Power

I read a book a few years back called Power by a guy named Jeffrey Pfeffer. The thesis is as follows:

Many people naively believe that if they do the best job they possibly can, they will be paid and promoted, but then are disappointed to find out that less-competent employees are getting paid and promoted ahead of them. The solution? Your job—that thing you do every day—is not your job. Your job is actually to be friends with your boss. If it makes you feel better, you can be friends with your boss and do a good job, but mostly all that matters is that you’re friends with your boss.

But then you say, “I refuse to play political games!” Earth to asshole: life is about political games. If you want, you can go on being the hardest-working, most underpaid person at your firm.

I’m not sure how much of this checks out, but I identified with it, because at Lehman, I was the most underpaid, hardest-working person at my firm. I didn’t realize it at the time, though. I never politicked for pay, and I got paid what I got paid, which was about 20 times what I was making in the Coast Guard, in any case. I was vaguely aware that my ETF trader pals at other firms were making almost twice as much as me, but at age 32 or whatever, I felt fabulously wealthy, so I didn’t complain. Editor’s note: I should have complained. If I got paid an additional 30% in my last three years at the firm, that money, compounded, would be worth a lot today. Enough to pay off my mortgage.

I like money as much as the next person—and I am being honest when I say this—the money was incidental to being able to participate in the most amazing intellectual challenge of all time: the financial markets. I did it for the love of the game. And like I said, I was just happy to be there, and I think management knew that I was just happy to be there, so I traded at a discount. Now, usually what people do in these situations is get an offer away and hold up the bank, but I was loyal to a fault, and they knew that, too. I did get one offer, and I turned it down, and it was a good thing I turned it down, because it was from Bear Stearns, and I would have been on the beach six months earlier.

Anyway, I don’t dwell on being underpaid, and now it doesn’t matter, because I eat what I kill, and when you eat what you kill, well, let’s just say that it’s a good place to be, psychologically speaking, not having to depend on the benevolence of some guy making $8 million to give you another $50,000. But the part that I do think about is: how do you use people skills to get what you want? Because there are people out there who have copious people skills who are adept at getting what they want. Then you have the politicians, who basically do this for a living. We hate the politicians who are unprincipled, which describes about 95% of them. The Thomas Massies of the world, the principled ones, have no political future. Once he’s ignominiously voted out of office, he’ll start a libertarian gold mining newsletter or something, flying coach to MoneyShow Orlando, stay at the Omni hotel where the ice machine on his floor doesn’t work. If you’re a principled politician, that’s what’s in your future. When I think back to all the presidents we’ve had in the last 50 years, none of them are political slouches, with the possible exception of Biden. Bill Clinton had God-level political skills. My only experience with elected office was when I was elected class vice president my freshman year in college. After one year, I was voted out of office.

As I have written before in this blog, principles will get you in trouble. If you don’t want to overtly be a political animal, think of it this way: you would want to be friends with your boss just like you would want to be friends with anyone else. It’s just a nice thing to do. If you want a raise, have you tried asking for a raise? The cool thing about asking for a raise is that there is absolutely, positively no downside. Your boss can say no—end of discussion. But it’s kind of hard to cold-ask for a raise if you haven’t developed a friendship first. Life is salesmanship. Life is a presentation. This is how bad I was at marketing myself at Lehman—in 2007, I made $8 million day-trading S&P 500 futures over the course of the year—a herculean feat. Except I did it in my old index arb futures account, so the bosses just assumed I was still doing index arb. It never occurred to me to tell them that I was a fucking market wizard trading S&P 500 futures. So I never got paid on that.

I’m a slow learner. I rode the short bus to school. I didn’t start figuring this out until my 40s, when it was too late to matter. And by the way, don’t bother buying the book—I learned everything I needed to know in the first 40 pages, and I’ve written a neat summary of it here. One thing I have learned in my old age is that friends are really important. I don’t go around making enemies with people like I used to in the past. Though I have to say that writing a tell-all book about Lehman Brothers hasn’t gotten me invited to any Lehman Brothers reunions.

This may sound like a bunch of Machiavellian bullshit, but really all it comes down to is being a decent human being. You treat people with love and respect, and patience and tolerance, and it will boomerang back to you. The ETF trader two guys before me, Tom, was allegedly a sweetheart of a guy, a sunny optimist who was friends with everyone. That guy hadn’t been in the building in ten years and people would still talk about him. He probably got paid more than me, too.

If you’re interested in another interesting read on the topic, check out Neil Strauss. Yes, that Neil Strauss. I read The Game in the 2000s—his memoir about being part of a pick-up artist cult, and then I read Rules of the Game in the 2010s, a how-to manual on how to pick up girls. Wait—what does picking up girls have to do with office politics? It has to do with a lot of things. Even though I was happily married, Rules of the Game was one of the most influential books I have ever read. This is an oversimplification, but here goes: girls like rockstars. So be a rockstar! You can be whoever you want to be. This biggest takeaway I got from that book is that oftentimes, our outsides match our insides. If you’re wearing dad jeans with a fupa, a woven leather belt, and New Balance sneakers, you probably don’t have a very high opinion of yourself—and it shows. That was about the time that I started paying more attention to my personal appearance. I started buying better clothes, I whitened my teeth, I went tanning, I went to the gym—I looked and felt great. I wasn’t doing it for sex appeal; I was doing it for myself, and it was interesting to see people’s reactions to the new me. Anyway, Neil Strauss almost died of too much sex and wrote his last memoir, The Truth, about how all his other memoirs were misguided and false. I still like Rules of the Game. Not for nothing, Strauss is an excellent writer, a compliment I don’t give out lightly.

I’m going to say that social media is important, because it is a contrarian thing to say, because most people say that social media is the devil. I have about 1,250 Facebook friends, and I am not one of these people who collects Facebook randos right and left. I know pretty much all of them pretty well. I think staying in contact with people is a good thing. I could do without all the memes and politics and crap, but I like seeing wedding photos and vacation photos, and I especially like celebrating other people’s achievements. I have a Facebook friend who posts videos of himself playing the guitar. I never thought much of that until I started taking guitar lessons, and I realized how fucking hard it is, so now I like his guitar-playing videos. I am generous with the like button. Look—ideally, we would have more meaningful contact than pressing the stupid like button, but you can’t realistically go deep with 1,250 people, so the like button it is. Trust me, people will remember (and like) that you pressed the like button. Don’t be so fucking stingy with it.

As is usually the case with these essays, spread good in the world, don’t be a hater, and great things will happen. You will get paid and promoted. Your boss isn’t a menacing authority figure, he’s just a guy trying to find his way in the world. You can be there.