Rules From The Mistake Century
A little advice from Werner Herzog and me
I’m reading “Every Man For Himself And God Against All” by Werner Herzog.
I like his films quite a lot1. But I love to hear him talk. I love his trademark Bavarian articulation. This book drips with his cadence, his accent, his sense of humor, and his finality.
He writes, “I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become ‘uninhabitable.’ I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis – along with quite a few other mistakes – that has made the twentieth century so terrible.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” he continues, “the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.”
First of all, I could kill 12 people to have written that. I mean not kill but, y’know, taunt. Snub. Opprobriate.
I discussed this quote with my therapist yesterday. Yes, I’m in therapy. I’m also once again newly sober. So fundamentally deep consideration about the soul and therapy, I love it. I want to roll in it, like a dog on a dead gopher.
(I’ll address sobriety at some point – it’s an absolutely wonderful thing for me and it is also so fucking boring – I miss shots of tequila and annoying people with Peter Gabriel songs on the jukebox and telling the same joke 7 times. I miss it. But, clarity is great, and despite what Frank Sinatra said about waking up in the morning being the best you’ll feel all day, I think that’s an inordinately important side effect.)
I don’t think therapy is a bad thing. First of all, you don’t shine the light on every dark patch of your soul at the same time.
You don’t open everything up to examination all at once. If you do it right, and I am not saying I’m doing it right, but I think what I am doing is helping; if you do it right, you can start to pinpoint, and understand, and address, things about your personality that cause you pain. And pain to others around you.
Start in the basement, Werner. At least if you turn all the lights on in the basement, the rats and roaches have to go somewhere else.
Part of being 54, and part of being in therapy, is accepting that you might actually, finally, after all these years, know something.
That your experience, that who you are, is of some actual value, not as defined by others or by your job or your family, but by you.
I keep lists of things that I’ve learned throughout my career. I hope that they will be useful in the future, either for personal reference, or when managing-up.
It really helps win an argument when someone raises a terrible suggestion and you can instantly pull out an existing document that says, in plain black text, “Don’t do this.”
I thought I’d share some of it here. Some of this relates directly to the topic at hand, and some of it is just hard-earned life lessons.
I left out things like “Don’t take dumb money” and “Don’t hire offshore engineers” because this isn’t a Masterclass in how to shit the bed in a startup. But I could teach that class, too.
Nick’s Rules
If you find yourself doing work primarily to look like you’re busy, you are not fooling anyone: either
a. you’re about to be fired, or
b. the company is about to go under.
If someone is toxic in your life or work situation, remove them immediately. If your boss is toxic, leave as soon as you can. If you are the toxic one, throw yourself into a cactus. Please. There’s no helping you.
Common signs of a toxic work environment
Some mental health and hygiene tips: Clean your desk before you stop working or leave for the night. Make a bullet list of what you have to do tomorrow. Do this every night. You will sleep better. Make the list by hand. I use a heavy sharpie on a sketch pad, and find that the thick lines and permanence are inspirational and persistent.
Walk into every meeting with handwritten notes on paper of what you need to contribute and what you want to get out of it. It’s neuroscience. A five minute meeting is a miracle on the level of St. Thomas Beckett and the cheese. Putting the notes on paper burns them into your brain, and a focused, clear agenda puts a torch to digression and chatter.
When working on any given team project, everyone uses the same toolset. This goes for calendar, communications (eg Slack or Teams or Skype), project management, whatever it is. If someone thinks they’re special or it will take too much of their time to “learn a new thing,” they’re going to be a problem. And you probably will not finish said project on time.
If you are winging it in a meeting outside your immediate circle, you are dead. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing in a specific situation, write down what you do know, and have a list of questions about what you don’t. Winging it has the stench of desperation.
When applying for a job, write about what you would do in the position you’re applying for. Whether it’s in the cover letter, or a brief, bulleted list of points. Folks who need to hire very smart people are so much more likely to listen to you when it sounds like you’ve thought about the company, the position, and how you bring unusual and effective chemistry to the alchemical mix. Communicate in specific who you are, what you’re good at, what you might be like to work with, and what you absolutely hate doing.
Blake, from downtown, very clearly explains what he is good at, and what he might be like to work with Easy Apply is the enemy. You can hit Easy Apply every day from now until you crumble into dust, and Protegrity is still not going to hire your ass.
It goes without saying but unless you are talking to people every day, and new people every day, in your own network or beyond, you will have a much harder time finding opportunities. It’s 50% experience, 50% luck, and keeping the job is the other 85%.
Corollary: Don’t ever hire me for a job that requires math.
Learn the lingua franca: I’ve been doing business in Texas for the past 16 years. Yeah, they’ll use the same gibberish you’ve heard, like “low hanging fruit” and vaguely offensive versions like “open kimono,” but also:
Shit through a straw — overdo yourself getting something done, as in “Don’t shit through a straw trying to get the deal”
Pig in a poke — something that lacks usability, or is worthless, and not checked out first hand, as in “They spent $5 million and it turned out to be a pig in a poke”
If you are non-technical: Don’t ever trust an engineer who says you won’t understand something because it’s “too technical” or “you’re not an engineer.” They are either lying or hiding their insecurities behind inscrutability.
And then there’s the Cardinal Rule: You are always one YouTube video away from wasting $350.
I had to install a new GPU in my PC. A new graphics card. I did not have enough faith in myself to open the hood and do it, even though I had certainly done similar things before. So I hired a guy. I could have watched a YouTube video, but I hired a guy.
He spent an hour dripping scruffy beard sweat in to my carpet and showing prodigious amounts of upper hind quarter ass. He finally said the GPU was corrupt and I’d have to call the manufacturer. He left me an invoice and he left the computer open. I looked at it for a minute, realized he hadn’t pushed hard enough to seat the card. I pressed down, it clicked into place, and I had a working computer.
Anyway, I hope this has been helpful, or at least you can agree with my points. If not, I’d love to hear otherwise.
Nothing here is particularly new, and some of my advice is probably so common sense, it veers into cliche.
But I’ve watched too many people let situations drift out of their control, seen too many folks mourn their joblessness but sit at home, indolent.
Hell, I’ve been there. That’s why we’re talking.
Herzog also writes about Fitzcarraldo, the film where he hauled a steamship over a mountain to make a movie about an obsessed man who hauls a steamship over a mountain2.
“I risked all the money I had in the world to get the thing off the ground,” Herzog explains. “After a very short time, I was so reduced that I was living in a converted chicken coop with a papier-mache ceiling just a little higher than the top of my head. Rats scuffed around at night. Finally, I was left with no food. But I always made sure I had excellent shampoo and the finest soaps because it helps one’s self-esteem in the jungle if you bathe in a river and smell good afterward.”
Don’t do therapy and save your safari money for perfumed soaps. I don’t agree, but I certainly want to hear more.
Until next time…
Reach out to me at nicholas@areyouexperienced.co - again, it’s dot C-O. GoDaddy had a special.
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There’s a lot more to come. I hope you’re enjoying these, or at least feeling seen.
Ok, some Herzog films I like a lot:
Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) and its brilliant Popol Vuh score
Grizzly Man (2005), also its Richard Thompson score
Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)
Encounters at the End of the World (2007)
Lest this become an infinite loop, it also inspired Burden of Dreams, a documentary by Les Blank about Werner hauling the steamship over the mountain to make the movie about hauling the steamship over the mountain.
Thanks, Nick! I needed that.
Notes taken.
Love your integrated writing style!