How do you get a work ethic?

shrunken brain=less chance of getting a work ethic, I'd guess.

just drink the juice.

Here ends chapter 1 in the story of my life.

In some jobs you don't need one. Some industries don't require one; not all employers care whether you have one.

Sometimes you can get by with faking a work ethic: come in early, stay late, have frantic typing sounds emanating from your cube all day (even if you're playing Tetris). When the boss is in the room, pretend to be an enthusiastic team player; go back to slacking when the boss's back is turned. They may never catch on.

But in some jobs, it's either required or very, very beneficial.

How do you get one? Here are a few ways:

1. Like the people you work with/for. Cultivate the feeling that you and your co-workers are a team and it matters whether the team succeeds or fails. If you slack, it makes things harder for the person in the next cube. Do you like him or her? Do you want him or her to succeed or fail?

2. Like what you're doing. Most people's jobs aren't what they would do if they had no need to work. But it is sometimes possible to find work doing something that is fulfilling if not 100% fun. If you like to do something (art, music, basketweaving, activism), there may well be a way to get a job that relates to it in some way. Publishing and nonprofits are good places to start: an avid basketweaver might do well to write for Basketweaving Monthly or work for the National Basketweaving Association.

3. Like why you're doing it. This is related to the above. Some people obtain a work ethic by working for Save the Cute Furry Baby Animals, even as a low-level drudge. As you're emptying the wastebaskets or opening the mail or filing stuff, you remember that you're doing it for the Cute Furry Baby Animals, and that helps. In some small way, what you do contirbutes to a grander nobler cause.

4. Have pride in doing things well. No matter what you're doing, there's probably a right way and a wrong way to do it. Doing things the right way can be its own reward: you contribute to the sum total of excellence in the universe. I don't know if you're religious or not, but some people believe that even if no one notices what you do, god notices and cares. So doing even small stupid mundane things well can be an act of worship.

5. Like money. Almost all employers want you to care enough to do your job well, improve, etc. They sometimes (but not always) reward such with money. With money you can purchase goods and services. I like goods and services. Hence, I go to work and appear to enjoy it.

I heartily recommed this book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0241142512/qid=1106589968/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-7336179-8159057

Though, yeah, it's best just to get things done quickly and efficiently to create time for taking it easy, doing nothing in particular.

This works.

-- cathy berberian (theundergroundhom...), January 24th, 2005 5:34 PM. (Jody Beth Rosen)

But what if you get paid peanuts? (badoom-tish)

Um seriously - if you hate your job you could try convincing yourself that you currently use skills you might need in a future fun job and that if you don't try to do your current job well, you'll get worse at doing those things.

FAIL! Hence you work hard to make that person look BAD and get them in TROUBLE. Otherwise they will try to do the SAME to YOU. Voilà, you have work ethic!

i ain't revealing the punchline, but the ensuing social exclusion will help you to avoid those time-consuming and wasteful office banter/water cooler occasions. has worked for me for the past week.

lol darraghmac. you are a treasure.

but anyway, i need to get a work ethic and stat. i think nabisco's advice from 8 years ago is otm - i've felt the least lazy when i have been busiest, so i should try to fill my days and just generally try to be more active in order to get stuff done. "switching on" that productive mindset is the key, and once you are in that zone, i think, things feel less difficult. one thing i won't do, though, is cut back on sleep because i tried that in college and it did not work out well for my physical and mental health.

anyone else want to share their tips for staying on top of things?

also: how many people on ilx find themselves thinking, every so often, that the internet has ruined their lives? i can't really imagine life without it, but then again i know that if it wasn't here that would just be one less emotional crutch for me to fall back on, and i would be forced, perhaps, to go out there and make something of myself. then again, the internet has been a loyal friend to me and i hate thinking about it like that. if it wasn't for the internet, i most likely would have never heard many of my favorite records, or have been able to stay in touch with many of my favorite people who live in distant cities. probably, it's my problem that i can't utilize enough self-control to stay off the internet when i need to be doing other things, and not the internet's fault for always being there for me.

go out there and make something of myself

What would you like to make of yourself? This seems germaine.

right now, i would like to make myself a person who does not live in my parents' house.

A modest goal. The great difficulty, as always, is that your landing a remunerative job depends largely on factors outside your control. Sure, you can make yourself employable, but that has only a remote bearing on becoming employed.

There is a widely circulated rumor that the key to landing that job you want is to dress the part each day, rise early, send out 20 resumes by noon and spend the remainder of the day making enthusiastic cold calls to another 20 potential employers, keeping lists, making tic marks at frequent intervals, hypnotizing yourself into believing that your fervor for XYZ company burns within you like a magnesium flare that cannot be extinguished even by an ocean of water, and ten minutes later expounding the same degree of fervor for ABC company and then for LMNO company, ad infinitum.

I am sorry to say that this rumor was started by a practical joker in Wichita, Kansas and is only designed to drive poor jobless people like yourself into a manic frenzy of pointless activity, all for the amusement of personnel managers, whose jobs are quite tedious and who require such harmless amusements to keep from going mad with boredom.

