Mr Motivation Strikes Again

A while ago, I posted about the Art of Underachievement, where I introduced a character called Mr Motivation, a conglomeration of a few people I have met in many years of suffering the ups and downs of corporate life in the seemingly inexorable rat race.

Mr Motivation is an arrogant man (or woman) who is so driven by the lust for money, achievement, material goods and power that he sacrifices everything, including his soul, and thinks that every other person should do the same. To him, I am an underperforming imbecile who simply must be unhappy, bored and depressed in my pointless dreary underachieving life even though I have found a niche in my career that I am relatively happy with. In other words I have found, for me, an almost perfect balance between work and life with benefits that make me comfortable and happy.

Mr Motivation considers me to be a loser and himself a winner.

And now Mr Motivation has struck again – and he has made me annoyed.

I have a thick skin and can deal with people like this. I give as good as I get and remain totally and utterly unimpressed with their so-called achievements. I don’t care whether they have a huge house and top of the range cars. The fact that their salary is bigger than mine is irrelevant.

In short, the only person who cares about Mr Motivation and his life is Mr Motivation.

However, this time he has gone too far and raised doubts in the mind of Mrs PM.

Mrs PM and I both do a similar kind of job (it’s how we met). We are both good at our jobs and Mrs PM is particularly happy in her chosen career – certainly happier than I am in mine. She is at a level where she can cope with the demands of the job and takes pleasure in her achievements.

She is not a high flyer who wants to dominate her chosen career, working relentlessly to climb up the ladder, achieve goal after goal, winning the rat race as a high flying manager in charge of hundreds of people; she just wants contentment and enough to be comfortable – just like me.

Last year, Mrs PM went to a university reunion and ended up in conversation with an acolyte of Mr Motivation. He simply said to her:

“What happened?” 

In other words, why are you stuck in a rut with no ambition to better yourself?

In other words, she was subjected to a typical quotation from the bible of Mr Motivation.

I have had discussions with people like this before; Mrs PM rarely considers this and these ill-chosen words pushed several buttons - mostly the button labelled SELF DOUBT.

Mrs PM is a very clever woman – far more intelligent than I am. She excelled at university and so far had been successful at whatever she has turned her hand to in her career.

Mr Motivation’s acolyte is a typical example of the kind of person who thinks:

“If you’re not earning megabucks or haven’t climbed high up on the corporate ladder then you are an abject failure. If you don’t work really hard to achieve world domination then you may as well be an amoeba.”

Mrs PM opened her heart to me and we had a chat about it. I had to stop myself from saying:

“He’s a complete arsehole”

I didn’t want to make her think that she really is a failure. She isn’t. She is far from it.

I just tried to give her some perspective.

First of all, Mrs PM earns a pretty good salary. Like me, the demands on her time can be quite high at times but mostly her position gives her an opportunity to balance life and work evenly. Her work, while it can sometimes be demanding does not take over her life.

Furthermore, unlike the motivational acolyte, she is in a happy relationship and has enough time to pursue other goals in life. I tried to emphasise the differences between the motivational acolyte and herself and made her realise that she is fact happier than he is.

I’ve met this guy before and I will again. And when I do, I will have a chat with him. I will point out to him that while money and career power are the most important driving for motivational acolytes, not everybody wants to reach the top of the tree. Some of us are happy where we are. I’ve had this conversation many times before.

I have to tell you the story of one person in particular I used to work with. I’ll call him Dirk (not his real name).

I met Dirk at a company social event. At the time I didn’t work with him but we actually got on well enough to become friends. A year later, fate intervened and we ended up in the same department and as I started working with him, I realised that he was a highly intelligent guy – but also very ambitious.

At first, it wasn’t too bad. However, his desire to climb the corporate ladder soon began to take over. He was more driven by promotions than his enjoyment of the job. And it worked. He was promoted.

Before I go on, let me just reinforce the fact that I don’t mind ambitious people. There are people I work with who have climbed up and up yet remained friendly decent people who I am proud to call friends and still get on really well with.

