At Stanford, said Julie Lythcott-Haims, the former dean of freshmen, she saw students rely on their parents to set up play dates with people in their dorm or complain to their child’s employers when an internship didn’t lead to a job. (…) Snowplow parents have it backward, Ms. Lythcott-Haims said: “The point is to prepare the kid for the road, instead of preparing the road for the kid.”
In a new poll by The New York Times and Morning Consult of a nationally representative group of parents of children ages 18 to 28, three-quarters had made appointments for their adult children, like for doctor visits or haircuts, and the same share had reminded them of deadlines for school. Eleven percent said they would contact their child’s employer if their child had an issue.
Do you recall how the Boomers complained and blamed their parents generation for the world they were inheriting?
The world they are leaving their kids is in far worse shape, not to mention that they prevented those same kids from gaining the skills they need to deal with it.
Since 1998, the US has seen employment rise by 22 million to reach historical highs. The main cause of this increase isn’t the dynamism of Silicon Valley or the entrepreneurial energy of Brooklyn hipsters. The vast majority (90%) of this increase is due to higher employment for workers aged 55 and above.
Unfortunately, the things that are drummed into our heads growing up continue to harass and control us throughout adulthood.
So it’s no surprise that the parental optimization and monitoring that did so much damage to millennials continues to haunt them as adults resulting in mundane task avoidance and burnout.
BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen wrote a very personal essay explaining millennial burnout. Interesting because in spite of being raised in Montana where she didn’t suffer the more extreme versions of optimization found in more urban areas, she still suffers from burnout.
Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.
It’s not the big things that affect her, but the little ones.
I realized that the vast majority of these tasks shares a common denominator: Their primary beneficiary is me, but not in a way that would actually drastically improve my life. They are seemingly high-effort, low-reward tasks, and they paralyze me.
72% of Boomers are white, 61% of Gen X is white, but of the 80 million millennials only 56% are white, but a large percentage of that 56% were raised privileged in middle class or better homes.
Many of the behaviorsattributedtomillennials are the behaviors of a specific subset of mostly white, largely middle-class people born between 1981 and 1996. But even if you’re a millennial who didn’t grow up privileged, you’ve been impacted by the societal and cultural shifts that have shaped the generation. Our parents — a mix of young boomers and old Gen-Xers — reared us during an age of relative economic and political stability. As with previous generations, there was an expectation that the next one would be better off — both in terms of health and finances — than the one that had come before.
But they are not better off, nor is the world they’re inheriting.
I related precisely to Petersen when she wrote: “Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed.”
and how having a kid changed her thinking.
The strength to say “no”: to pass on things that aren’t worth your time and energy; to skip events you don’t really want to go to but feel like you “should”; to take Instagram with a grain of salt. To not sweat the small stuff, in other words, or at least to reject the notion that by not sweating the small stuff quite as much, we’re not measuring up to some impossible standard.
Much of Boomer and older Gen X attitudes can be traced back to a saying that always chilled me. It went something like, life is a challenge to be overcome.
I preferred a different version that went like this, life is a mystery to be lived, not a challenge to be overcome.
It dovetails nicely with Peterson’s idea that life should be lived, not optimized.
As I said yesterday, millennials aren’t what you think.
It’s pretty stupid to think that 80 million people would all think and act identically. Not all Boomers did drugs, not all Gen X were slackers and not all millennials were spoiled and entitled.
Just as an animal reflects how it’s raised, so does a human.
When I’m accosted by an unruly dog I hold the owners responsible.
The deprived generation of the Depression raised the entitled generation of Boomers who raised the much entitled, very special generation of Millennials, so when you look at millennials you should look to their parents — the Boomers.
Time magazine’s 2013 cover story was written with an eye to covering for its Boomer reader base. It did a good job by locking in the millennial myth.
“The Me Me Me Generation—Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.”
Not that they had much choice.
No generation grows up in a vacuum and economics plays a large role.
The first wave of millennials hit the job market in 2008.
(…) millennials were in the fourth year of the “jobless recovery,” facing high unemployment, mounting debt, and an eroded social safety net. And yet, with breathtaking cluelessness, TIME framed the millennials’ desperate search for stable work as a privileged character flaw—look at the kids too flaky to handle “choosing from a huge array of career options.”
Options maybe; actual jobs, very few.
Worse, the attitudes drummed into our heads growing up are very hard to shake at any age and some are still wreaking havoc.
Join me tomorrow for a look at what’s happening now.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Since the start of this blog 12 years ago, I’ve written numerous times about the sheer idiocy of using age to screen talent. This post mentions several examples that easily refute Vinod Khosla’s ignorant comment on age and creativity, but here is an even better example, since software is supposed to be a young person’s game.
