Don't Quiet Quit - There is No Shortcut
So I heard there is a new trend called quiet quitting: Doing the bare minimum tasks of your job description well enough that you don’t get fired. Quiet quitters keep it so real that their asses are out the door the moment the clock strikes 5pm. Let’s talk about why that is a problem FOR YOU.
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I get it - No matter how hard you work, the value of your contribution accrues to the owner. Why work so hard huh? Here is the problem: To become an owner, you need to work hard too. So either way, you have to work hard.
I argue becoming an owner is way harder and that’s why there are more salaried workers than owners on this planet. Why do you think that is? Very simplistically, a business needs capital, products, sales channel, legal, human resources, and so on.
When you are an employee - you work for someone else’s company and collect salaries and benefits, all the things I talked about before are already built: established product-market fit and sales channel, the business is financed, the office is furnished. You don’t need to worry about any of that: you just show up on day one and work.
For that reason, you don’t typically share in the value creation of the company except by receiving stock options prevalent in the tech industry. If a company’s stock price goes up, you get a salary and you still get the same salary if the stock price goes down. If the company needs to cut costs, you are laid off because you are the cost.
Conversely. When you are the owner, you deserve to reap the value created by your business because you dealt with things your employees did not need to. When you first started the business, you had no product, might need to convince others to provide capital, needed to convince customers that your company’s product solves their problem, and needed to correct bad employee hires. The owner assumes all the risk of whether your invested time and capital will turn into a Google / Amazon or a zero.
That’s the trade-off. As an employee, you are only risking your own human capital. If it doesn’t work out, you find another job. As an owner, you take many more risks: If it doesn’t work out, you wasted time, but more importantly, you lose your capital and the trust of your investors. As you can see, employees don’t get to participate in the upside because they are not in a high-risk-reward situation like the owners.
Most of the time, the world is quite efficient. You can complain about why you are not the owner of anything, but unless you play lacrosse or equestrian at your $50,000 per year tuition boarding school, you and I were dealt the same hand in life and we got to play with what we have. And quiet quitting is the only way to guarantee mediocrity or, worse, failure in life.
To create value you need skills to solve problems. If you decide to half-ass on your job, you are going to develop zero skills, the skills that could help you build something that’s your own in the future – whether it’s a business, a social media presence, a brand, and so on. I don’t care as much about the societal implication of quiet quitting, but I care about how it impacts your professional prospect.
The other issue is no one likes to have a quiet quitter at work: the CEO, your manager, and even your colleagues don’t. You probably will say: I don’t care about what they think. Forget about losing your job for a second, part of being in a corporate environment is meeting mentors and sponsors who can guide you in the right career direction.
If you are just unhappy about your current job environment, that’s a more fair reason than you being unmotivated. However, if you have a good attitude about wanting to be better, people at your workplace can introduce you to better opportunities.
I have studied three languages in my life. I can attest: if you have a shaky foundation, you can pass the elementary level language course but you will struggle mightily at the next level because everything builds on the foundation. Career is the same. I began my career as a consulting actuary after graduating from college with very bad grades. I was grateful for being given my first job and had great mentors on my first job. I came away with strong Excel shortcuts and general resourcefulness that I still benefit from today.
As an entrepreneur today, the skills I have learned from corporate jobs help me immensely: I have to learn many new skills because everything costs money if I outsource. For being a long-time consultant, I can learn anything pretty quickly because a big part of any high-pressure job is to learn how to figure things out.
Today I do graphic designing, making website, marketing, selling, and managing the finance – some of the skills are from my finance days but many other skills are from my consultant days. So, I urge you to being open minded about your current job because you never know how you will benefit from your prior skills in your own endeavor.
Don’t quiet quit, you should put in the work. No one can really blame you if you do not care about the company you work for, but you should care about increasing your own intrinsic value.
I am a value investor – a believer of finding dislocation between price and value of an asset. If you think about the labor market, labor market sets a price for you as a labor. You don’t really control what the market is willing to pay for the value you can add. The market price for a profession is decided by supply and demand and it is usually a very narrow band. Too many people focus on price – quibbling over $20,000 to $30,000 of pre-tax base salary spread over 26 paychecks without playing the long game.
Instead, you should focus on your intrinsic value. Invest in yourself by reading voraciously and learning new skills. If you want to be paid more, become more valuable as a labor. The higher upside the job is, the higher intrinsic skill it requires and more risk taking it involves, the labor market is efficient that way.
Once you have reached a new realm of personal intrinsic value, if you believe you are undervalued, I can guarantee you the market will ultimately value you correctly.
Is There a Shortcut?
As a career coach, I get these questions over and over:
How can I retire by age 40?
Which career path gets me to a 7-figure paycheck most QUICKLY?
How do I QUICKLY know the key drivers of different businesses?
How do I generate actionable stock ideas QUICKLY?
