Success: the 2nd email
My Dear Niece Snakeash,
How do you define success? If you haven’t put much thought into this matter, I suggest you get off your plump rump and do so promptly.
You will have the privilege of judging others in the vaulted ceilings and spikey bloodsoaked pits of Human Resources. In fact, making judgments and pronouncements of those around you will be your job.
Think of it: we get paid, define, confine, and demean our co-workers! What other industry bestows such beneficence on its supplicants?
But, whereas success for you, and I mean the fatty and acrid smoke of a recently sacrificed middle manager, it means different things for different employees. As the saying goes, ‘different strokes for different people experiencing perennial high blood pressure due to toxic working environments and stress.’
Your Employee. How do they define success?
Please pause reading this email while I claw through your notes.
Your Employee stated they defined’ success’ by’ simply trying’ in a pre-performance performance and appraisel (the ol’ triple P n A).
What the HR does that even mean?
Judging from the sudden jagged movements of your quill on the parchment, it appears that this pronouncement caused you no small amount of stress yourself. But did you dig deeper?
“Always Make A Mountain out of that Molehill”
Ancient HR Proverb
While I wish you could have expanded opon the employee’s sentiment, I do believe we can examine it further without needing a second sick bag.
The fact Your Employee thinks that merely trying something, anything, is a mark of success is deeply troubling on several fronts and at least one chaffed behind.
It means that you have not sucked the soul out of their body so completely that they are willing even to try anything. The fact they still use trying as measurement means that they are still willing to try.
Very simply, that’s bad.
Employees are the most useful and least productive when they are confined mentally, spiritually, and, most importantly, aspirationally. They should not be in a state where trying sounds good.
Trying, i.e., doing anything out of the routine, should be akin to the feeling of sharp paper cutting open dry skin. Now, why would they be privy to the particular sounds emanating in proximity to my wedding chamber? I do not know, but it seemed to cause a fair amount of dismay in our Christmas letter recipients, so that just feels about right.
Where was I?
Right, trying: wrong.
Encourage (hahahah) Your Employee to employ the same definitions that their co-workers use for success: [please insert your own examples, I don’t seem to have any to choose from. Perhaps search online?]
Or, barring that, highlight, in my abundances of experiences and girth, the most influential and popular definition of success there is: keeping your job at all costs.
Success should be nothing more than a series of concessions culminating in a modest retirement and overwhelming and all-consuming regret.
-AT