how to be a great employee

i’m back.

A few months ago, I revealed my tip-top linkedin business advice worth $50,000 in free value (cuz I said so) that inspired BILLIONS to thrive and express their true selves, but like only their work selves that are mostly manicured lol…

It was so tip-top Forbes hit me up and begged me to distill my genius from the worlds of wisdom I got from business undergrad and my whopping four internships to tell you how to be better at your job… but mostly all the things you’re definitely doing wrong and need to fix (like asap). 

After doing some mission critical market analysis, that's real and reliable and not at all made up, it was clearly self-evident there’s a big blue ocean of untapped market opportunity where I can leverage my unique value proposition.

So I decided to make the first ever so simple step-by-step guide to be a great employee:

1. Main maxim of employee excellence: Do what you’re told and don’t ask why. Being an obedient child was all prep for being a good student which was all prep for being a good employee. See?? You were made for this. 

2. Spend ample hours on super ambiguous tasks with two million ways of doing it instead of asking for clarification cuz that just shows you’re incompetent. No one has time to explain things. You’re expected to just know. Say “okay I’ll take a stab at it, haha,” then nervously chuckle and cry.

3. Read lots of life-changing Inc. articles that Google recommends (instead of starting that report you’ve been putting off for two weeks) like  ‘What EVERY successful entrepreneur does before 6am’ or ‘12 traits ALL millionaires share’ or 'How to get AHEAD of 99.92% of losers people' and reflect on how your life went so terribly wrong. 

4. Don’t question whether what you’re doing is important or makes any sense or will be used and especially don’t ask if you actually enjoy it cuz you need the job lol and gotta look busy.

5. Always look busy and talk busy and explain to everyone at every chance you get how busy busy busy you are. 

6. Anytime anyone asks how you’re feeling, don’t be fooled. It’s a trick question. Business is a gladiator sport and there’s no room for feelings. Just reply: “Meetings!” or “Forecasts!” or “Due diligence!” and hurry away.

7. Send sentence fragments on Slack and mispellt emils to show how speedy you move at all times.

8. Do whatever you can to keep that fucking little green dot on Slack. (A trusty rock on the spacebar works wonders but i heard through the winevine the windows media player also does the trick).

9. Write emails with lots of exclamation points!! So people know you're friendly and extremely excited to be corresponding with them! But make sure to mix in a few periods to prove your normalness. So they know you're not manic. Unless you don't care if you seem unhinged!!! Because you just might be today!!!!!!

10. Be extra enthusiastic even if you feel dead inside cuz it’s all about a positive attitude and no one has time for your existential crisis cuz they also feel dead inside. 

11. Pay very close attention in big team-wide meetings cuz everything being said is very important and very critical to doing your job and not made up last minute. 

12. Take notes at all times. Even if it doesn’t seem important, it is. Everything is important. And you’re not important enough to decide what’s important anyway. 

13. Always remember you’re irreplaceable and definitely can’t be fired one Tuesday cuz some rich old guy decided to restructure divisions when he got bored. I do 17 ½ positive affirmations in the mirror every morning to tell myself I am a valued employee… cuz no one else will lol

14. Material abundance fills spiritual hunger and money will make you whole. If you’re feeling sad or empty you just don’t have enough. Buck up and speed up and spend up cowboy.

15. You need to be a white collar assembly line of productivity. It doesn't matter if your kid is sick or you’re busy moving or forget what your friends look like. Your personal life is an inefficiency. There are urgent emails to be answered. Family time is for old people and you can go to the dentist when you’re dead. You’re in the fast lane.

16. Mess with the graph data range until all the ugly bits are hidden. Meekly punch in made up numbers in Excel to show forecasts to a client who smiles in approval cuz it confirms what they already thought (cuz you made it look like that). Make “reasonable accounting adjustments” to pump up quarterly earnings so the exec team’s options vest. Fudging the numbers can’t really be lying. If everyone else does it, it must just be standard approved normal industry operating procedure. Plus, it's not like there’s a virtue committee handing out big bags of money for telling the truth or whatever. Moral ambiguity is for socialists. 

17. Forget your interests. You don’t have any. Your interests are the company’s interests - it’s called employee alignment. Look it up. 

18. The more hours you work, the more it shows you’re willing to sacrifice for the company’s bottom line. Me? I work 400 hour weeks. I hire people to dress like me (gray t-shirt and jorts) and work like me and procrastinate like me so it looks like i’m a non-stop work machine. I made a life-size paper mache replica of myself to sit at my desk so i get every darn second of office face time possible. This is good. This makes me more valuable to the next company that might just hire me if i beg enough to also sacrifice my life for them to make money.

19. If you’re not in a fancy full-time job, don’t say you’re unemployed or people will question what you’re doing with your life and why you’re so lazy and unfunctional and tell you to get it together. Just say “I’m on a sabbatical” and they’ll ooh and aah and think you’re pretty enlightened.

20. And if you work hard enough during your prime years of health and pray every night for a promotion, you could be in your boss's scuffed shoes one day, making subordinates anxious with vague ever-changing expectations and indecipherable emails, eyes rubbed raw from glaring at people’s stupid powerpoints until you can’t read street signs anymore.

Ps. accepting applications 4 my new biz consulting company. it’s foolproof. if anything fails we can just blame the client for bad implementation. i’m the high level visionary ideas guy and you’re expected to just make it happen… by EoD plz.

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Thank you

CansaFis Foote

and

Haley Brengartner

for your early feedback.

If you didn’t like this, it wasn’t written by me, but my business alter-ego Thomas R. Dixon… guy is intense. And if you liked this, you may enjoy my piece on helping alex dobrenko with linkedin

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👋 what i’ve been up to:

• The past two weeks have been a rough patch. Writing hasn’t been easy and work is chaotic. My mom’s moving out of our house so I’ve packed up all my stuff (mostly books) and said goodbye to the suburb I grew up in. I’ve seen better days, but it happens. There are no highlights without everything that falls beneath them. I try not to trust my perception that everything is bad. That’s the funny thing about brains: they stretch “now” into “forever”.

• Highlights of the week: (i) getting together with all my friends from school (easily the most I’ve laughed in ages), (ii) polar swim in Lake Ontario, (iii) chance to work with a philosophy & religion professor.

• Early this morning, I flew to Austin, Texas for the final few weeks of the book launch.

✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Writer Toni Morrison on disliking her first job:

I knew that if I told my mother how unhappy I was she would tell me to quit.

Then one day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.” Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it.

In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”

… Since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.

Source: The Work You Do, the Person You Are

📸 photos of the week:

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You got all my love,

Tommy