Dirk was different. Dirk relished his responsibility and began to work longer and longer hours, pushing his team to do the same, unnecessarily so in my opinion. As he climbed, he changed. He started looking down on people like me and often came out with quips, in meetings, like:

“This is exactly why you won’t be a manager, Dave.”

However, it was soon evident that his ambition did not match his ability. He was a classic example of the Peter Principle – a person who is promoted beyond his level of competence.

He had no clue how to manage people.

And it got worse. He rose to be a pretty powerful manager – but not a good manager.

One Christmas, on my last day of the year, we were all out on the annual pub crawl. He marched up to me and said in front of others, “I was so close to cancelling your holiday and sending you to Singapore.”

“Merry pharking Christmas, Dirk,” I said before walking away.

In the end, he was found out. Redundancy struck and he ended up on the list.

A couple of years later, he reappeared at the company as a mere project manager – a significant step down. Sadly for him, the Peter Principle still applied – he ended up being made redundant a second time.

I haven’t seen him since.

One thing I know is that I feel sorry for Dirk. I would still buy him a beer but I would chat to him about how his career fluctuated and failed. I would ask him whether he should have stayed at the level he was good at. I think I might still be working with him today if he had.

Yet somehow I imagine he will still be clinging onto the dream of ruling the world and working his fingers to the bone to do so – while looking at people like me and calling me a failure.

Thankfully, Mrs PM is happier now, content in the knowledge that she is brilliant at a job she really loves.

That, to me, is an achievement. I'm proud of her.

The Art Of Underachievement

When I look back on my life, I do so with a sense of satisfaction, a touch of sadness, a lot of euphoria and smidgeon of pride. I have achieved enough to keep me happy and one thing is certain: I have not sold my soul.

I am comfortable and the balance in my life is not that far from perfect; it could be better but it could also be far, far worse.

Yet there are certain people in the world who might look at my life and call me a failure – or at least an underachiever.

Such people rule the world; such people sacrifice everything to climb the corporate and social ladder. They have one goal in mind – to be the best – or even the best of the best – or, absurdly, the best of the best of the best – you catch my drift I’m sure.

Such people look down on me because, in their eyes, I have the potential to move on in life. They probably look down on you too, dear reader.

I have a problem with this philosophy and there are good reasons why.Let’s take one of these rulers, these overachievers and give him a name: Mr Motivation.

Mr Motivation is driven, so driven in fact that he is blinkered. His focus is his career or his determination to climb the corporate ladder, or to achieve absolute greatness in whatever field he has targeted and he will do anything to get there.

While his ambitions may be admirable, the cost of achieving those ambitions is too high for somebody like me.

I will illustrate what I mean with a conversation between me, as an underachiever, and Mr Motivation as an overachiever.

Mr Motivation: What have you achieved in life?

Plastic Mancunian: I have a job, I have a lovely lady, two kids, a car a house, three cats and I get to travel, write a blog and relax as and when the need or the desire arises. I’ve achieved enough.

Mr Motivation: Sounds dull. How much do you earn?

Plastic Mancunian: Enough to keep me happy and pay the bills.

Mr Motivation: Well, looking at your car and your house – and the area where you live, you just seem ordinary to me.

Plastic Mancunian: That’s what I am – an ordinary bloke.

Mr Motivation: How boring. You could be so much more. You have a degree and you are obviously intelligent. Why are you not running your company? How can you be happy with your life as it is?

Plastic Mancunian: I prefer a decent work/life balance. I go to work; I do my job; I come home; I do the things I want to do.

Mr Motivation: Pointless. You should strive to be the best. That’s the kind of drivel I hear from underachievers everywhere. Let me tell you what I have achieved in the last ten years. I am the managing director of a multimillion pound company. Last week alone I secured the biggest deal in the history of my niche. I drive a Bentley, own two Porsches and a seven bedroomed house in the Cheshire countryside. I climbed to the top in record time. I work my fingers to the bone. I don’t just “do my job”; I excel at my job. I go above and beyond the call of duty every single day of the week. I work as many hours as I can to achieve what I want – and it doesn’t stop there. I want to move on and earn millions.

Plastic Mancunian: Nobody cares.

Mr Motivation: Excuse me?