Which book is the BEST for learning about this sector?
How do I QUICKLY become a great communicator?
I am probably not the first to tell you, but if I am, thank me later: THERE IS NO SHORTCUT. It’s consistent hard work, it’s an accumulation of compounded knowledge, it’s resilience during setbacks, it's curiosity and a desire for lifetime learning.
This week I discuss how to master things the right way.
No “Instant” Success
Let me tell you a story about Picasso’s napkin: Pablo Picasso is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. One day, Picasso was doodling on a napkin in a restaurant. A woman approached him and offered to pay whatever Picasso felt that napkin was worth. Picasso asked for $10,000. The woman answered in shock: “But you did that in 30 seconds! (there are variations of the story but the takeaway is the same).” Picasso replied, “No, it has taken me thirty years to do that."
What's the takeaway of the Picasso story? You have seen it in a motivational post (below): No one is an overnight success. Most just don’t care or know about their journey.
Malcolm Gladwell famously laid out the requirement to achieve excellence in a discipline is 10,000 hours (for those interested, that's from his book) - a much more conservative estimate than what the clueless perceives to be instant success.
I see online articles about “instant success stories” all the time: “How a 30-year Old Makes $100,000 a Month Working Only 3 Hours a Week!” Only after reading the article, you understood the person spent many years building his online presence to achieve that lifestyle.
Yes, you can try that path, too. One, you are not guaranteed to replicate his success. If everyone can, no one will have a corporate job and we will all be sole proprietors. Two, even if you are making real progress on your own business, things take time.
Media is incented to get your attention with such title and most readers are not delusional, but a subset will draw the wrong conclusion: “I can be a YouTuber and achieve instant fame.” Ali Abdaal, a YouTuber with multi-million followers puts it very well and succinctly: Media likes to portray success as an event when in reality it’s a process. Don’t forget that point.
Internet is one of the greatest inventions in my lifetime so far. It democratized information and made everyone’s life easier. But you are not an exclusive beneficiary of the internet – the internet made it easy to get information out there FOR EVERYONE. That means everyone can have a newsletter, a social media account, a podcast, a YouTube channel and so on. But there is only one Litquidity (finmeme Instagram), one MrBeast (YouTube), one Patrick O'Shaughnessy (finance podcast). All that is to say: the method of distribution has changed, but the game remains hard.
For example, becoming the next super YouTuber like MrBeast, PewDiePie, or Casey Neistat is very hard. Simply posting content on YouTube (again, we all can do that) doesn’t mean millions will follow you tomorrow. You have to be good, and unique and solve real problems. In a start-up, you need product-market fit. In social media, you need the content-audience fit. And most cannot achieve the critical mass to sustain a lifestyle from social media.
So again, there is no overnight success. But I can say there are commonalities amongst successful people – they work hard, are obsessed about excellence and constantly improve themselves. In the case of Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast), I don’t know why a 13-year old (that's when Donaldson started YouTube-ing) is so obsessed with YouTube, but that’s why he became the world’s most-followed YouTuber at the age of 24 because he is obsessed and constantly worked hard (watch the interview below for yourself).
That leads to my next big point.
The Only Secret to Success
Hard f**king work. That’s the not-so-well-kept secret that people don’t want to hear and definitely don't want to implement.
Most want to get rich quickly without working hard. I am sorry, but money doesn't grow on trees.
Some paths offer you quicker time to wealth, but they are riskier, higher stress , and longer hours. There is also no guarantee you can add value in that path.
For example, for entrepreneurship, vision or idea is easy, but the execution is not. Selling everything online and making electric vehicles are simple ideas theoretically. But Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk made them happen at scale. Go ask them how operationally complex it is to make Amazon and Tesla happen. They deserve the wealth and fame for their execution as much as their vision. Very topically, Brian Armstrong and Sam Bankman-Fried both executed the vision of a crypto exchange but the outcome is vastly different (at least based on the information we have as of now.)
The wealth and publicity are the fun part, and that is what the delusional and clueless fantasize. Hard work is not fun, and the picture below of Jeff Bezos in 1999 should give you a glimpse.
"Overnight success" is in reality a result of a compounded effort to build and grow. The experts enjoy the process and just make it look effortless. The media is never reporting on the process because sleepless nights, stress, and setbacks don’t attract readers/viewers.
Finally, life isn't fair - hard work does not guarantee success. The clueless and delusional consider those who failed to be losers. The ones who have the maturity or have been through the same journey, understand the failed ones are at least courageous enough to try their best and underwent a positive personal transformation.
My goal is to convert some of the clueless and delusional to someone who "gets it". I will leave you with one of my favorite motivational speeches by Denzel Washington: KEEP MOVING, KEEP GROWING AND KEEPING LEARNING. I will see you at work.
Thanks for reading. I will talk to you next time.
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