No matter how much you earn you are still a slave.

A slave with many masters.

Enslaved by free stuff.

And sold to a myriad of buyers.

Image credit: Paul Downey

Way back, when I was a recruiter, I coined a term for an attitude that impacted people from senior ranks down through support staff and production workers.

I called it ego-merge and it happened when people so entwined their identity with their company’s that they took personal responsibility for its successes and failures.

Last week we looked at companies with perks designed to keep people on site, so that the company becomes their life.

Both situations are highly addictive.

Even companies with benefits designed to foster better work-life integration/balance can be considered addictive, since they are difficult to leave.

Most addictive of all are great managers, even when special perks and over-the-top benefits are missing.

Sadly, abusive companies/managers are also addictive, just as abusive homes/partners/relatives are.

So what do you do if both good and bad can be addictive?

Know yourself.

Know what’s really important to you, not to your friends or what looks cool on social media.

Make a list.

Know what holds your company has on you.

Make a list.

Compare the lists.

Revisit each list at least once a year, more often if something major happens in your life or company.

Edit them based on who you/company are, not who you/company were.

Image credit: David Prasad

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

From the start of my career, especially as a headhunter, AKA, recruiter, I have  done my best to drum the following mantra into the heads of both hiring managers and candidates.

Life is LARGE; career is but a small part of the whole.  A major problem is created when the adjectives (and, therefore, the attitudes) are reversed.

Most agreed, but that was then…

These days, too many companies intentionally design their perks and campus to encourage people to stay — like Facebook.

My greeter walked me to one of the complex’s main arteries from Hacker Way toward Main Street. “The campus was designed to be a cross between Disneyland and downtown Palo Alto.”

If everything is at work why leave?

Maybe to have a life?

Of course, before you can leave you need to get your work done and it’s hard to be productive with all the distractions.

“It’s no wonder people are working longer, earlier, later, on weekends, and whenever they have a spare moment,” Jason Fried writes in the new book It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work, which hits the shelves in the US today (Oct. 2). “People can’t get work done at work anymore.”

Forbes recently published a Quora response to the question What People Won’t Tell You About Working At A Top Tech Company that presents both the pros and cons of working  for a company with the main goal of arranging its perks and compensation so people won’t leave.

Not just won’t leave, but can’t leave.

It’s not just the perks, but the compensation. Even those willing to take a reduced package will find other companies hesitant to hire them. And when the downturn comes, as it always does, they will be in an even worse position.

A couple of weeks ago Ryan accepted a new position and I wrote his new company, Spatial Networks, up as a role model.

It’s proof companies don’t have to turn themselves into a field of poppies to attract and retain great talent. We’ll look at more examples next week.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I wrote a piece last week on the idea of embracing the rush of our lives and how it’s a human condition. While to some degree I do think it’s a sign of our times and not altogether negative, I do see the impact it has made.

In school I read about the effects of coffee on the industrial revolution. The idea was that the widespread use of the stimulant allowed shift workers to operate all hours of the day and night.

Of course, we, in the modern day, have benefited on the backs of their labor; however, we have also learned from the negative aspects of that society. At least in this country, we no longer employ children, we have tougher safety laws, and regulation.

Back to my point of embracing rushing, I was wrong to take it on from a single standpoint. Through this past week I have searched out resources to learn more about the effects of our gadget driven world and what it has gotten us.

I titled this post “Start with why” and it’s a rip off from a great book of the same name by Simon Sinek.

That book focuses on sales and challenges sales people to start by asking why someone would want to buy their product/service and then shape a solution around that.

However, he also speaks about the current state of our society and it’s character.

If we could sum up the modern First World in one word it would be addiction and not just to drugs.

Many in my generation are addicted to our phones, our streaming services and our reliance on same day delivery. We can order anything, watch any show and contact any person in the world. In an odd twist of fate I can get live tweets from our current president and tweet him back.

As a current digital addict I tend to look at others and see it as normal.

When I am at the park I tend to not use my phone and see that others are. As a result I figure I must be balanced.

However, first thing in the morning I check my phone and look at my notifications. If you were to follow me on a social network you would see that I don’t post a ton. In reality I tend to not think I have much to say that is important for the world to know and I limit my posts for food recommendations while in new cities.

However, I check all the networks multiple times a day. I get updated on the latest coffee from the person I had 10th grade English with and also get to see the latest from our President.

It’s an odd time to be alive.

Why do we do this?

