Asshole: How I Got Rich & Happy by Not Giving a Damn About Anyone & How You Can, Too - Hardcover

Kihn, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767927265 ISBN 13: 9780767927260

Publisher: Crown Archetype, 2008

Synopsis

Nice guys, pushovers, soft-touches and suckers:

Tired of being walked all over?
When the waiter brings you something you didn’t order, do you assume he knows best?
Are you ready to demand the respect you deserve?

Martin Kihn doesn’t care what your answers are, because of course you need this book. Watch and learn as this one-time softy transforms himself into a lean, mean a-hole machine.

About this title

About the Author

MARTIN KIHN is an Emmy Award–nominated former writer for MTV’s Pop-Up Video, and the author of House of Lies. He has worked at Spy, Forbes, and New York, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Details, and Cosmopolitan. He lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

STEP ONE

Keep Your Eye on the (Ass)Hole, Not the Donut
"By my foes, sir, I profit in the knowledge of myself." —William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Having decided to make a start, it's time to focus on where you want to go. There are flyboys out there, men who have polished prickhood to a glossy sheen. And there's a name for such people: co-workers. Also: role models. Go find them. These masters of disaster can be found in almost every neighborhood, office, SUV, reality TV cooking show, and roman à clef. Look around. Whether it's your boss, your brother, or the guy who's sleeping with your spouse, these people have what you want. Watch them and learn.

If you open your eyes, you will see Assholes everywhere. I guarantee this in writing. It doesn't even matter where you are, although I understand many of them live in the South. My wife Gloria and I ran into an outstanding example at our car rental place, and he unwittingly guided me to this First Step.

We were standing in line on a Friday afternoon. Let's say there were eight or ten of us at a small car rental facility on the Upper West Side--a long line, for that location. There were three agents behind the counter doing what I assume they were paid to do since they did it every time I was there: stare at their screen, poke at their keyboard, say, "You gotta call the 800 number!," disappear for an hour, make two personal calls, then say, "The system's down." And God help you if you were going to try to redeem frequent-renter points for your car. To do that you had to spend the night on the little couch by the water fountain.

Tension was high. Then someone arrived who took the game to another level.

He was a short man with an unruly, curly mop and glasses he obviously needed, holding a green carry-on bag and a tiny folded umbrella. His American Express Platinum Card was already out as he crashed the front of the line.

"I'm running late, I've gotta emergency!" he growled. "President's Circle member--name's Scheuer."

One of the counter ladies--the one who had spent the last six hours looking for the "Esc" key on her keyboard, and then another two aiming for it with her twelve-inch nail--said, "How you spell that?"

"S-C-H-E-U-E-R."

"Slow down," she requested.

Now, this was New York City. We know what to do with line crashers. Some are given a suspended sentence of immediate banishment from the building, but most are stripped naked and insulted to death. At least, in our minds.

"There's a line," said the woman who was at the front of it.

"Yeah," added someone else.

"I'm running late," said Mr. Scheuer.

"We've been waiting."

"Yeah," whined the guy behind her, "we were here first."

The counter lady asked Mr. Scheuer if a midsize vehicle would be all right.

The short answer was: no. "You get this wrong every time," he sneered. "I can't believe this. I need a full-size—how can you fuck that up all the time?"

"It's not me, sir."

"I don't care," he said. Then a thought occurred to him. "I need a free upgrade—you know how much I spend here. Look that up. You got any Jaguars in?"

"No, sir, we sure don't."

"Don't help him," whined some pathetic guy at the back of the line, "he cut in front." Oh, yeah, that guy was me.

"We have an Escalade," said the counter lady, whistling in admiration. "Only four hundred miles. Practically brand new."

"Sounds okay to me," said Mr. Scheuer. "Throw in a NeverLost with that."

"Already on board, sir."

After he had driven off in his magnificent machine, my wife and I had a couple hours left in the line to ponder what we'd just seen. Our reactions were different. Mine was that it was unfair and poopy and I would get revenge by taking my two hundred dollars of annual business to another rental company, and that would show them. I was livid, although you would never have been able to tell from anything I did.

On the other hand, Gloria started a girl-to-girl round-robin with some people in the line about what a dick that guy was, which somehow morphed into a free mini-seminar on folding omelettes.

I wasn't even listening. In a dark part of my soul, I admired that guy.

