Came early. Stayed late. Died.
The firmly entrenched and the entrepreneurs can read the archives this week. We’re concentrating on the recent college graduates and the people switching jobs. For you, we offer a stratagem that’s so simple to execute that most people never see it. It takes a few minutes, and it cannot be more important. It’s one of the biggest examples of leverage you’ll ever find.
Time is money, right? What Ben Franklin meant by that, in case it’s not obvious, is that you have the opportunity to put every hour to its best economic use. Giving away the store to your boss is not one of them.
Get to work on time, not before. Take the time off you’re entitled to. Punch that clock like it’s the nose of a shark. If you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of servitude. Your employer is your employer, not your massa. Set the terms out at the start of your tenure. We can’t overemphasize this. (Yes, you can set terms, instead of having them dictated to you. Accepting the job in the first place was your decision, right?)
Once you’re on the job there’ll be pressure, and not a little of it, to do the opposite of the advice you’re currently digesting from a disembodied voice on the internet. Who gives less than everything yet expects to get ahead? If you’ve never thought about this, hearken. The employees with the least going on in their lives, and the least ambition (or at least, the least ambition outside of trying to do as much as possible for the company) often dictate the workplace conditions. Along with complicit bosses.
Whether your directive is a written contract, a relevant phrase in an employee handbook, or just the climate of the workplace you’re joining, more often than not you’re still expected to come early, stay late, work through lunch and sacrifice the occasional weekend. Unless you absolutely live for what you do, which the overwhelming majority of us don’t, do not do any of the above. Your job shouldn’t define you, but neither should the overage on your commitment to your employer. You owe your employer a fixed number of hours. Your employer owes you a fixed number of dollars. The ratio of dollars to hours should thus stay constant until both parties agree to change it.
It gets far harder to do this the longer you stay in the job. If you’ve been donating labor to your employer labor every week in your six months on the job, superiors and coworkers who have come to expect your charity will notice when you deny it to them. Make it clear on your first day, when it’s 5:01 and you’re nowhere to be found, that you’re playing a more complicated game than the one in which you nail yourself to a crucifix in the hopes of getting noticed. Of course, this means you really have to bust it during the time when you are on the job, which you should be doing anyway.
If you spend 3 years in your position, getting there 10 minutes early every day, working a mere 7 minutes into lunch, and sticking around 23 minutes after the de jure end of the average workday, congratulations. You’ve sacrificed an entire quarter’s salary in the hopes that your employer noticed you and recommended you for advancement. You know, so you can do more of the same, for each tier of middle management you choose to slog through.
Sure, the promotions usually go to the employees who make the biggest show of their loyalty. That’s not how capitalism is supposed to work. You say you have to donate your time to preserve your job? Nonsense. Even when 9.7% of the nation is out of work, this strategy doesn’t affect your individual case. If you’re so incompetent that giving away additional time is the only way you can get your work output up to an acceptable level, you need to find something or somewhere else.
But if you’re capable in your job, spend that extra 40 minutes a day that you would have spent at the office reading the Control Your Cash archives. Or shopping mutual funds. Researching discount brokers. Looking for investment properties. Anything to spur passive income, rather than the active income that you will almost certainly never get wealthy off.
The traditional means of getting ahead is self-defeating. There’s more to life than hoping the person who gives you your active income notices you, which is a form of prostitution. (Or what else would you call giving away time, equated with money, in exchange for attention?) If you truly love what you do for a living, whether it’s selling radio air time, mining coal, preaching the Gospel, playing an instrument, determining who holds title on property, or cooking short-order meals, step back and examine where you are for a second.
Congratulations on finding your calling, if that’s what you want to call it. Why are you doing it for someone else, who takes a cut?