One reason is dopamine. It is the same drug that opiates release and it’s triggered naturally when we see activities or people responding to our posts. That’s why we look to see the comments, the likes and the re-shares.

It’s also why we tend to get worse over time with our usage. We need more and more dopamine to feel good.

I wrote all of this to say one thing.

Maybe we shouldn’t always embrace the rushing and start with the why.

Why are we doing this; who do we care about; why are we not happy.

Image credit: Ksayer1

Why in the world do so many people choose to run at 60% efficiency?

“Not me,” I hear you saying.

Yes, you.

It’s the price you pay for enabling ‘notifications’ on your phone.

Your phone sitting there, constantly lighting up throughout the day creates this pattern in the brain scientists call “switch cost.”

It essentially means when there is an interruption, such as a notification, we switch our attention away from the task, then have to return afterwards — which is costly in terms of brain power, as well as time.

There are a finite number of hours in the day and we plan in an effort to spend them wisely, so it makes sense that we should plan how to spend our daily allotment of brain power/energy just as wisely.

Considering the toll, notifications doesn’t seem to fall in the wise column.

“We think it interrupts our efficiency with our brains, by about 40%,” Scott Bea, a psychologist at Cleveland Clinic told CBS. “Our nose is always getting off the grindstone, then we have to reorient ourselves.”

Beyond reducing effectiveness, notifications near constant interruptions directly effects our brains.

According to a study, presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America last November, the interruptions from alerts to your smartphone could be altering your brain chemistry. (…) Constantly waiting for the next notification can put you on edge, meaning when it comes, your body releases cortisol, causing you heart rate to jump.

Even if you scoff at the addictive and brain-altering effects of notifications, do you really want to stake your career progression/success on functioning at 60% efficiency?

After all, it is your choice.

Check out some of the other posts/links about the myth of multitasking and its negative effects.

Image credit: Erik Pitti

I’ve been ranting for years about the negative effects of social media and how it lends itself to insecurity, FOMA, jealously, etc., how it enables trolls, kills empathy and, worse, its unmitigated, conscious focus on addicting its users in exactly the same way heroin addicts.

Of course, I’m not the only one; psychiatrists and psychologists, educators, parents, and a host of pundits have weighed in.

Everyone knows that actions speak louder than words, so it is telling that the biggest names in tech kept tech away from their kids and far away from the schools they attend.

This in spite of giving millions in cash and product to enable schools to embrace tech.

Since it’s proven that screens kill empathy, not to mention engagement, their actions will give their own kids a major advantage in adulthood, since empathy and critical thinking will be at a premium.

If the hypocrisy doesn’t encourage you to seriously limit screen time, no matter the howls of outrage, perhaps the new voices condemning the addiction and warning of the dangers will carry far more weight.

Why?

Because they are the people who helped create the problems, starting with Tristan Harris, a former in-house ethicist at Google.

“The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.”

The new Center for Humane Technology includes an unprecedented alliance of former employees of some of today’s biggest tech companies. Apart from Mr. Harris, the center includes Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager; Lynn Fox, a former Apple and Google communications executive; Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive; Justin Rosenstein, who created Facebook’s Like button and is a co-founder of Asana; Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook; and Renée DiResta, a technologist who studies bots, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who was an early employee at Facebook, said in November that the social network was “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Read the article and then decide whose side you are on — the hypocrites or the social angels.

Image credit: NotionsCapital.com

Sometimes people seem to forget that kids grow up and become adults.

Or they used to.

The responsibility for most of the problem can be laid at the feet of their parents and their helicopter approach to raising their offspring. Most ironically, they complain when job candidates sport the same attitudes as their own kids.

Other factors retarding adulthood include the escapism offered by today’s video games, especially for under-30 males, the lack of interpersonal skills driven by social media, along with social media’s unsubtle efforts to foster addiction in the name of profit.

And, of course, the largest factor being family and friends, whose emotional and financial support, enable a relatively comfortable living situation.

The difficulty today’s young adults are having in becoming actual adults was the impetus for (what else) a startup.

Rachel Weinstein, a psychotherapist, and Katie Brunelle, a former elementary school teacher and coach, responded by creating the Adulting School, a place for people to gain the skills they need to feel like an adult, from goal-setting and sheet-fitting to how to manage money or hang a picture.

Simon Senek, a British author and motivational speaker, also blames parents for the false expectations of so many Millennials, who never were given the chance to learn/live the process of achievement.

“Everything you want you can have instantaneously, except for job satisfaction and strength of relationships,” Senek argues. “There’s no app for that; they are slow, meandering, uncomfortable processes.”