Plastic Mancunian: Nobody cares. Of all the billions of people who live on this planet, how many people do you think give a damn about your promotions, your cars, your house or the fact that you secured a multimillion pound deal?

Mr Motivation: Aren’t you impressed?

Plastic Mancunian: Not really. And let me tell you this – neither is anybody else. Your friends may congratulate you but really only those closest to you will care. Joe Bloggs in the street won’t give two hoots. So – you’ve bought a new Ferrari. Big deal. I’d like to drive one, and I’d be happy to be a passenger if you offered to drive me around – but impressed? Nah!!

Mr Motivation: That’s so sad.

Plastic Mancunian: Why?

Mr Motivation: It just shows that you have no goals to better yourself.

Plastic Mancunian: Do you believe that you are better than me because you have material goods? Because you have sacrificed so much time to get where you are? My soul is intact – is yours?

Mr Motivation: What do you mean?

Plastic Mancunian: Well I can’t help but notice that you are carrying a Blackberry that has been chirruping constantly during our conversation.

Mr Motivation: That’s because I am important. I am constantly on call and need to be able to react to get things done – to make more money – to be the best.

Plastic Mancunian: But it’s Saturday afternoon. How many hours work do you do on average?

Mr Motivation: I work 60 sometimes 70 hours a week. You have to do that if you want to be the best.

Plastic Mancunian: Okay – but that phone is still chirruping – so you probably work longer.

Mr Motivation: I reap the rewards. You can see where I am.

Plastic Mancunian: Well I think you’ve sacrificed your soul to be the best. The problem is that aiming “to be the best” while admirable, is not always achievable and it comes at a cost – you are blinkered and don’t see life outside your tunnel vision. Tell me, when was the last time you had a decent holiday? Or spent quality time with your wife and kids? When was the last time you relaxed?

Mr Motivation: You’re just lazy. I am hard working and that’s why I am where I am and you will remain stuck in a rut.

Plastic Mancunian: I’m happy in my rut. I have ambitions but not materialistic ambitions. I want to be happy and I know what I need to do to make me happy. The difference between you and I is that I haven’t sold my soul to achieve it. I realise my own limitations. And I don’t want to be unhealthy because of it.

Mr Motivation: Unhealthy?

Plastic Mancunian: Yes – stressed. Don’t tell me you aren’t stressed.

Mr Motivation: Absolutely not. Nevertheless, my goals demand constant attention and until I achieve them, I am on edge. I work best when on edge.

Plastic Mancunian: You’re stressed then. Tell me something else: can I be the best?

Mr Motivation: Yes – everybody can be the best.

Plastic Mancunian: That’s not true though is it? How can everybody be the best? Surely only those people who are the best can be the best. How can everybody, say, in the UK “be the best”?

Mr Motivation: Now you’re just being facetious.

Plastic Mancunian: But I’m not though. If you go for a promotion with two colleagues and you all work your bollocks off – and you achieve that promotion and that seven figure salary – what have you achieved? Sure – your family might be happy at more money – but the two guys who failed will not be the best, will they? They will have failed. And you will have worked stupid hours, sacrificing your life and another chunk of your soul, just to say that you are the best – until the time you fail. Is the money really worth it if you can’t enjoy it? Will the seven figure salary really make your life easier if it means that you now get 200 emails more a day, have to work every weekend for the next six years, only get a week or two off and have to take your laptop with you if you go on holiday? That lifestyle is not for me. I’m happy with my own balanced, stress free life.

Mr Motivation: You’re an underachiever.

Plastic Mancunian: If that's what you think then I'm proud of it.

The Importance Of Being Lazy

We live in a world where we’re urged get up and then hit turbo charge and attack each day as if it is the last day of our lives. From the moment my crusty eyes open after a night’s sleep I am on the bloody move. I look at my clock and think “Crap! I’m going to be late!!”

