How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work - Hardcover

Hustad, Megan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618713506 ISBN 13: 9780618713509

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008

Synopsis

Based on the experiences of twenty- and thirty-somethings, as well as the advice of experts ranging from Andrew Carnegie and Emily Post to Napoleon Hill, Helen Gurley Brown, and Stephen Covey, a hip and practical guide explains how to negotiate the often difficult ins and outs of office life with wise and whimsical advice on how to move up in the world.

About this title

About the Author

MEGAN HUSTAD is a former book editor, former bookstore manager, and current freelance writer. Originally from the wilds of Minneapolis, she now lives in New York City. She is addicted to buying 50? midcentury paperbacks with interesting cover graphics, and should soon be able to boast the country’s largest private collection of bad vintage business books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1 On Being a PoseurEarly Capitalists on Why Writing Business Letters Takes Longer Than Reading Them Does

Never write a long letter. A business man has not time to read it. ― Cyrus West Field

One of the worst pieces of advice is "Just be yourself." You hear it a lot. Oh, you’re nervous about your new job? Don’t worry. Just be yourself. It comes from online career sites. ("The best preparation is really to be yourself.") It comes from well-meaning mothers. ("Just be your own sweet self.") It is so prevalent you can almost hear it in the breeze. Unfortunate, then, that it’s ill- suited to any number of life situations, but at no time and in no place is it more useless, more beside the point, more potentially destructive than the very moment when you’re starting a new job. Why it’s so awful takes some explaining. It certainly seems to be solid, all-American wisdom: Don’t put on some phony act and try to convince people you’re something you’re not. Don’t get yourself all worked up trying to impress, instead just be "natural," and then you’ll probably be more relaxed, and because you’re relaxed you’ll perform better, and best of all, because you’ve been being yourself the whole time, you’ll never have to explain, later on, why you’re not quite the same person you seemed to be before. It promises this, too: That any red-blooded individual who values forthrightness and honesty ― who really knows quality when he or she sees it ― will recognize your sincerity and appreciate you all the more for it. One of the first clues that being yourself might not be the answer came to me when I started asking people who’d been working full-time for a while to describe what their first post-college jobs were like, and got dead air. Sometimes I got wounded stares, looks of near incomprehension. People squinted, as if trying to glimpse something through a dense, coastal fog. Their mouths opened but nothing came out while they waited for the right words to surface. Finally they would spit out a strangled cross between "Hah!" and "Huh!," mumble a few words about it being "interesting," grin, and quickly change the subject. Trying to attach adjectives to these dim memories, one interviewee told me, felt like coming across poetry you wrote at sixteen. How you thought then and how you think now is very, very different. But I soon discovered that if you simply ask people what kinds of tasks they handled at their first jobs, the words came more easily: They made photocopies. They stood next to the photocopier so they’d be ready for action when the 11" x 14" paper jammed. They pored over Excel spreadsheets until their eyes ached. They answered phones. They forced big smiles while they cried a little on the inside. They were not themselves, in other words. Part of the problem with being yourself is that you could be anyone. You could dress badly. You could be a shy daydreamer, or you could be a bubblehead. You might be the only person who thinks your comic stylings rival Will Ferrell’s. You might think your story about that lesbian bar in Amsterdam was a winner but your senior colleagues might not. So I started to wonder if this particular piece of nonwisdom was really as all- American as it sounds. Have we always been sending inexperienced young people into the capitalist lion’s den with the flimsy instructions to just be themselves? We haven’t. In the early days of the American office, it turns out, the advice was different. Flip through the first texts written to help the novice through entry-level employment, and you’ll find they were pretty much all agreed on one thing: Act a certain way, and you’d be going places. Behave in other ways, and your corporate overlords would lose interest in you, and very quickly. The steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, for one, was quite clear about what he wanted to see in young recruits, and in a speech called "A Road to Business Success: A Talk to Young Men," he offered up an interesting warning: Forget yourself, he essentially said, and maybe try being somebody else a few hours a day. Maybe somebody better than you. I was familiar with Carnegie’s track record ― that he’d started the company that became U.S. Steel, that he’d made millions of dollars on the backs of thousands of coal miners, and that he was a short, pushy firecracker of a man who later felt somehow guilty about his piles of money. But I hadn’t expected to find him articulating a strong case for being, in essence, a total poseur ― and for feeling no shame about it either. Looking at the train wrecks narrowly avoided by people feeling a little too at home on the job, I have to say that Carnegie was onto something. Striking a pose may be the best route for anyone hoping to emerge from corporate underlinghood with their dignity ― and even, strangely, their sense of self ― intact.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618713506
• ISBN 13: 9780618713509
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 232