Whatever you think about a school that teaches adults how to be adults the real question is: in what direction will the next generation go?

Image credit: the Adulting School

Do you believe that Twitter was founded with effects like Arab Spring in mind? Or that Mark Zukerberg started Facebook for altruistic reasons? Or that Instagram, Snapchat and other similar sites actually have your wellbeing in mind?

If so, you probably also believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

The primary purpose of every one of these sites is simple: to make as much money as possible.

How?

By using personalization to achieve behavioral addiction.

Infinite personalization comprises the artificial intelligence-driven, big-data based tools that allow algorithms to build a personalized Internet echo chamber customized just for you, designed to make you feel great. Infinite personalization feeds you the real, the fake, and everything in between, with the simple goal of holding your attention and getting you to come back for more. It is the process by which companies can measure, match, and predict consumers’ individual preferences with amazing accuracy and then tailor offerings to maximize revenue.

It’s done with full knowledge and, in my opinion, malice afore thought.

It’s why tech titans, starting with Steve Jobs in 2010, limit their kids, as I said a couple of years ago in The Hypocrites of Tech.

They want their kids to grow to positions of leadership and power and know they can’t if their world shrinks to a self-enhancing echo chamber that only regurgitates information that fits their preconceived ideas.

Personalization is active in the real world, too, and has been for several years, with young adults inventing ways to shrink their world by curating their college roommates and demanding “safe places.”  

All I can say it ‘good luck’ when their carefully curated echo chamber has to function in the work-world.

However, it’s a sad and scary commentary that in the frenzy to make more and more money tech is providing a detailed roadmap, along with the supporting technology, for demagogs to become dictators.

For a more detailed look at behavioral addiction check out Adam Alter’s Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

Image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

I, along with many others, have written about the need for mindfulness, the importance of quiet and the dangers of distraction and FOMO.  

Joe Hollier and Kai Tang sum it up nicely.

Solitude and boredom are essential to creativity or producing any sort of serious work. We are becoming scared of boredom, scared of solitude, scared of conversations with ourself.

They also believe in the value of boredom.

Capacity for boredom is at the root of observation. Observation inspires science, art, change, and opportunity. Have we become afraid of our inner lives? I think that we will find ourselves much happier when we are able to look forward to boredom, and to actually aspire for it, instead of being afraid of it.

But apparently there’s actually a market for a solution to providing the first two and reducing the dangers of the third.

A market to combat tech’s intentional effort to addict.

Being entrepreneurs, Hollier and Tang are going after that market, with a ‘back to the future’ solution.

It’s called the Light Phone and its tagline is “your phone away from phone.”

It’s beautiful, sexy and only makes calls.

And at only $150 it’s an affordable way to reenter the real world, rejoin the humane (not a typo) race and create the world in which you want to live.

Image credit: Light Phone

A couple of weeks ago we looked at leaders’ responsibility for the effect of their words; but what responsibility do they have for the effect of their technology?

Most people acknowledge the addictive quality of today’s technology.

Crackberries have long been a joke, but from email and texting to Angry Birds and Facebook people are staying online longer, often to the detriment of their families, their work and even their humanity.

The addictive qualities of technology have long been a subject for academics, psychologists and social scientists.

The question now is when building a product, what responsibility, if any, do entrepreneurs have for its effect on people?

That’s a question being asked by tech leaders from places such as Google, Twitter and Facebook and forming the basis for an annual event called Wisdom 2.0.

But hearing it from leaders at many of Silicon Valley’s most influential companies, who profit from people spending more time online, can sound like auto executives selling muscle cars while warning about the dangers of fast acceleration.

“We’re done with this honeymoon phase and now we’re in this phase that says, ‘Wow, what have we done?’ ” said Soren Gordhamer, who organizes Wisdom 2.0, an annual conference he started in 2010 about the pursuit of balance in the digital age. “It doesn’t mean what we’ve done is bad. There’s no blame. But there is a turning of the page.”

Wisdom 2.0 provides a forum and insights from the very leaders whose success most entrepreneurs want to emulate.

In the crush of 80 hour weeks it’s difficult to find the time or energy to consider the long-term effect of what you are doing, but it’s necessary if you are in it for more than the money.

However, the thoughts are worth having and you’ll find that creating a conversation among those who toil alongside you is a great way to share, bond, learn and grow personally, as well as build a stronger company.

Video image credit: Wisdom 2.0