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.

Last week we looked at millennial burnout and it reminded me of a post I did a couple of years ago on how it’s often driven by Silicon Valley pundits who preach the need for relentless hustle, which, to put it politely, is a crock.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

This is a short post, because it contains links to the two biggest Silicon Valley lies.

I realize that lies aren’t nearly the big deal they used to be, but when the source of those lies is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) prevalent in a critical piece of US infrastructure the lies take on a life of their own.

They carry so much credibility that their insidious spread is guaranteed.

The first lie is that success requires constant hustle. Whether starting a company or working in an existing one, hustle means giving up everything else — family, friends, recreation, relaxation, whatever, no exceptions — and work 24/7/365 (more if you can figure out how).

But for some, “hustle” is just a euphemism for extreme workaholism. Gary Vaynerchuk, a.k.a. Gary Vee, an entrepreneur and angel investor who has 1.5 million Twitter followers and a string of best-selling books with titles like “Crush It!,” tells his acolytes they should be working 18 hours a day. Every day. No vacations, no going on dates, no watching TV. “If you want bling bling, if you want to buy the jets?” he asks in one of his motivational speeches. “Work. That’s how you get it.”

Which, as anyone familiar with productivity research knows, is a pile of poop.

The truth is that much of the extra effort these entrepreneurs and their employees are putting in is pointless anyway. Working beyond 56 hours in a week adds little productivity, according to a 2014 report by the Stanford economist John Pencavel. But the point may be less about productivity than about demonstrating commitment and team spirit.

The second lie is that Silicon Valley is special. But Silicon Valley’s special is completely self-serving.

Silicon Valley has a lot of self-interested reasons for preferring to maintain a facade that its culture is special, and that its industry is more innovative, virtuous and productive than every other industry. It serves as a great recruiting tool as the region competes for talent with other industries and areas. It allows insiders to maintain outsize control of their companies. And it is a way to prevent regulators from coming in and regulating Silicon Valley to the extent that it might otherwise seek to do.

Stop drinking the Valley kool-aid. Facebook doesn’t love you, it loves your identifiable personal data, which is slices, dices and sells to all comers.

Google jettisoned its “don’t be evil” motto when it got in the way of revenue generation.

Read the articles.

Share them, tweet them and stop ruining your own life by believing them.

Image credit: Elektor Labs

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

Neither market cap nor valuation are cause for celebration.

Both are as ephemeral as morning fog.

Ask Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella his reaction when Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world for a few months last fall.

“I’m not one of those guys who says, ‘let’s celebrate some market cap measure.’ That’s just not stable.”

What does interest him?

The Microsoft-generated ecosystem.

“Our business model is about creating more surplus outside us. We will only be long-term success when the people are making more money around us,” he said.

This dovetails with what Bill Gates also believes, i.e., a company’s success is defined when the total value of the ecosystem around it is more valuable than the company that created it.

That ecosystem seems non-existent to the majority of founders of gig economy businesses, dating apps, social media, etc.

Or perhaps it’s just those with venture funding who are focused on growth at all costs.

That said, this post is dedicated to the founders who focus on building sustainable businesses/ecosystems.

As opposed to the fools who chase investment in lieu of revenue, celebrate valuation based on their last round of funding, and don’t care about ecosystem beyond its PR value.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Pretty much everyone I know responds to my emails (yes, emails) on their smartphone.

They respond to email because they know I don’t text.

As a result, I am inundated with emails that not only respond to the subject at hand, but provide me with constant comedic content.

They don’t need to try and be funny, because their phone’s autocorrect takes care of that.

And gives me the opportunity to make (as a Brit friend says) smartarse comments.

That said, I’m taking this opportunity to show I really do understand the difficulty they are facing.

It’s not their fault.

They are all much too busy to review their emails before hitting “send.”

Image credit: Language Log

People constantly offer up their own answers to ‘what’s life’, which is good.

I think the only definition that really answers that question is one you craft yourself.

Here’s my answer.

Life is a kaleidoscope, with no frame, constantly changing and filled with beauty.

What it is not is a jigsaw puzzle, with a single picture and set borders.

Image credit: Lance Shields

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.

Danial Adkinson was lucky. His first boss was a true role model and taught him one of the most important lessons anyone ever learns. He was especially lucky, because he learned it at a very young age and apparently pretty smart, because it stayed with him.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Washing dishes for Jeff was grueling, greasy work. But then again, making a pizza, or driving a truck, or baking a cake, or any of countless other jobs are not always enjoyable in themselves, either. Out of all the lessons I learned from that guy in the Pizza Hut tie, maybe the biggest is that any job can be the best job if you have the right boss. — Danial Adkison

People work for people, not companies.

People quit people, not companies.

They accept positions because of the culture and leave when it changes.

Bosses interpret company culture; they improve or pervert it; they add/subtract/polish/tarnish it.

What bosses don’t do is pass it on intact and untouched.

Flickr image credit: Susanne Nilsson

From the Winter 2018/2019 issue of Inc. Magazine (Use the link to see the actual survey results.)

