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

  The book you hold in your hands aims to be a corrective to this strange, counterproductive loop of naivete and cynicism. It’s a crash course in success literature designed to help the tenderhearted and creative people I like so much to avoid these existential potholes. While it’s fair to say I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People so you don’t have to, I was also interested in finding a way to reclaim professional climbing for the smart and sensitive. I’d like my friends to stop scowling when they hear “She’s ambitious.” I’d like everyone to be more aware of what was being written back when working for a living was actually a source of genuine inspiration to people.

  To get this started, I’ve taken the most compelling American success books from the last hundred-plus years—some of them still selling by the truckload and some left undisturbed and unopened for decades—and turned them upside down and shaken out every last bit of wisdom that might be useful to those low on the office totem pole today. This is a short tour of a section of literary history—and what genre of letters is more screamingly American than this one?—but it’s also a critical guide to one’s first few years of salaried labor. For example, Andrew Carnegie had some things to say about those minor housekeeping duties. Before history forgot him completely, author and publisher Orison Swett Marden taught millions in the early decades of the twentieth century how to dodge psychic bullets. Etiquette maven Emily Post was full of interesting notions about the socioeconomic role of curiosity. The banalities of networking are addressed by Napoleon Hill, author of 1937’s Think and Grow Rich. Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 Sex and the Single Girl shows you how to suffer strategically. And even Donald Trump—not as useless as you might have imagined.

  For those still unconvinced this exercise is worthwhile, I’ll play the Paris Hilton card. If you read her great-grandfather Conrad Hilton’s memoir—Be My Guest, it’s called, and he’s the one who built the Hilton hotel chain, from scratch—you find a lot of advice like this: Get up early. Develop intellectual crushes on people who fascinate and inspire you. (He was partial to Helen Keller. No joke.) Understand sacrifice and delayed gratification. (He served in World War I, and in the New Mexico state legislature.) Really understand what makes you tick. (Still young and kicking around in a dust-bowl Texas town, he came across a photograph of New York City’s Waldorf Hotel. He carefully clipped the picture out, slipped it under the glass top of his desk, and told himself that someday, someday…) Flash-forward forty-seven years to Paris’s bestseller, Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose: “Trust me, people act differently toward you when you’ve got jewelry on your head.”

  To those who argue that Paris’s book was never meant to be taken seriously, I’d say, sure, fine, but that’s a lot of trees for a joke that goes on way too long. What I found as I paged through older, mustier books is that after a while, the authors’ enthusiasm for work, for the possibilities it affords, for the mundane and sometimes maddening ways human underlings adapt to their surroundings—and in some cases change them for the better—is completely contagious. And lest anyone think I’m treating the corporate system a little too reverently, I’d argue that dismissing it wholesale doesn’t pay off either. You can learn skills without being co-opted. Even those who seek new and progressive alternatives are better off knowing more about the way things are done and have been done—if only because most of us can’t live our entire lives outside the system. (And even solar-powered NGOs have bosses and protocols.)

  The advice of these Old Masters is surprisingly fresh, and they’re fascinating characters in their own right. I wish I’d heard of some of them much earlier, as it might have saved me some long nights. Success literature is altogether not quite what I expected. The ideal it describes is far from the go-getting, amoral, self-indulgent loudmouth of popular imagination, but instead a thoughtful character, determined to find life as it’s lived endlessly engaging. That still leaves one nagging question, however:

  Can successful habits be successfully learned through books? As central as the self-made, self-schooled man is to the American story, it’s a question that always pops up. I put it to a PR man and political consultant in his early thirties, and his answer did his profession proud: “Well, that’s a question you’re going to have to wrestle with, isn’t it?” He smiled as he said this, naturally. He’d been raised by smart, nurturing parents, had an extended family that stretched from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to Mumbai, went to private schools, and graduated from Princeton. He seemed to doubt that “a certain polish,” as he put it, could be achieved through a stack of advice books. He did not hesitate to say that he’d been born lucky, and that what had been made available to him was not available everywhere. He didn’t specify, but I could guess what he was talking about: suburban Milwaukee, say, or working the grocery checkout line.