On a more practical note, studies show that the majority of jobs are acquired through personal connections to the employer or to someone who works for that employer. So shake your acqaintances, your parents' acquaintances and everyone else whom you know in any capacity, begging for leads. Remind them each time you see them and make sure you see them often enough to remind them. Nicely, of course.

i think the aggressive, cold calling thing probably does work but i haven't been so good about spending all of my energy doing that stuff. i have some leads... i think, thusfar, i have messed up on the interviews because i do not come across as confident.

(rummages about) Ah, here it is! Allow me to reprint something I wrote a decade ago for another job seeker:

The first thing you should know is that the so called "real" world is no more "real" than the world you and I live in. It is merely more painful, that is all. Simple-minded people often credit pain as granting life a greater measure of reality than it otherwise incorporates. Stuff and nonsense! Pain is just hard to ignore, whereas ignorance is the primary state of such effigies of humankind.

A sufficiently subtle person (such as I take you to be) will carefully discriminate between "occupation", "employment" and "a job". I beg you to take note of their differences.

What is "a job" (apart from an abomination)? After careful observation, I take it to be a fruitless and pointless repetition of the same or similar activities, mysterious in intent, and utterly remote from one's own devices.

We are often encouraged to take pride in a job well done, but why? I surmise it is because all emotions, pride included, have a facility for attaching themselves to objects or activities willy-nilly, just as baby chicks might imprint upon an alarm clock, a handpuppet or any other rubbish as a surrogate mother. Thus, the presence of inapt pride in our jobs may cloak from us (in part) our more natural feelings of pain and disgust at their idiocy.

Employment, I would have you notice, is somewhat more neutral. It is supplied to us, as motion is supplied to a cat's paw. But woe betide the person who is "employed" in this way by another! I have always preferred to employ myself, usually in such delightful pastimes as scratching and spitting, neither of which can be done too much.

Finally, occupation is what comes most naturally to those such as you and I. It comes as naturally as breathing (a very healthful and sensible occupation). I find that, no matter what, I am fully occupied with something or other. It matters little what. I have sometimes been occupied for several hours picking at some bit of food stuck between my teeth.

If you are so foolhardy as to seek employment at the hands of another, and an interview is required, then whatever you do, pay no attention to the pernicious and ill-considered advice peddled by the employment quacks and shills. They give the worst possible advice, tatamount to pandering and procuring for the bosses of this world.

An interview is, quite logically, an exchange of views; keep it that way. Come to every interview equipped with a steamer trunk full of assorted views of your own devising. Sow the air thick with them. Make mortally certain that your potential employer is acquainted with your views upon as many subjects as possible. The purpose of this is to weed out the unattractive employers early in the game.

But, under no circumstances should you reveal to your potential employers any whiff of servility, self-doubting or self-loathing. Get a good grip around the neck of your base, cringing, sniveling self and throttle it deader than a whippet on a pikestaff. Both you and your employer will benefit greatly by this arrangement.

By all means, skirt any employment that you deem base, vile, or unbecoming to one of your grace and attainments. If forced into such employment by base, vile or unbecoming circumstances, then you must simply rise above, that's all. If that fails, there is always single malt scotch as a fallback.

the second to last paragraph is the most relevant one to me.

thanks for digging that post up though. i think i already have the serene, content thing down -- i never am bored and could probably be satisfied spending the rest of my days reading, or something -- but right now i need to do the opposite: convince myself of my dissatisfaction with my current situation (which is real) to motivate me to do whatever it takes to change it. it's unnatural for me to be competitive, and even to be motivated to *do* stuff -- i am more of the reflective personality type -- but in our society i need to change my habits, i think, and learn to trick myself into feeling, as you said in your post, "satisfied in a job well done" rather than just in "being."

or actually, i'm not sure i believe that. i think i need to gain detachment from my objective circumstances in order to go about changing them without being too emotionally involved, because this can be crippling. idk, i am more comfortable about thinking of how i want to change my concrete habits than i am thinking about how i want to change the way i conceptualize myself, and how i feel about what i am doing, because the latter is just an infinitely regressive topic, a black hole where no answer can ever be totally right or wrong.

I am not the best person to seek advice from on job hunting. I hated it with a passion and consequently was never much good at it. The problem always was the weakness of the connection between what I did and the results I got.

The apparent futility of it all wore me down. But however ugly it is to keep up the job search, by removing oneself from the search you also remove the chance of landing a job. There is, of course, the avenue of self-employment, but it's no bed of roses either, especially if you have no capital and must compete in a field with very low bars to entry.

Good luck is the best I can say, and do whatever you can to keep your spirits up as you endure what is usually a long series of impersonally administered blows to your esteem. Just realize that employers hate the process, too.