The oldest Millennials are now well into their 30s, and they’re increasingly running companies. Inc. and our sister publication, Fast Company, partnered with career-development site the Muse to survey 155 Millennial bosses to see how they manage, what they value, and how they plan to shape the future of business. The top priorities they cited are humanist: creating positive work cultures, forging strong relationships (in person, not through apps), and caring for the whole person, not just the worker. And, unlike some Boomers and Gen-Xers, they’re optimistic about those who will replace them. As Elena Valentine, co-founder and CEO of video company Skill Scout, predicts, “I have a hunch Gen Z is going to make an even bigger impact.”

Of course, the survey focused on CEOs in tech; no one seems to bother doing similar surveys on lower level millennial managers working outside of tech.

So I thought I’d share my own experience over the last 15 years with millennial managers and their workers at my small, local bank branch.

Over those years there have been roughly seven managers, all but one were promoted and are still with the bank.

Unlike large, urban branches, small branches like mine function differently. Tellers remember your name and chat; managers often handle transactions normally done by bankers.

Because I handle the banking, wires, etc., for my Russian business partner I had a lot of interactions with the managers, as well as the staff, and got to know them on a more personal level than you might expect.

The managers all ranged from their late twenties to early thirties.

They managed much the same as the CEOs in the survey. Same concerns and efforts with their peoples’ growth and well-being.

Our conversations often focused on the culture they strove to create and, for a few years, what it took to protect their people from the toxic culture and destructive behavior of a district manager (she created enough stress to put one pregnant manager on doctor-ordered bed rest) who was finally fired.

None of the managers were perfect, although the current one is as close as any manager gets, but they created great micro-cultures, in which their teams thrived.

Impressive, especially when you consider that the bank is Wells Fargo.

Image credit: Hiking Artist

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 behaviors attributed to millennials 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.

A few days later Quartzy’s Jessanne Collins wrote about her own burnout

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.

Image credit: Beck Pitt

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.

Image credit: speight

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.

Generation Y is the more accurate name, but you probably know them as Millennials. I, along with the rest of media, have been writing about them for more than ten years — too often disparagingly — and far too simplistically.

They didn’t deserve it.

So this week we’ll take another look at that much maligned generation.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Ryan Healy starts his post by saying, “There’s no doubt that Generation Y will fundamentally change corporate America.”

It’s an interesting post, filled with the brashness, dreams and optimism I’ve come to expect as each new generation enters adulthood—whether I read about or lived through them.

Still more interesting are the comments, whether they agree or not.

I can’t help siding with Carlos who says, “Every generation thinks that their generation is unique. The truly gifted on each generation is and will affect change, but this notion that today’s 20-somethings are any more intelligent or capable than those from 10-40 years ago is naive,” although I would change his 40 years to 4000.

Each generation, going back to Year One BC, sets out to change its world and in doing so lays the groundwork for the next generation to change it and the process repeats itself throughout all history.

Some of the changes are good and some not; some seek to address errors previously made, while some target good changes gone bad as a result of social or technical progress.

Changes can be revolutionary or evolutionary; they fuel both society’s progression — and its regression.

Image credit: PorcelainB

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Your life as lived in the real world with real people and real relationships.

As Arianna Huffington said,

What we’ve discovered is that technology might be great at delivering what we want in the moment, but it’s less great at giving us what we need over the long term.

The biggest step forward in the world of technology in 2018 was the realisation that we have to set boundaries in our relationship with technology to protect our humanity. (…) It was the year we realised that the consequences of allowing technology into every aspect of our lives aren’t all positive.

If, after all Zuckerberg’s lies and shenanigans you actually decide to delete Facebook from your life, you need to remember that it owns Instagram and WhatsApp, so they would need to go, too. If that works for you, here are two explanations of what to do. The first explains how to delete all three, the second focuses on Facebook.

You can take a less drastic approach than full deletion, yet give yourself far more control, by leaving the apps on your laptop, but deleting them from your phone (except for some Samsung models). They’ll still be there, but you’ll need to make a conscious choice to check them instead of responding like Pavlov’s dog to the notifications.

If even that is too much, start by turning off notifications.

You will be surprised at the difference it makes.

Don’t ignore the fact that tech is addictive and can take over your life in the same way as alcohol or drugs. And just like alcohol and drugs there are support groups and rehab centers for tech addiction. Even if you don’t believe you are actually addicted, check it out; it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

If instead you just want to take much more control, here are some links that can help you make conscious choices.

Use Location History Visualizer to gain a better understanding of what Google’s location tracking means to you. And understand that Apple isn’t immune.

One humongous thing you can do to shrink your online footprint is to switch from Google to Startpage.com. The lack of ads makes a huge difference in the quality of your browsing.

And take a close look at this infographic on how to make yourself invisible on the net.

Invest in a VPN; I have Avast’s, since I also use their virus software and consider the small annual charge to be one of the best investments I’ve made.

Here’s one on stopping robocalls on both iPhone and Android.

You don’t have to do it all at once, but you do need to think through tech’s effects on your life and your relationships and then go from there.

PS This just in. Amazon’s Ring, along with dozens of other IoT devices are famous for their laz security.

Beginning in 2016, according to one source, Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world. (…)  The Information, which has aggressively covered Ring’s security lapses, reported on these practices last month.

So before you buy one stop and think, “would I want whatever this device learns about me and my family shared across the strangers and media?” If the answer is “no” then you should probably skip it.