  Well, as Dale Carnegie would say, “One way to get air out of a glass is to pour in water.” Worth a shot, right? Cracking open a book is certainly preferable to resigning yourself to subordinate status and hating yourself for it. Some good career ideas and some profoundly stupid ones have been issued over the past hundred-odd years. I hope these pages will help you tell the difference.

  1

  On Being a Poseur

  * * *

  Early Capitalists on Why Writing

  Business Letters Takes Longer

  Than Reading Them Does

  Never write a long letter. A business man has

  not time to read it. —CYRUS WEST FIELD

  ONE OF THE WORST pieces of advice is “Just be yourself.” You hear it a lot. Oh, you’re nervous about your new job? Don’t worry. Just be yourself. It comes from online career sites. (“The best preparation is really to be yourself.”) It comes from well-meaning mothers. (“Just be your own sweet self.”) It is so prevalent you can almost hear it in the breeze. Unfortunate, then, that it’s ill-suited to any number of life situations, but at no time and in no place is it more useless, more beside the point, more potentially destructive than the very moment when you’re starting a new job.

  Why it’s so awful takes some explaining. It certainly seems to be solid, all-American wisdom: Don’t put on some phony act and try to convince people you’re something you’re not. Don’t get yourself all worked up trying to impress, instead just be “natural,” and then you’ll probably be more relaxed, and because you’re relaxed you’ll perform better, and best of all, because you’ve been being yourself the whole time, you’ll never have to explain, later on, why you’re not quite the same person you seemed to be before. It promises this, too: That any red-blooded individual who values forthrightness and honesty—who really knows quality when he or she sees it—will recognize your sincerity and appreciate you all the more for it.

  One of the first clues that being yourself might not be the answer came to me when I started asking people who’d been working full-time for a while to describe what their first post-college jobs were like, and got dead air. Sometimes I got wounded stares, looks of near incomprehension. People squinted, as if trying to glimpse something through a dense, coastal fog. Their mouths opened but nothing came out while they waited for the right words to surface. Finally they would spit out a strangled cross between “Hah!” and “Huh!,” mumble a few words about it being “interesting,” grin, and quickly change the subject. Trying to attach adjectives to these dim memories, one interviewee told me, felt like coming across poetry you wrote at sixteen. How you thought then and how you think now is very, very different. But I soon discovered that if you simply ask people what kinds of tasks they handled at their first jobs, the words came more easily: They made photocopies. They stood next to the photocopier so they’d be ready for action when the 11“ x 14” paper jammed. They pored over Excel spreadsheets until their eyes ached. They answered phones. They forced big smiles while they cried a little on the inside.

  They were not themselves, in other words.

  Part of the problem with being yourself is that you could be
anyone. You could dress badly. You could be a shy day dreamer, or you could be a bubblehead. You might be the only person who thinks your comic stylings rival Will Ferrell’s. You might think your story about that lesbian bar in Amsterdam was a winner but your senior colleagues might not. So I started to wonder if this particular piece of nonwisdom was really as all-American as it sounds. Have we always been sending inexperienced young people into the capitalist lion’s den with the flimsy instructions to just be themselves?

  We haven’t. In the early days of the American office, it turns out, the advice was different. Flip through the first texts written to help the novice through entry-level employment, and you’ll find they were pretty much all agreed on one thing: Act a certain way, and you’d be going places. Behave in other ways, and your corporate overlords would lose interest in you, and very quickly. The steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, for one, was quite clear about what he wanted to see in young recruits, and in a speech called “A Road to Business Success: A Talk to Young Men,” he offered up an interesting warning: Forget yourself, he essentially said, and maybe try being somebody else a few hours a day. Maybe somebody better than you.