Yukihiro Matsumoto was born in 1965; in 1995 he released the Ruby programming language to open source. Of course, at 30 he was still within Khosla’s window. In 2012 he open-sourced MRuby, in 2014, at the ripe old age of 49 he open-sourced his work on streem, a new scripting language and he is still going strong.
Age as a criteria when hiring is just plain stupid, no matter the size of your company.
Age, however, is the biggest stupid and has been for decades.
For Boomers, the breakpoint for when a person became hopeless and valueless was 30; Millennials raised it to 40.
As bad as age discrimination has been in general, it is far worse in tech.
VC Vinod Khosla crystallized and popularized this mindset back in 2011.
“People under 35 are the people who make change happen. People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”
That means you can expect no more creativity from Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Marc Benioff, Parker Harris and Satya Nadella. (For insight to other fields read the article.)
Not to mention that 32 year-old Mark Zukkerberg only has a few good years left.
There are thousands more at all levels, I just picked recognizable people to better illustrate the stupidity.
The difference between when the Boomers did it and now is the notice and action being taken.
This past week, the EEOC joined a probe behind a federal class action lawsuit against Google filed last month, charging that the search giant “engaged in a systematic pattern” of discrimination against applicants over the age of 40. The suit, expanding upon a related case filed earlier this year, cited data from Payscale that placed the median age of Google’s workforce at 29, with a margin of error of 4%. By contrast, the median age for U.S. computer programmers is 43.
Actually, I will probably find it somewhat amusing to watch founders as they try to meet candidate demand for the compensation and perks of the past few years in today’s do-more-with-less/revenue-based-business-model world.
That also goes for many, not all, by a long shot, tech workers who are looking for those same jobs and perks.
So heed the advice I recently gave a founder who took advantage of my standing offer of free help (both my phone number and email are posted on this blog).
He asked how to land a “star” candidate looking for “yesterday’s” compensation and refused to consider anything less.
My advice was to take a pass, refer him to Facebook or Google hire a reality-based programmer who can do the needed job and was sincerely interested in his product and vision.
The only thing he might lose were a few late night bragging rights.
In short, grow up, get smart and hire talent — no matter its age or color or gender.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
It’s been 10 years since I wrote this. Nothing has change and, if anything, it’s gotten worse.
Rigidity has gotten more rigid, if possible, and it’s far more prevalent up, down, and round and round the generations. And it’s still a total waste of time and energy.
There’s a lot of talk right now about the resistance of mangers and older employees to Web 2.0 initiatives and the information-sharing that goes with them.
Kind of amusing that this big generational argument is happening during the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, the start of the biggest generational fight most of us remember—we weren’t around for the Roaring Twenties, the rise of jazz, let alone rebelled with the suffragettes.
The Boomer theme of, “you can’t trust anyone over thirty” is being reprised today by the wired generation.
The Boomers accused their bosses of being unwilling to change and when they became the bosses, they were accused in turn. Some things never change.
Generational differences have always existed, with the younger generation blasting into the future and screaming that the older ones are holding them back, but it’s ridiculous to paint everybody over a certain age with the same brush.
In May I commented that I thought a lot of the problem was grounded in insecurity and I still believe that, but I’ve done a lot of thinking because the subject’s so prevalent and have some further thoughts.
It should be remembered that managers’ rigidity has as much to do as much with the corporate culture as with the individuals involved. Openness is based on trust and if the culture doesn’t foster that then you should expect people to be ultra turf conscious, not interested in sharing, and prone to spending large amounts of energy fighting every new thing that comes along. In 2007 it’s Web 2.0; twenty-five years ago it was telecommuting (and still is in many companies).
But if we’re going to talk about rigidity, then it has to be recognized that it’s on all sides—there are a lot of pretty rigid twenty- and thirty-somethings (and no one in their right mind ever called a teenager flexible). If you have any doubts about this, try getting to your twenty-something co-workers to approach a subject from any position other than the one they advocate.
It’s not so much doing it differently, as it is doing it my way and, unhappily, that attitude has substantially worsened.
It seems that everybody has a group and while their group is OK, other groups, i.e., any that don’t agree with theirs, are rigid, inflexible, and standing in the way of progress.
There’s value to be found in most approaches and when that value is tweaked and/or merged with other methods the result is usually worth far more than the original.
This is a generation, after all, that thinks of itself as “forever young,” even as some near 70. Most of all, what came across onscreen as well as in Greenfield-Sanders’ portraits was an unapologetic affirmation of the essential Boomer mantra—yes, it is still all about ME.
