I’ll have to think on this some more. I honestly consider myself to be incredibly lazy, especially compared to migrant/temporary workers and people working multiple jobs to put themselves through school, etc. Only through the good fortune of being a white male in America could someone like me get as far as I have with so little effort. (And the luck of a lot of “book learning” type stuff coming to me very easily.)
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So the word ‘lazy’ is one I find myself applying to myself a lot as well. And I’ve really reflected on it.
What’s really going on with me at least is that I’m keenly aware of how much I’m getting for the energy I’m expending, and I am absolutely trying to crush that ratio. When the returns are strong I’ll work 90 hours a week and when the returns suck I would prefer to goof off. I see goofing off as having mental health value and I refuse to feel guilty or unproductive about it. I enjoy learning so a lot of my ‘goofing off’ time is actually disguised as work. In attempt to be more accurate with myself I sometimes call goofing off ‘unstructured free time’ in my own head and actually try to have as much of it as I can… and then a bunch of it ends up being productive as I ADHD hyperfocus into random crap lol.
None of that ‘laziness’ means that I don’t have a strong locus of control. I’m trying to optimize that ratio long term and one of my favorite activity is researching ways to get more done with less effort.
And let me be super super clear about my career trajectory too… I was ALWAYS this way. I was never particularly ‘hard working’ in terms of the number of actions I took, but was always hyper focused on being more and more efficient so that I get more for less. The first few years sucked really hard before I started to get to a place where I actually could do more with less.
I feel like a few of you guys were car salesmen. I was that guy who sold 8-9 cars a month and made 500-600 a car in commissions off 45 ups, not the guy who sold 25 cars off 200 ups. I was usually not as good of a salesperson as that second guy either… I just took the best 1-2 ups of the day and worked them slow. Which isn’t actually supposed to work lol.
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This is true, but it’s not because job training is necessarily a grift. It’s because the corrupt government floods money in to private for-profit job training companies via grants to the companies or loans to the students and the for-profit vocational schools are just money sucks that provide shitty training. Maybe you’ve seen this is in your industry? Dunno, maybe truck driving schools. Contractor schools, electrical or solar training is full of horrible little private schools that charge basically whatever the government will provide to students as gifts or loans or they just put the students in debt and promise some kind of job placement.
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Yup. I’ve seen lots of that across several industries. The only training programs I’ve seen that haven’t actually sucked were all just entry level no skills required jobs at companies that trained their own employees basically. ‘Make 13 bucks an hour to change oil and learn how to fix cars until we make you a mechanic in 3-5 years’, ‘make 14 bucks an hour to get your health/life insurance agents license so you can work in our call center’, etc.
Every certification program I’ve seen personally had extremely shit outcomes in terms of people actually getting jobs.
I only worked up enough energy to get my BS and MS because I was pissed off about being underpaid and promoted slowly because I only had a GED while doing jobs that typically required a BS and in some cases an MS. I found it hard to move on to other companies without the “paper” even though I had been successfully doing equivalent work for years.
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I majored in Econ because it meant I would almost never actually have to attend class. I dropped out my last semester because a freight brokerage offered me a job and it was the kind of opportunity I went to college to get (in my head it was labeled ‘real b2b sales jobs’). I experienced the same thing you did in your 20’s where you’re clearly capable but you’re permanently capped from promotion beyond the 40-50k range because you don’t have a degree.
I went into the car business in my late teens entirely because it was possible to advance without a degree. I quit the business because in reality you’re a serf on some lords land, and the reason why they let people without degrees work it is because they are cheaper and you can treat them worse.
No one has ever asked me about my degree in real life lol. I don’t think it’s even possible for most people with degrees to imagine that I don’t have one. I’ve since discovered that you can also pop the college degree bubble by just having/making money. That’s why all those tech company founders feel like they discovered some secret not needing a degree… it’s true that they don’t need degrees, but their parents are fucking rich and they dropped out of Ivy league schools lol.
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IME, public vocational schools have been significantly better than the private schools both in terms of quality and also placement. Not that they are great and on the job is certainly better training, but they are better than private for-profit and are not costing the students a ton or signing them up for a lot of debt.
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Yeah community colleges in particular put in fucking work. They also mostly help the people who are definitely going to make it, but they are providing a lot of the necessary ladders up for those people to climb… and they do that at an excellent price.
Yeah, they help the people who are ready to be helped and at least for they people who blow it off they don’t leave them with $20k in debt.
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I was in and out of community college for five years. Almost all of my student loan debt was incurred at the university level. Some of you may be developing the read that boredsocial is not good at the game of academics. You are correct. I have never, ever been able to find enough motivation to do more than the bare minimum to pass a class I wasn’t interested in unless merely existing was enough to get me a better grade. I have probably paid for 20 community college classes that I dropped out of because I hadn’t been to class in months. The title holder is whatever the basic biology class was called, which I took five times and dropped five times. I finally took Chemistry and willed myself to a terrified C (where you bomb the first big test and have to study really hard to pull out a passing grade by making an A on the last test).
20 year old me was insecure about his ability because school was a shitty fit… 35 year old me is not insecure about his ability because the world is an excellent fit, and I now realize that I’m just high functioning mentally ill. I’ve also figured out that every trope about what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is bullshit. Trauma is damage that takes time to heal. After the trauma has healed you may have learned some stuff during your experience, but you would have learned other probably funner stuff instead if you had been doing something else. It took me a long long time to get my shit together lol.
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So lets say you are 100% right about this.
Why do they spit in the face of these programs?
Culture?
Upbringing?
Or are they just inferior to you?
No, empathy is not feeling sorry for somebody.
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As opposed to:
I think of it as empathy being about understanding and sympathy being about feeling.
Empathy also isn’t limited to negative emotional states. You can (hopefully) empathize with somebody who wins a huge pot just as well as you can empathize with somebody who lost to a runner-runner.
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No I pretty universally hate anyone doing better than me.
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Now you’re confusing empathy with something else. You can empathize with somebody and hate them at the same time.
the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference
That doesn’t mean you have to have any positive feelings for them, just that you can understand their emotions from their own POV.
Yeah I was kidding. And yes obviously empathy can be used on positive situations… Even when you were the biggest contributor to the big pot he won. Empathy is just good for emotional stability all around.
Definitely lucky. You think you or I would be 50% as good at work as we are without it? It’s got pros and cons like anything powerful.
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