  I was familiar with Carnegie’s track record—that he’d started the company that became U.S. Steel, that he’d made millions of dollars on the backs of thousands of coal miners, and that he was a short, pushy firecracker of a man who later felt somehow guilty about his piles of money. But I hadn’t expected to find him articulating a strong case for being, in essence, a total poseur—and for feeling no shame about it either. Looking at the train wrecks narrowly avoided by people feeling a little too at home on the job, I have to say that Carnegie was onto something. Striking a pose may be the best route for anyone hoping to emerge from corporate underlinghood with their dignity —and even, strangely, their sense of self—intact.

  These very early job advice books started appearing in the mid-1800s, and they took a dim view of “you.” Most begin with the basics of public life; they reminded readers of the importance of discipline, self-control, accepting criticism without getting into fistfights, and covering your mouth when you yawned. More than one mentions the need to keep one’s fingers out of one’s ears and nose. Some authors tried to push the young office clerk toward physical robustness as well, like C.B.C. Amicus did in Hints on Life: And How to Rise in Society when he recommended a regimen of swimming and gymnastics.5 The American Chesterfield, or Way to Wealth, Honour, and Distinction… Suited to the Youth of the United States stressed the importance of social graces. Others recommended Sunday school. Horatio Alger’s novels, which appeared with relentless regularity beginning in 1868, made it clear that smoking, petty theft, ripped clothing, and hanging around with juvenile delinquents were not OK by most employers’ standards. As for Carnegie, when he delivered his “Business Success” talk to the graduating class of Pittsburgh’s Curry Commercial College in 1885, he quickly reassured the crowd that he wasn’t going to dwell on moral issues. “You all know that there is no genuine, praiseworthy success in life if you are not honest, truthful, fair-dealing. I assume you are and will remain all these,” he said. And that’s as far as he went in the “be yourself” vein.

  What was really pressing on Carnegie’s mind was the subject of janitors. He thought janitors were a bad idea. The people who should be cleaning up around the office, he felt, were the junior associates. “Many of the leading business men of Pittsburgh had a serious responsibility thrust upon them at the very threshold of their career,” he said. “They were introduced to the broom, and spent the first hours of their business lives sweeping out the office.” It made little sense from a budget perspective—division of labor and janitors being cheaper by the hour and all that—but somehow the sight of company underlings pushing industrial-sized brooms around warmed the cockles of Carnegie’s heart. He wanted everyone to start at the bottom, or as he put it, to “begin at the beginning,” just like he had.

  This willingness to grab a broom, or do any kind of poser grunt work, was necessary because bosses had a jaundiced way of looking at underlings. The view from the boardroom, Carnegie went on to suggest, looked something like this: a teeming pool of talented young people, undifferentiated, difficult to tell apart, and vaguely pathetic. And it was hard, in those early days, to predict who in this pool was destined for bigger and better things. But Carnegie knew, and any boss worth his salt knew, that some of them wouldn’t amount to much. It had nothing to do with how special they were. These young people would do good work, sure, and were probably even overqualified for the mundane entry-level work they were being asked to do. But when the boss took a break from expanding his empire and looked over at them, clustered at the end of the hallway, and imagined a scene twenty years into the future, he saw Bob Cratchits, stooped over their desks at age forty-two and still answering to The Man. Good bosses might like to do right by everyone they employed, but eventually all that humanity started to blur before their eyes and they resigned themselves to leaving some underlings bobbing in the talent pool, undiscovered and unrescued. They could only do so much for so many.

  So if you didn’t want to get tagged as a Bob Cratchit, you had to adopt a certain ready-for-anything posture. You had to ATTRACT ATTENTION on the job. (This portion of the speech transcript is actually set in all caps, as if Carnegie—5’3“ in socks—stood on tiptoe and shouted.) Carnegie’s list of what you could do to ATTRACT ATTENTION is shockingly banal, however. Shipping clerks could double-check invoices for errors. Weighing clerks would make sure the scales were accurate. Messenger boys wouldn’t just fling deliveries through doorways, but wait around to make sure those letters and packages got into the right hands. The boss didn’t just want you to be willing to do menial dirty stuff, he wanted you to be meticulous, thorough, and attentive to small responsibilities.

