John C. Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in a speech last month that “there is still time to avert this fate.” Moving inflation up and keeping it there could convince millennials, he said.
“In this case, it’s fortunate that the young are impressionable.”
“Fate” refers to the potential economic mayhem that could result from the high savings rate among Millennials looking to retire ASAP. “Impressionable?” I wonder how long it’s been since he actually knew any of the “young.”
Powerful men who have seen women as things to do with as they please are thinking twice in the wake of #metoo and Harvey Weinstein’s conviction. Hopefully that caution will trickle down to the rank and file bosses who still seem untouchable, although that’s unlikely.
Big Tech is no longer seen a solution to the world’s problems, but, in many cases, as their cause.
Startups are learning that public investors, whether knowledgeable or casual, are still hung up on mundane ideas like profit as opposed to their beloved EBITDA.
Founders, too, are rethinking their actions. Thanks to high profile cases, such as Travis Kalanick (Uber) and Adam Neumann (WeWork), and a much savvier workforce, visions and charisma are no longer enough.
One might look at all this and say, “the world is changing,” although a more realistic view could be summed up as “too little, too late.”
It’s a convenient narrative for the founders and CEOs who count on employees to put in extra hours—often without extra compensation—in order to keep their companies afloat. (…) Basecamp founder and CEO Jason Fried noted on Twitter, “If your company requires you to work nights and weekends, your company is broken. This is a managerial problem, not your problem.”
Working extra long hours was considered the way to get ahead, but it was also the road to burnout.
So, what’s changed in a year?
The advice to get ahead.
Instead of working long hours, nights and weekends for others the recommendation is to use all those unpaid hours working for yourself.
The answer may vary depending on the specifics of your job. But in general, you’re far more likely to get ahead by channeling your enthusiasm and ambition toward your own independent projects—not the company’s. (…) That is, after all, how many founders and CEOs achieved their own success. (…) Other ambitious young people may find that the best way to advance their careers is to dedicate their free time not to the jobs they have, but to the jobs they want.
In other words, continue with the 80-100 hour weeks, just shift part of those hours to your own projects.
Great advice.
Doing so would mean there’s a second party responsible (blamable) for your depression/anxiety/burnout/atrophied social skills/blown relationships/etc.
The truth is that whether those 80-100 hours is for yourself, someone else, or split, they will ruin your health and, eventually, your life.
Poking through 13+ 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.
Welch is still alive and must love today’s optimized millennials, who were raised to constantly strive and never stop working. Burnout would be no problem, since he could simply fire them.
In spite of that I doubt he could manage them; neither they, nor their elders, would take kindly to his style.
In fact, Welch’s approach is actually the fastest way to produce a bumper crop of weeds.
I’ve disagreed with Jack Welch many times going back to the start of this blog. In December 2006 I wrote Men Want A Life, Too in response to Welch’s comment.
“We do acknowledge that work-life balance is usually a much harder goal for women with children. For them, there is about a 15-year period in their careers in which the choices they make are not about what they want from life professionally and personally but about what is right for their kids. It can be a fraught time, since choices and consequences are more complex. That, however, is a topic for another column.”
It took two-and-a-half years, but he did return to that topic recently at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference telling them that women need to choose between raising kids and running a company.
“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” (The article is from the Wall Street Journal and is the first link on this Google search page.)
Putting the comments together we have a high profile x-CEO who believes that the way to the top is for both men and women to make the tough choice and put their family second to their career.
Just let relatives, nannies (if you can afford them), daycare, schools, friends, gangs and the internet raise the next generation.
Why do comments like these come primarily from old, rich white guys?
What planet are they living on? More importantly have they bothered listening to today’s workers—and I don’t mean just Millennials.
As long as this is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that runs companies that attitude will translate to corporate action and companies will face problems staffing. The recession won’t go on forever and demographically there’s a serious people shortage at every level and in every field.
If you really want to attract the best and brightest men and women then you need to recognize that their priorities have changed and if forced to choose the company will, in most cases, come in second.
And those candidates who do choose company over life may lack the empathy needed to innovate and market, let alone lead, the current workforce.
There are plenty of companies that already know this and have adjusted their culture accordingly, but most will be dragged kicking and screaming into the reality once the economy turns around, demographics rears its ugly head and they have no choice.
Yesterday’s Oldie talked about one of the biggest lies perpetrated on an already vulnerable Millennial audience — relentless striving 24/7.
It’s a great article — equal parts enlightening and alarming.
Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape.
According to Erin Griffith (@eringriffith), writing in the New York Times, the biggest drivers perpetuating the scam do so to line their own pocket.
“The vast majority of people beating the drums of hustle-mania are not the people doing the actual work. They’re the managers, financiers and owners,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp.
In 2016 Marissa Mayer, of Yahoo infamy, claimed a person could work 130 hours a week was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”
Many companies extoll the approach and incorporate it into their culture, but WeWork has gone further and built its business around it and is a good example of how this philosophy in action looks more like a cult than a culture.
It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries, with 400,000 tenants, including workers from 30 percent of the Global Fortune 500.
But it took Gary Vaynerchuk, the patron saint of hustling and founder of One37pm to “glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.”
It’s a lifestyle that has made a fetish of convenience, not for the sake of a better, more well-rounded life, but as a way to free up more time to work.
Finally, without doubt, it can be stated that hustle is a culture with no redeeming features. It sucks humanity from its followers, then uses up and destroys the most devout.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
For years the media has been proclaiming that the great majority of young people want to be entrepreneurs or work for a startup, as opposed to a larger/older company, because startups were “cool.”
Research suggests entrepreneurial activity has declined among Millennials. The share of people under 30 who own a business has fallen to almost a quarter-century low, according to a 2015 Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data. (…) Two years ago, EIG’s president and co-founder, John Lettieri, testified before the U.S. Senate, “Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history.”
What changed?
Maybe they learned that wanting to and doing it are very different. That they will work far harder for themselves, even if they are well-funded, or that startups fail far more often than they succeed (90% vs 10%).
A survey of 1,200 Millennials conducted in 2016 by the Economic Innovation Group found that more Millennials believed they could have a successful career by staying at one company and attempting to climb the ladder than by founding a new one.
But maybe there is something else going on.
Maybe they have figured out that the world doesn’t need another social network / dating app / review site / etc.
Maybe investors have realized that monetizing through ads isn’t a good road to sustainable profitability, considering the push for more European-style privacy.
Or maybe, just maybe, reality has reared its ugly head and they’ve figured out they don’t have enough experience or know enough to create enterprise solutions for real-world needs.
Matt Krisiloff, the former Y Combinator executive, added that the opportunities “to start compelling start-ups,” for college students without industry-specific knowledge, “has vastly shrunk.”
What they found is that the average age of a startup founder is about 41.9 years of age among all startups that hire at least one employee, and among the top 0.1 percent of highest-growth startups, that average age moves up to 45 years old. Those ages are taken from the time of the founding of the company.
Maybe our media-inspired view of entrepreneurs is a reflection of the warped views of Silicon Valley as engendered by VCs.
VCs believe they have “pattern recognition” abilities that they simply don’t have. Instead, they rely on suppositions and stereotypes that don’t match the underlying data on startup success. The same reason why older founders are ignored by the ecosystem is the same reason why women and other minorities struggle in the Valley: It’s really not about what you build, but what you look like while building it.
Maybe the entrepreneurs of the future will look more like our real world in all its diverse, messy glory.
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,