So I get up, rush to get to the bathroom before Mrs PM, race downstairs, get hassled by the cats, prepare their breakfast, make my lunch, rush out, hit the rush hour, curse because I’ve forgotten to eat breakfast myself, curse again because I’m in such a rush that I forgot my lunch and finally after seemingly eons in the car I get to work,

When I arrive, I am urged to fall into line and spend an adrenalin-fuelled day meeting deadlines and being virtually ordered to be a dynamic robot, seeking excellence in everything I do. My entire day is usually a tiring stress-filled period of trauma where I have several people bothering me constantly:

“Have you done this?”

“Have you done that?”

Emails fly in, the phone rings, I’m asked question after question. I attend meeting after meeting. I barely have time to breath.

At the end of the day, I am a shredded nervous wreck. The greatest feeling in the world is driving out through the gates at the end of the day knowing that I can relax at least a little. But then there’s the drive home through the rush hour traffic to rekindle the stress-monster within.

When I finally arrive home I am shattered and want nothing more than to vegetate in front of the TV. My brain is quite literally fried, drained of all emotion and thought. My imagination is a distant memory and I find myself trying to fill the void with inane garbage on the TV. I sit there like a dribbling half-wit as boring drivel somehow gets past my mental firewall filling my mind with utter nonsense. Eventually my firewall somehow reboots and I am able to focus on more interesting stuff but then I realise that it is time to go to bed. My final thought before sleep claims me is:“Oh no! Back to work tomorrow!”

The cycle is inexorable and all-consuming, mentally draining and physically sickening.

And it doesn’t matter what you do or who you work for. I speak to friends and colleagues from all walks of life with all sorts of careers. It is the same for them.

Recently I’ve been asking myself, who the bloody hell decided that I should spend my entire life racing through days like a rocket powered Formula One car? What elite group of psychotic arses decided that everybody should run around like blue-arsed flies for their entire working lives? I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole world is run by a bunch of these people. I would like to call them "agitators”.

So, what is an agitator? It is a person who is driven to work, work, work until they are fit to drop and expects everybody else to fall in line. Such is their devotion to life in the fast lane that they drag the rest of us along with them. They regard idleness as a sin; they regard relaxation as a crime; they have no imagination; they want to rise as quickly as possible up the corporate ladder and will do anything to achieve their goals.

Agitators seem to think that it is somehow good for the rest of us to be overly productive, mentally alert, and run ourselves into the ground day in day out for the best years of our lives. We have been told that we must “GO, GO, GO!” constantly and inexorably. And if we do “GO GO GO” they tell us that we should “GO FASTER FASTER FASTER ”. We are not allowed to stop. We are expected to put in supreme effort and drain ourselves almost to an oblivious void. These people have somehow brainwashed everybody into thinking that we have to drive ourselves into the ground every single day.

We are good, they ask to be better.

We improve and become better, they ask to reach excellence.

We achieve excellence, we are asked to become perfect.

We reach perfection and that is still not enough. We have to become super-perfect. These are the kind of people who, when told “I will give you 100%”, dismiss that with a wave of their hands and say “100%? I WANT 200%!!!”

There’s no time even to be ill. If you ARE ill you have to personally phone up work; it’s as if nobody believes that you can be so ill that work is impossible. There are commercials on the TV for maximum über-strength cold and flu remedies that enable you to get to work and do your job even though you are in the grip of the worst flu imaginable. The agitators tell us “Life doesn’t stop just because you are sick and dying”.

I have an ambition to write a novel or at least some kind of book. I know that I will never do that unless something changes. When I arrive home from yet another day’s hard work, together with millions of people worldwide, my brain is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. My vivid imagination has been replaced by a nebulous cloud. I could not stimulate my mind if I applied a million volt electric shock (you may actually struggle to believe I hadn’t already done that if you’ve ever seen my hair on a bad day).

My mind becomes a void that can only be filled with trash.

If you read the job pages of a British broadsheet, you see that the demands on people are phenomenal. The job commercials demand qualities that even Superman would struggle to fulfil. Here are some examples I picked up recently from a broadsheet:

“Capable of thriving under pressure”

“Must be deadline oriented”

“Must be absolutely flexible”

“Must be able to solve any problem”

We are expected to hit the ground running and to stay there, burning ourselves out. Friends and colleagues in all walks of life and in many careers feel exactly the same. We are driven to dedicate our entire lives to this unending mind-destroying rat race.

