thing; not only that, it's necessary and impossible to get around. We all procrastinate, because at any given moment we have a ton of tasks that we want/need to do and that we could do, but since we can't do them all at once, we have to prioritize. If we are bad at that, then we could become ineffective.
I've been trying something new for the past couple of weeks that seems to be working pretty well: throughout the day, I disable my internet connection by hitting the wifi button on my laptop.
Anything that causes you to use time, energy or money less efficiently generally contributes to one being less effective, successful or productive. I've built this element into a few of my game designs, where, for example, the player can acquire assets or skills which reduce the future time/energy/money cost of doing something worthwhile or necessary. So it's like an investment where the payoff is an accelerating factor on everything else the player wants to do.
