Belly Button Lint

Feeling Lint-y?

Tag: work

  • Theme:

    there’s no office politics when you’re sheet rocking

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    1–2 minutes

    The joy of manual labor is not only the ability to produce something tangible.
    More importantly, this is a skill you can get good at; your skill speaks for itself.

    In white-collar office politics, there are seldom straightforward measurements. Every action is fraught with navigating the politics of choice and opinion, hierarchies, and turf management, while metrics are a sliding scale of ad-hoc rationalization.

    Yes, you can still be micromanaged and overworked doing manual labor, but the appeal is in the objective proof that transcends petty politics.

  • Theme:

    Self-flagellation alienates you from the world

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    1–2 minutes

    Supposedly punitive self-flagellation trains you not to make the same mistakes. However, the cycles of rumination embed negativity, leading to repetition and catastrophizing.
    Equally, these behaviors happen internally, pulling you out of the present reality to focus attention inward.
    Attention is a precious light: by focusing you prioritize. By beating yourself up you miss out on the world, the only place you can find redemption.

  • Theme:

    not working is work

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    1–2 minutes

    There was a time (before cell phones) when you could sit for 10 minutes doing nothing. Today we convert all time to use: your commute is time to learn, your evening is consuming entertainment to enable communal discourse tomorrow, and your vacation doubles as social media production.
    Similarly, meditating (formally doing nothing) is now a practice requiring discipline: your 10 minutes is sanctioned work for mental health, requiring apps and guides to mitigate your drive to spring into action consuming or producing.

  • Theme:

    The hidden third party

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    1–2 minutes

    We see things dualistically: us v them.
    Our interests (goals) are disrupted (blocked) by another, creating a conflict. This friction creates an invisible but powerful third object: the problem.
    We can choose to fight each other and empower "the problem" or ally against the problem by collaborating.

  • Theme:

    clarity over commitment

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    1–2 minutes

    Clarity comes from criticality, and commitment is an investment. Commitment before clarity wastes labor, time, and resources.
    Be clear on the goal, and commitment will follow naturally, generating results.

  • Theme:

    boss sabotage

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    1–2 minutes

    Bosses like to issue vague decrees and demands with little clarity and articulation. 

    This paradigm allows them to decide later how to react: anger at your failure to intuit the invisible or grudging acceptance when you magically do. A dominance play keeps you reliant on their mood with no fixed rubric for success, which comes at the high cost of repeated check-ins and edits, increasing frustration on both sides. 

    Yet, bosses are often unable to give up control and shirk the hard work upfront, making them the sloppy architect of their sabotage. 

  • Theme:

    solidarity in refusal to work

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    1–2 minutes

    Solidarity is found in work, in manifesting a shared purpose. Workers can also find communion in refusing to work, shifting "non-work" into political work.
    Yet, the daily negation of production has a psychological cost.

    "Doing nothing" to manifest change has an inverse logic, requiring more communal discipline than the simple satisfaction creation.

  • Theme:

    Earning the Right to your Opinion

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    1–2 minutes

    Have you earned the right to your opinion? Not everyone with a viewpoint has done the work to add something meaningful to the conversation.
    Without the work, you are merely righteous and walking into a trap.

  • Theme:

    Find yourself by subtraction

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    1–2 minutes

    To know who you are, quit chasing and adding. Try restricting your activities. Your increase in focus will be more revealing.
    By quitting most things, you give the remaining items more importance and intensity, and in their growth, you find yourself.

  • Theme:

    We are paid to test our foresight

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    1–2 minutes

    The work begins before the “work.”

    Most of our work is knowing what to prepare for: foresight from former floundering.

    The dynamic moment of doing the work (the moment we charge for) is the testing ground against which we gauge our mental models, and appear worthy of the challenge.