  This is a modest list of character traits—by no means an exhaustive catalog of any bright young thing’s capabilities. But it was the foundation of the office pose, and basically all that the boss cared to know at this point. So if you were tempted to show off the many intricacies of your personality in full flower, the advice was simple: Don’t. Other business philosophers agreed. “No doubt there are a few men who can look beyond the husk or shell of a human being—his angularities, awkwardness, or eccentricity—to the hidden qualities within; who can discern the diamond, however encrusted,” wrote William Mathews in his 1874 Getting On in the World. “But the majority are neither so sharp-eyed nor so tolerant.”

  To be yourself, in other words, was to gamble on your boss being an unusually tolerant, perceptive soul. Being yourself was essentially leaving it up to your boss to decide for himself which parts of your personality were the most reliable indicators of your potential. And that, not to put too fine a point on it, was ceding a lot more power to the boss than was wise.

  Aleksey Vayner, a Yale undergrad, achieved brief notoriety in 2006 for precisely this misplaced faith in a future employer’s perceptive abilities. He made a resume video that was leaked through e-mail onto the Internet after he’d submitted it to UBS, a major international bank, in hopes of landing a job. New York newspaper the Sun summed up the video this way: “Mr. Vayner identifies himself on his resume as a multi-sport professional athlete, the CEO of two companies, and an investment adviser. The video depicts him lifting a 495-pound weight, serving a tennis ball at 140 miles an hour, and ballroom dancing with a scantily clad female. Finally, Mr. Vayner emerges enrobed in a white karate suit and breaks six bricks in one fell swoop. Between athletic bits, Mr. Vayner takes the opportunity to opine on success.

  After being described in the opening lines of the video as ‘a model of personal success and development to everybody,’ Mr. Vayner says, ‘Failure cannot be considered an option.’ ”

  It ended badly; Vayner didn’t get the job, and started looking into potential legal action against UBS (as the source of the leak) instead. Right, you think—obviously too much information, no sane person would mount such a production. But I’v
e heard many examples of smaller moments that had careercrippling effects. There’s the assistant who always wanted to discuss the novels he’d read in college—the ones that moved him profoundly sophomore year. The new kid who was overheard laughing about Jell-O shots four times in one week. Or the go-getter who felt his intelligence was being insulted by all that photocopying he had to do, “so he’d come by, lean against the doorframe, take a seat, and delve into his unified theory of Grand Theft Auto while I’m sitting there trying to get some work done,” as one former colleague complained. Or the Wellesley grad so worried that her pitch-perfect resume made her seem a little too color-within-the-lines that she let it slip to her new boss that she’s constantly wearing clothes with the tags on and then returning them. Or the young woman who gave “[email protected]” as her home e-mail address. Or the guy who asked, six months into the job, when he was going to get promoted, because, as he told his boss, he thought things had been going pretty well.

  Even more common, though, is being what early success books plainly called “dull.” I was a dull underling. I was at times so soft-spoken that a person sitting five feet away might not realize I’d just “contributed” to the conversation. I didn’t want to be too aggressive, because I thought that looked rather tacky. (That’s probably how I would have phrased it, too: “rather tacky.”) It’s not worth dwelling on the particulars of what I thought came across as reserved elegance because it wasn’t registering—at all.

  I barely escaped from being classified as a Bob Cratchit, in other words. I didn’t discover this, however, until after I’d been at this job for a full year. One evening the editor in chief had to fill out some forms for human resources (nothing he’d trouble with normally, but his assistant was out sick), and as everyone else had left for the day, he was forced to come over himself and ask me personally what my last name was. It wasn’t that he couldn’t remember—he had never known. This was in a department of only twelve people. From his office door to my cubicle was only ten steps. So I told him my last name, he thanked me kindly, and that was that.6