Moving the needle in Journal of life stuff

My last post moved the needle forward on the internal discussion. So, two questions this time:

1. What motivates me?
2. What happened to me?

2017 was a nexus point in my life. I got laid off from a job not because of my work performance, but because I wasn’t friends with the boss. That was the only reason. Objectively, by every.single.metric, I was the best employee he had by a country mile. But that bastard laid me off because he didn’t like me at a personal level and had the fucking gall to write it was my work performance as the official reason. The HR lady wouldn’t even look at the reports for my metrics that PROVED he was lying.

That experience broke 3 lies I believed in.

1. You can find a good employer and stay there 20 years.
2. Being good at what you do guarantees employment.
3. People in charge know what they are doing.

Every job interview I have they ask me, phrased one way or another, if I’ll stay. Because I don’t have 5-10 years at every employer. I never expect to leave, and I don’t get ‘tired’ of working for someone. I only ever half-heartedly believed that I could find a company that I could spend my entire life working for, but now I realize the ONLY company I’ll probably ever manage to work at for more than 5 years will be the one that I run myself.

I was the best employee they had. Other people were smarter, other people could figure things out I couldn’t, but when it came time to show down and take a huge risk that generated huge revenue? I was the only one who jumped to take those risks and I knocked every single one of them out of the park. In 4 years I saved my company over $100 million with a total expense of less than $1 million. How many employees can truly claim, much less prove, to bring in literally 100x their value? Among my peers, the average was that they only broke even if you counted the theoretical costs of upset customers. I could outright prove deals had been made or maintained because of my work.

Number three is one I, again, only somewhat subscribed to. Respect is earned, never given. That has been a lifelong rule. But at the same time, you assume that in order to be a high-level manager at a billion dollar plus company you have to actually be competent. Well, you do, but not very competent. You can absolutely hire and terminate people based purely on social whims and not empirical data because to be a leader in a big company, you biggest skill is kissing ass and giving blowjobs to those above you rather than any objective metric like profitability or productivity. “Well, if you lose money you get fired!” Wrong. If you lose money you have to be able to give such good blowjobs to your leaders that they think the problem wasn’t yours, and those leaders, in turn, don’t understand the basic fucking concept that ANY leader must take extreme ownership of everything they do.

In that capacity, I sometimes think I would be far happier working for a company formed from former military types. They at least understand what the difference between a good and bad leader is, and have 0 tolerance for some asshat trying to say he failed because his team failed him. No, he failed because HE FUCKING FAILED! Own that shit!

And that difference in view is reflected in what I’m writing here. I got laid off for a BS reason, and I know and can prove it was a BS reason, yet I take ownership for why it was my personal failure. I identify the things wrong in myself that lead to an outcome I didn’t want. That is extreme ownership.

Once I lost my job, I managed to maintain my weight for about 2 months, but then two things hit me at once:

1. I had a REALLY bad date.
2. I lost a job offer I was a slam-dunk for.

I was normal weight. I was the top end of normal, but look up my height and weight in any medical text and it would have said I was within the limits of the ‘normal’ range. For someone who spent his entire life obese, that was an accomplishment. I hoped I’d finally be attractive to the women I found attractive (which does not mean 10/10 models. Rather, people who aren’t obese themselves and generally have everything were it’s supposed to be on their body). I’m perfectly happy with a 7/10. 6 is touch and go. 5 and below general requires some form of disfigurement or obesity. At least to me.

So I go on this date and the personality of the person was just…wrong. In so many ways. But I didn’t have the courage to stand up for myself. I was still ashamed of having an opinion. I still was apologizing for existing and being who I was. What’s worse is that this other person claimed to be a Christian but didn’t believe in a single Christian belief. She prayed before eating, and she went to a building called a church, but God wasn’t a real person. He didn’t die for anyone’s sin because sin was made up. I could keep going. It was insane. And yet, this same person shamed me for not being Christian enough myself, and for having different opinions than they did…AND I LET THAT HAPPEN?! What the fuck was wrong with me? I know what was wrong, and I’ve taken steps to fix it, but the event happened all the same, and it broke my faith in my faith. If that was what passed for a Christian on this planet, I wanted nothing to do with them.

