Get Ahead!

Many industries, many companies, are geared to one-upmanship, and the workforce is indoctrinated in to the belief that this is the only way to get ahead.

"Hard work is rewarded!" you will hear in corporate offices across the land.

"Our office is a meritocracy!" you will be told.

It’s a trap!

I have had those same lies told to me. Stop believing them!

Any industry you want to join, any job you care to mention, putting in more hours than the other guy does not make you get ahead, it just makes someone else rich at your expense.

Any person in business and being smart about it does not hire for the number of hours someone can put in at the office. If they want someone to put in 100 hours a week at the office, might as well just hire a couple of kids right out of McDonald’s, paying them hourly until they fall over from exhaustion.

That parochial, 18th century mindset of labour is fine for menial production line jobs that do not require any smarts. But if you are an educated person, if you are employed for your knowledge and how to apply it, you get paid for not having to put in 60, 70 or 80 hours a week. You get paid for doing in 1 hour what someone else could never achieve in 100 hours.

To get ahead and be more productive than other people, you have to focus on results, not the amount of time it took. You should not care if a particular project consumed a week or a year of time, the only question you should concern yourself with is, "Did you finish?"

Putting in hundreds of hours but failing miserably, you get an A for effort, and a D- for achievement.

Next!

I know, it’s harsh. A tough pill to swallow.

Focus on your achievements, talk about them when someone brings up the number of hours you or they work, redirect their attention to results rather than effort.

Don’t rise to the bait when people ask "what time did you leave the office last night?" Any time that someone asks that, your answer should always be "When I was done."