He had something I wanted so badly I could smell it. And he reminded me of somebody. It took me a moment to connect the dots, but when I did I realized there was a cesspool of Asshole wisdom right in front of my nose: the Nemesis.

So your first order of business is to find a good role model. If you live and work in America, this won't be hard. It's important to observe the schmuck closely for a period of weeks. It's even more important that you do not let him know what you're doing, for obvious reasons.

I began my field work one night as I was leaving the office. Carrying my travel tote filled with important direct marketing papers, I stopped by the Nemesis's office. He was typing furiously with two fingers and a thumb on his huge Mac computer.

"Hey," I said, buddy to buddy.

He didn't look at me and kept typing.

"Working late, huh?" I asked.

"It's only eight."

"Oh--you're right. Thought it was much, much later."

I stood there for a long time until he finally chose to stop pounding on his innocent keypad and notice me for real. "What's up?"

"How're the projects going?"

"Okay," he said.

"Working on any good pitches?"

"Could be."

"Need any help--?"

"I'll let you know."

He started scrutinizing e-mail on his outsized flat screen. I noticed that his neck was almost bigger around than his head. That must have taken a lot of the kind of weightlifting I didn't even know existed. Did people lift weights with their head? Also, his hands were enormous, and we all know what that means.

On the walls in his office he had an art poster of--I'm not making this up--a credit card, and a framed photograph of an ATM. His desk had a little bobblehead of a St. Louis baseball player, a Rubik's Cube keychain, four staplers, a black Swiss Army jackknife, a scary-looking silver letter-opener, and an unspent round of automatic ammunition.

"Cool," I said. "Lunch next week?"

He looked at me like I'd just taken a dump on his rug.

Just to make sure, I looked down.

***

Over the course of a week or two, make a careful case study of your role model. Be thorough but quick; he's always moving. Think of it like those documentaries on Animal Planet that profile a struggling species and then say it will die out in a few weeks due to an oil spill. The only difference is you are the struggling species, and the role model is the oil spill.

Now I must confess up front that in the course of my time observing the Nemesis in action, I did not see or hear explicit evidence of a number of behaviors you might have expected. For instance, he never actually pummeled a colleague in my presence, at least not physically. He never called a woman a "skanky ho"—although he called many men that. And despite his reputation for having a mercurial temper, I did not see him pistol-whip or machine-gun another VP, at least in the office.

Those are the things he didn't do.

What he gave me were priceless lessons in the ways in which an A-plus Asshole can operate in the corridors of corporate America through a combination of high volume, wild egomania, and a breathtaking lack of social skills. His techniques can usefully be divided into major themes--what we might call The Asshole's Six Secrets of Workplace Effectiveness.

They are, in order of importance:
Number 1. Show No Interest in Others
At first glance, this one may look easy. Most of us are self-centered in the extreme, and it should be no big deal to kick it up a notch or two in order to gain maximum benefit from our hobby. However, the fact is that where true selfishness is concerned, the Nemesis makes us look like Saint Francis.

The Asshole is self-seeking and proud of it; this is America, whose motto was recently changed to "Land of the Me." If there's one more cookie left on the plate, you know who's taking it. If it means standing up for more than ten seconds he's not giving you his seat on the bus. The trouble with the rest of us wannabes is we don't follow through. We fail to take this First Secret literally and show NO—that is, zip, nada, empty circle—interest in others.

We had a regular parade of job candidates coming through our doors to replace the people who had seen the light and left, and we interviewed them in teams. That is, four or five of us at various levels would meet with these people for a half hour, one after another, and grill them on their backgrounds and present a "case," or marketing thought experiment, so they could show us how they'd tackle it. Then after each victim had left we'd meet in the boss's office to debrief and come to a decision.

The Nemesis and I were often on the same interviewing team, meeting the same candidates and attending the same debriefings. And because my division was about three thousand people stuffed into an office space built for fifty, the interviews usually had to be held in semipublic places like conference rooms--even, one time, on a window ledge next to the copy machine. Thus it was very easy for me to "happen" to overhear the Nemesis "interviewing" a candidate.

His encounters with the candidates were very different from mine. Most of the airtime was eaten up by the Nemesis, in effect, interviewing...

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown Archetype
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0767927265
• ISBN 13: 9780767927260
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256