We can’t relax, even at home or on holiday. Some people are driven to work all the hours they can and are not satisfied even when they achieve great things. I am astounded that people can go on holiday and take their work with them. They have to “GO GO GO GO GO” all of the time and if they are go-go-going at their fastest rate they are urged to slip into overdrive by the agitators.

I think we have forgotten about life and are gradually leaving it behind. In my twenty five years in the rat race, things have become far worse and I can only see things deteriorating rapidly. Stress is causing illness amongst the population of the world; demands are made through the management chain and by the time it reaches the bottom, everybody in the chain has suffered varying degrees of pressure. Even if you are not an agitator yet have some degree of success, the agitators will pile even more work and burdens upon you to make sure your stress levels are so high that you can be even more productive.

Okay, so we need to work to be able to live comfortably, but the agitators, the drivers of this fast paced life, have us by the short and curlies. We have to work and they know it, so their demands become greater while resources and time becomes scarcer. Even agitators have demands thrust upon them by competitors, customers and über-agitators higher up the food chain, whose requirements are becoming more absurd as time progresses. It’s a vicious circle of mayhem; we are all part of it and cannot escape.

Why should agitators ruin it for those who wish to be creative? Agitators are driven by a work ethic that is becoming increasingly all-consuming in all walks of life. Ultimately I see the human race becoming almost robotic. Longer working hours will mean that we have less free time to become relaxed and ponder the beauty of the world; we should be working shorter hours and using spare time to expand our minds. Agitators, who seem to be in charge, have forgotten how to do this and are driven solely by a meaningless ambition. They pat themselves on the back for their success.

Except they don’t have success do they, if we’re honest about it?

A large proportion of them set themselves and others increasingly absurd and unachievable deadlines and targets that they and the people who work for them can’t even dream of reaching. Just take a look at the crazy rush to build the new Wembley Stadium as a prime example of the failure of agitators. Look at the panic that ensues when other large building contracts and projects finish way over budget and years too late. It is a worldwide phenomenon and yet we sit there and continue to let the agitators dictate to us.

I ask myself whether it is time to fight back. Should we improve our quality of life by spending more time relaxing?

Agitators pour scorn on such rebellious thoughts by making out that this leads to idleness and sloth. You are lazy and therefore a total burden to society.

But I ask myself, what the hell is wrong with being idle?

My mind is normally active and, when not under pressure at work, I am constantly thinking about new stuff. My imagination tends to run amok if I am relaxed, particularly if fuelled by something strange I see in the news, or something weird I read in newspapers and magazines. Even something as mundane as watching a film can trigger a bizarre journey into the sick, sordid and wacky universe that is my imagination.

Yet the work ethic that is forced upon me by agitators is slowly killing that world. Even if I change my job to do something else I will be at the mercy of these people. Agitators call us lazy and the rest of society frowns upon us as a result. I can just imagine an agitator watching me at the moment and the thoughts that may go through his head.

“Why are you sitting there at a computer typing a blog post when you could be working? Your blog is meaningless. You don’t get paid for it – why bother? You may as well knuckle down and start thinking about how you are going to tackle your next week’s work.”

It shouldn’t have to be that way.

Staying in bed for an extra hour at the weekend is frowned upon and criticised by agitators.

Well, maybe it is time for me to make a stand. Maybe I shouldn’t allow agitators to dictate the roads I take. Okay, I have to work, but outside that work I should not be pushed around and accused of being unproductive just because I am refusing to tow society’s line of constantly running and living on an adrenalin-fuelled rollercoaster.

I think I will embrace idleness. Laziness will be my guide. Indolence will fuel my imagination and help me fuel my ambitions.

No more burning the midnight oil for me; no more worrying about work when I am at home. I will no longer allow agitators to accuse me of idleness just because I decide to spend my days strolling through the park, allowing my imagination to run free.

There is a world out there and being idle occasionally allows us to focus on it. Ignore the agitators; join me and we can derail this obsession with fast-paced, stress-inducing, agitator-driven rat race that we all have to endure.

Life is good – relax and enjoy it.