For a small, and supposedly lost, generation, Gen X’ers have found their way to positions of power. (…)Gen X’ers, incidentally, are among the most highly educated generation in the U.S.: 35% have college degrees vs. 19% of Millennials.
We all know that everything moves faster these days — whether products, attitudes — or generations.
So, without more ado, meet Generation Z, which encompasses those born between 1995 and the early 2000s.
They present a new challenge to bosses, especially since they bear little resemblance to Millennials.
The question for most bosses and bosses-to-be is this: having finally wrapped their heads around Millennial dos and don’ts is it worth the effort to add Gen Z to the repertoire?
Unequivocally yes.
Actually, you don’t have much choice, since there are 79 million (and counting) of them.
Through time, all generations were self-absorbed, but due to sheer size, the Boomers are the original me generation.
Gen X wasn’t much better and in 1982 Steve Wozniak financed The US Festival. According to Glenn Aveni, director of a recently released documentary about the festival,
“Woz felt the 1970’s were The ‘Me’ Generation and that it was time for the world to embrace a less selfish credo, one of unity and togetherness.”
Great music, but little effect.
Millennials come next, slightly more of them (75.4 M to 74.9) and most happily carry on the focus on me.
Tech has driven that focus across all generations via selfies and social media to the point that for millions their experiences, meals and even their lives exist only if they constantly post them online and they are liked, shared, and retweeted.
There was a time when I allowed myself to be more than what could fit onto a 2-by-4-inch screen. When I wasn’t so self-conscious about how I was seen. When I embraced my contradictions and desires with less fear of embarrassment or rejection.
The focus on me has led to a focus on being happy — polls and articles measuring happiness, and comparing happiness.
Back in the day, the Boomers considered everything a challenge that must be overcome. Fast forward to now and Millennials, especially those in Silicon Valley, see the world as a series of problems to be “hacked” (modern times call for modern words).
Which, to put it politely, is a crock.
Andrew Taggart thinks most of this is nonsense. A PhD in philosophy, Taggart practices the art of gadfly-for-hire. He disabuses founders, executives, and others in Silicon Valley of the notion that life is a problem to be solved, and happiness awaits those who do it. Indeed, Taggart argues that optimizing one’s life and business is actually a formula for misery.
This is important, because, in many ways, it’s Silicon Valley that is shaping much of our world — even for those of us who choose not to actively participate.
But I doubt Taggart and his ilk will change that attitude or the obsessive focus on “my world.”
Scott Berkun, a former Microsoft manager and philosophy major who has written multiple business books on the subject, says philosophy’s lessons are lost on most in Silicon Valley. Many focus on aggrandizing the self, rather than pursuing a well-examined purpose. “If you put Socrates in a room during a pitch session, I think he’d be dismayed at so many young people investing their time in ways that do not make the world or themselves any better,” he said.
I never saw life as a challenge or a problem. I prefer a different mantra.
Life is a mystery to be lived — not a challenge/problem to be overcome.
Why is it that the most difficult part of management, i.e., people management, constantly moves backwards?
Managers from the Greatest Generation tried to manage by memo.
That lasted until the 1970s when Boomer and Gen X managers took a giant step backwards and started trying to manage by email.
Millennials have taken an even larger step in that direction by trying to manage by text and have swept many of the previous contingents along with them.
Granted, people at all levels often look for and find ways, frequently turning to available technology, to avoid, or at least minimize, the most frustrating and difficult parts of their jobs.
Every time this comes up I find myself quoting something Terry Dial said to me decades ago.
“People are 90% of our costs as well as the key to customer service and satisfaction. The only thing that should take priority over hiring a new employee is keeping a current one.”
Wally Bock puts it this way (and offers excellent advice on how to do it.)
In the Marines, I learned that when you’re responsible for a group, you have two jobs. One of them is to accomplish the mission. The other is to take care of the people.
I personally guarantee that you won’t accomplish the former if you ignore the latter.
You cannot “care for your people” by email or text — it requires face time.
It requires one-on-one conversations — wherever they take place — and not just about performance.
Conversations need to be human, that means family, hobbies, food, sports, etc.
Face-to-face humanizing contact is critical for teams, too, whether they are in a different office around the block or around the globe.
“Building trust is a multisensory experience,” she says. “Only when people are physically present together can they use all of their senses” to establish that needed trust. Without a bond, conflict or disengagement can more easily arise and is more difficult to resolve.
So whether you consider yourself a manager, a leader, a boss, or just a plain working stiff honing your in-person communication skills will not only improve your career opportunities, but also all parts of your life.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
——-> 
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