Second Place Means First Loser

If you're not the early bird, you're the worm.

Photo by Kyle Hanson on Unsplash

Lately I have been amazed by LinkedIn. It’s an incredible source of inspiring content from experts like me, full of exciting ideas, and possessing no verifiable credentials. As a social network, it fills an important void for people who hate Instagram, but still need an occasional reminder that they are not quite good enough.

I’m here to help! Over my many years in business I’ve perfected a simple formula. If you want to make it work for you, it will take some hard work. But it’s still way easier than accepting yourself just the way you are.

Ready? Here goes!

Step 1: Hone Your Craft

This one simple step can transform your career, improve your credit score, and make you pores as smooth as glass.

Simply wake up every morning at 4:30 am, go directly to your desk, and spend 4-5 hours alone, with no distractions, silently and diligently practicing your craft.

What does “practicing your craft” entail? I’m glad you asked. It’s different for everyone, but here are a few examples:

If you are a designer, I want you to spend those first 4 hours every morning designing beautiful things with no client in mind. Do it solely for yourself.

It doesn’t matter what you design, so long as the work is heartbreakingly beautiful. It must be so incredibly beautiful that monks will secret it away forever safe from mortal viewers, lest the poor souls who gaze first falls upon it wildly strike themselves blind in ecstatic rage — desperate to know that your design is the last thing their feeble eyes behold.

Or draw your cat. Or sketch ampersands. Don’t care/doesn’t matter. Just make at least 20 beautiful things before the sun comes up. Hustle up, buttercup!

Moving on: Where are my salespeople? Practice your pitch for at least four hours every morning. Your colleagues are counting your uncanny ability to describe your product to customers in a way that is totally incomprehensible, and yet somehow not completely incorrect. Let’s get out there!

Next up: Managers. You have a little extra work to do. Here is a three-exercise workout plan for you to follow every morning:

1. Practice giving feedback to members of your team that is completely inscrutable, so they’ll be like “what did that even mean?”

2. Practice insisting that people must first be doing a job before they can be promoted into it.

3. Practice claiming that you fought against a policy change you’re now required to enforce.

You got this, managers!

Finally, for my CEO friends, and others in the C-Suite. I want you to start the morning by going out to your garage and sitting alone quietly in your Tesla for a few minutes.

Look at yourself in the rear-view mirror. Practice talking about new product ideas for your company that literally nobody has ever asked for. It’s best if they’re scientifically impossible, marginally illegal, and definitely unnecessary.

As you speak, practice doing that bubba bubba bubba thing, where you flip your finger up and down across your lips, like they do with babies. Yes, that! Continue doing that throughout the day, as you interact with colleagues at your company. If you do it right, your team will believe that you’ve finally lost your mind. The buzzing sound and slobber coming out of your mouth will, to many, be viewed a welcome improvement. Enjoy!

Step 2: Work Smarter

Photo by Joshua Chehov on Unsplash

Once the day begins, it can be difficult to make time for little rituals that might help you perform at your best. Set a reminder on your phone to help you remember to take one minute at least twice a day to check your pulse and see if you are, in fact, still alive.

While radical ideas like these are as yet still on the fringe, some scientists are now recognizing that it may be medically necessary for you to eat food, drink water, and go to the bathroom.

People everywhere are taking notice of strange new category of tasks that we are somehow meant to accomplish during the work day, even though they take up actual time, and yet inexplicably do not appear anywhere in our calendar.

(Apologies to women, for whom this is Not News. They’ve been working those unscheduled extra hours this whole time, complying with insane cultural beauty standards and providing uncompensated emotional labor to everyone in the building. Keep up the great work, ladies!)

One way to show you’re ready for leadership is by encouraging your team to follow suit. Encourage them to cut out non-essential daily tasks, like pretending to give a fuck.

Step 3. Point of No Return to Office

Photo by Kim Green on Unsplash

By the time this is published, most workers will have been forced to “Return To Office” (RTO) by employers who are eager to recreate the cultural closeness, meticulously planned onsite gatherings, and impromptu hallway conversations that immediately preceded and come to think of it probably caused the COVID-19 epidemic.

Employers who required workers to return to the office earlier in the year are now going a step further by asking them to remain stationary at their desk at all times during the workday. This allows them to efficiently harvest otherwise-wasted body heat, defraying the cost of energy needed to charge the managers’ electric cars.

Do your part, please. Start by not wearing a unnecessary layers while at work. You might find the management more receptive to approving your “work from home exception” if you can show you’re not a useful source of biothermal energy because you’re already completely dead inside.