I know there are better people outside of the shithole that is New England, where every church has to fly a pride flag or else men with guns will come in and shut them down for being a hate group. It’s a disgrace. A part of me hopes I can move to the midwest, go to a random church, and find what I want to see. I doubt it very much, but I have a tiny bit of hope that people haven’t abandoned God everywhere, just up here.

As for the job? I talked about bitcoin and that lost me the job I was a slam dunk for. Instead, they forced me to take a different role where I’d be a programmer. They lied to my face to get me to accept the job offer. They were that desperate for a developer. I was miserable in that role, despite being ‘ok’ at it. I wasn’t great, but I wasn’t terrible. The problem was mostly that I wrote really good code, but I wasn’t good at writing my own test cases, automating those tests, or being super great at integrating my code with other people’s. Like I said, I was ‘ok’ at best. I wasn’t great. But being able to write code that works well is still valuable.

If you have a team of 5 people and 2 write excellent code but can’t test or integrate it, but the other 3 can’t write good code, but can integrate and test it? Fabulous. Pay all 5 and make sure that the 2 best coders keep the 3 integrators fed with work to do. Keep everybody happy and on the same page/team. Ensure everybody listens to each other and nobody’s ego gets too large. That kind of setup can work great. But, our leadership didn’t understand how to do that, even when I explained it to them. Sigh.

Losing that job offer broke me. I gained 20lbs in 2 weeks because I ate anything I wanted any time I wanted purely so that when the phone rang and I accepted the call I wouldn’t sound angry and pissed off to the person calling. I used food to keep my mood positive enough that I could act like a happy and well-adjusted person.

But the damage had been done. No matter what I’d done or accomplished, I couldn’t win in a vacuum. You aren’t supposed to desire or expect validation from others, and yet, when you really understand life, you realize that the validation of others is the only currency that has any meaning in your life at all. I am a living example of what happens if you actually live without validation. If you really are all you need on your own without other people. It sucks, and it isn’t something to aspire to.

If other people don’t care about you, love you, want to fight for you, and appreciate you, then your life will never be fulfilling. You don’t need 10,000 followers to be validated. 1-5 people you know and can call/talk to/etc are all a person really needs. 1-5 people on whom they can actually rely. For most people, that’s their parents, or a brother/sister, or some other family member, or a husband. But for me? I don’t even have family. I really am alone.

I keep asking myself why I don’t try to be a leader. Why don’t I go back to being a leader? I am good at it. I am really good at it. But I haven’t’ done it in nearly 20 years. So why did I stop?

I stopped because where I was leading was in school, and what I was leading, with one exception, was always the worst students who didn’t want to do anything. I was the A student who got grouped with the D and F students so that the teacher could lie and say they were C students and not look bad on their performance review. I got so sick of it that I stopped working with other people and did projects alone. I stopped wanting to be responsible for others because I kept being given the shittiest people on the planet. I burned out before I was 10 years old.

Those experiences made me so bitter about being a leader that I never looked back. The reality is, it shouldn’t be that hard to lead actual adults, because they have a vested interest in not seeing their life come crashing down around them. And, unlike in school, if you’re stuck with an employee who refuses to do their job, you can terminate that person.

There was a car was company in Indiana that had management boot camps. Perhaps I should look into something like that as a way to get my foot in the door. Look into MBA courses on MIT’s Open Courseware. I think the MBA is largely a joke, but the people who hire managers are almost universally empty-brained monkeys. Wait, no, this is a terrible idea. Scroll up 2 pages and re-read the section about a manger’s #1 job being blowjobs and ass kissing. Nevermind. I can lead, but I have to lead in my own company. Fuck.

So what company do I start? How do I do it? What do I do? Time to go back to thinking.