If there was ever a punchline to that joke (i suspect not) i have long forgotten both it and the supposed incident noted above

Aimless wisdom is good wisdom, it calms me down quite often.

https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but-the-problem

i know some folks like to fill up on meaningless busyness but if they make you do it just to live it's not an ethic imo

that article is basically otm btw but i'm sure we'll hear two cheers for the status quo

great western public's vision of what makes a good human being is riddled with slave morality, self-loathing and death wishes

I have fully bought into that stakhanovite b/s before and denounced other less productive colleagues as "lazy fuckers" and wince at the memory now. But it very hard not to get caught up in it all in jobs where you don't leave site until it is finished and are not on an hourly rate. But self-loathing slave mentality is a fair assessment.

oh i happily contribute to my own exploitation, i know what it's like, and mostly we want the good opinion of the decent folks around us

work ethics exist outside of jobs/the market economy/capitalism and are good and healthy imo, having a work ethic is not the same thing as "being good at your job"

i know there are other kinds of self-motivation, i just wanna reserve the word "work" and the phrase "work ethic" for the sickness of industrial-capitalist space-time. Larkin was right, it poisons everything.

I should have put this in the general "Work" thread I found – I don't think 'work ethic c/d' is really the focus of that aeon essay. xp

it's fine here, i know we're not addressing it directly but a redistribution of work or any sense of a post-work society does depend on reconstructing values like the work ethic and reinvigorating creativity and play as values that are not disposable fripperies

i just wanna reserve the word "work" and the phrase "work ethic" for the sickness of industrial-capitalist space-time.

ha, we are completely at odds, I would prefer to allocate other words to describe paid labor and restore "work" to the noble place I think it merits in human life

i guess "Collected Works" sounds better than "Collected Labours" tbf

i remember bob black's advocacy of similar ideas, many years ago. i think nobody paid much attention to him because he was an asshole, though.

honestly, though, i have spent a fair bit of time thinking about a post-work society, since it seems evident to me that this is where the world is heading, whether people want to acknowledge it or not. and the more likely solution is that societies will transform into more overtly slavery-based societies. why does america put so many of its black men in jail? because it doesn't have meaningful work for them, and the re-institution of slavery under another name is the path of least resistance. in fact looking at prison trends in the past year one sees an increase in the incarceration rate of rural whites. the new prison state is spreading.

the thing about a post-work society, about "guaranteed income", and i have had enough experience not working to comment on this, is that if you pay me to do nothing, that's what i'm going to do. when we're working, we love to make all kinds of plans and dreams about the great things we'd do if we didn't have to spend 40 or 60 hours a week on some bullshit meaningless job, but when one is actually faced with time the easiest thing to do is waste it. goof around on the internet. play video games. drink. watch porn. get high. it's not much of a life. i'd honestly rather work.

humans are, to a very high degree, extrinsically motivated. and the problem, to my eyes, is not so much the presence of extrinsic motivation itself, but the sorts of things we are being extrinsically motivated to do, which tend to be meaningless bullshit at best and actively evil at worst.

the problem, to my eyes, is not so much the presence of extrinsic motivation itself
From what I gather from reading Matthieu Ricard's "Altruism," that is the problem, because, paradoxically, extrinsic incentives tend to smother intrinsic motivation.

what does it mean to work "hard"?

If the activity you're engaged in be turned into a decent montage, you're working hard.

"But they're a hard worker", how many times have I heard that said about some complete twat I've had the misfortune to work with? Donkeys work hard fwiw.

lol ilxors

if you pay me to do nothing, that's what i'm going to do. when we're working, we love to make all kinds of plans and dreams about the great things we'd do if we didn't have to spend 40 or 60 hours a week on some bullshit meaningless job, but when one is actually faced with time the easiest thing to do is waste it. goof around on the internet. play video games. drink. watch porn. get high. it's not much of a life. i'd honestly rather work.

I don't think anyone is actually suggesting otherwise? So what do we do with idle people, on UBI or whatever else?

I don't think anyone is actually suggesting otherwise? So what do we do with idle people, on UBI or whatever else?

― El Tomboto

well this is my bias, but i'd suggest a society structured around the arts and around education. since creative work has no objective value within the framework of capitalism, it's not open to the charges of "make work" other forms of employment are. and with education- instead of giving people loans to educate themselves for jobs that may or may not exist, why doesn't society just out and out pay them to learn? learn what you can, and then create.

yes, it's utopian, but i do like pondering alternatives to the much more likely prison and/or genocide state.

That way lies Britpop, and indie music in general.

what does it mean to work "hard"?

re-wiring a school in the 6 weeks summer holiday is the definition of hard work. You get pressured into doing 70-80 hour weeks and weekends and constantly get reminded that the overrun penalties if it isn't completed will take the company down. And after 6 weeks of wading through asbestos and living to work you have to deal with some arsehole clerk of works ripping your work to pieces. And then a couple of months after the handover, all your self sacrifice has gained you nought respect and the contracts manager says we haven't any work till January - go home and live off your (LOL) savings till then. Hitler was a big stan for the dignity of hard labour, so obviously the little cunt never actually did any.

goof around on the internet. play video games. drink. watch porn. get high. it's not much of a life. i'd honestly rather work.

False binary! I combine nearly all of these andwork. Hate video games though.

I love the idea of a massive community college state where humanities and fine arts are actively encouraged. That seems like the height of civilization imo!

so you're not working "hard" if you're not suffering to some degree

_goof around on the internet. play video games. drink. watch porn. get high. it's not much of a life. i'd honestly rather work

you suck

Always Be Closing