If you work for a company, you presumably want that company to thrive and succeed, right? So if your company came to you and said “We’ll be more profitable and successful if you take a 50% salary cut,” you’d leap at the chance, right?

Okay, clean the spit off your screen, and let’s continue.

You’ve now encountered the fundamental conflict in all motivation – the conflict between success of the self and success of the team. We want both of those things to be true. But when push comes to shove, most people will pick themselves most of the time.

It’s natural – you can’t pour from an empty cup, after all. We’ve all gotta eat. So if you want someone to do what’s “good for the team,” then you have to align the incentives such that the same actions serve both goals. If you can’t do that, then people are going to be acting against the team most of the time.

Here is a bad thing we do to kids: we issue a piece of paper to their parents every few months for their entire childhood telling the parents how well the kid memorized state capitals. In the footnotes of that paper, if they’ve been exceptionally kind, we give this throwaway line: “plays well with others,” which does not matter at all to the evaluation metrics being levied against this kid.

Being able to play well with others is about a thousand times more important than anything else that happens in school.

Here’s another bad thing we do to kids: we answer their questions. When a kid asks a question, we should do everything in our power to teach them how to be finding and verifying new information themselves, rather than training them to rely on authority figures to spell it out for them. Even something as simple as “Where is the bathroom?” should (outside of emergency situations, of course!) be met with something like “Let’s walk out into the hallway and look around. Look for landmarks – things that stand out – so you can find your way back. Then, let’s start looking at the different signs so you can see what they mean. Who here knows what things might be on the sign for a bathroom?”

Being able to find the bathroom when you don’t know where it is might be a pretty essential skill, don’t you think?

Here’s yet another bad thing we do to kids: we force them to be wasteful. The concept of “child labor” is nearly hilarious to me. People will tell you with a straight face that child labor is a terrible thing, but they’ll force kids to work 8 hours a day, five days a week from age 4 to age 18. They’ll do this even though the kids hate it, even though there’s an enormous amount of evidence that the majority of those kids are wasting the majority of that time. They’ll do it even though it has a massive cost to society. But if you suggest that a fourteen-year-old might actually learn something valuable by ringing a cash register for 6 hours a week, they’ll string you up.

Being able to work when it’s valuable and play when that’s valuable is pretty much the core happiness formula.

If you get the opportunity to move the needle on any of these things – however slightly – don’t stay silent. Your kids will thank you. So will mine.

If you have too many awesome people, it could ruin your team.

First, a quick self-diagnosis. I’m going to describe a scenario to you that involves a hypothetical person, and then I’ll ask you a question about that person. Ready? Here we go:

You are the Chief Revenue Officer of a mid-stage startup. Ten salespeople and four marketers report up to you, and your team is entirely evaluated on hard performance: the marketers are evaluated on leads generated per dollar and conversion rate while the salespeople are evaluated on total sales closed and total dollars won. Everyone works directly on those tasks. One day, you get a new enablement support specialist on your team, Sam. Sam does quality analysis, liaises with the product teams, trains & coaches, and performs a variety of other activities. Six months after Sam joins the team, leads per dollar have improved by 40%, conversion has improved by 30%, closed deals have increased by 15% and the average dollar amount per sale has improved by 50%. However, Sam does not directly generate a single lead or close a single client.

Here’s the question: Is Sam valuable?

You’re probably rolling your eyes and saying “Duh, the answer to that question is really obvious.” But I promise you, someone else is saying the same thing while believing that the “obvious” answer is the opposite one. I’ve met both people, and both are adamant about being correct.

Let me quickly dispel any illusion that I am neutral on this topic: I am not. Sam is valuable. Sam is incredibly valuable – in fact, Sam is the most valuable person on the team and if you don’t agree, then that’s an early warning sign of Individual Contributor Syndrome.

What is “ICS?” It’s a culture that can pervade certain teams, destroying them from within even as each individual member is amazing. In fact, every team member being amazing is often another symptom. Here are some signs that your culture has developed a case of ICS:

• If everyone on the team works 20% more hours, you’re actually – at least in the short term – 20% more productive.
• Any improvements in process are extremely difficult to implement.
• Everyone is great at what they do, but no one could do what anyone else does. In fact, no one is even sure what anyone else does, only that they’re good at it.
• People who train, coach, manage, or lead are viewed with suspicion or even derision, while people who “grind” to get things done are viewed with respect.
• Everyone’s solution to every problem is to knuckle down and grind harder, not address root causes or improve things. If there’s a hole in the boat, the solution is to bail water faster, not to pull into port and fix the hole.
• Everyone is extremely guarded and secretive about “how the sausage gets made.” Everyone knows their process is horrible and held together by grit and duct tape, so no one wants to let anyone else look under the hood. As a result, it’s extremely difficult to learn anything or train anyone new.
• People are evaluated based on what they contribute directly, and everyone is extremely myopic in this evaluation. There’s no love for “the assist” in any capacity.

A culture like that is pure poison, even if – in the short term – it’s filled with people who are absolutely delivering. In fact, from the outside it can appear to be highly functional because everyone is delivering at a high level. The problems aren’t immediately apparent. When they boil over, however, it’s a disaster.

One of the biggest problems with ICS is that it can’t be solved by high performance. It can only be solved by the very thing it resists – effective team management. The high performers don’t even want to admit there’s a problem, but I can demonstrate with some pretty easy math why it is. Let’s look at our next hypothetical, but first: some axioms:

1. We can assume it as a given that it’s possible for someone with really great team management skills, coaching ability, or even just a generally great attitude can improve a team’s performance by 5%. That’s an extremely conservative estimate; realistically people like this can often improve a team by 10, 20, or 30% especially in a leadership role or with the right support. But we don’t have to debate that – 5% should be uncontroversial.
2. The reverse axiom: a toxic person can reduce a team’s total effectiveness by 5% easily. In reality, truly toxic people, especially in influential roles, can completely cripple a team and everyone knows it. So again, a 5% downgrade is uncontroversial.

Now, on to the next hypothetical:

========================================

Imagine two different sales teams, led by two different managers. Each manager is in charge of the hiring for their respective teams.

Manager A wants rock stars for her team, so she hires exclusively based on their past sales numbers. She doesn’t consider any other factors at all, just whether or not they were in the top tier of their prior organization. As a result, all ten people she hires are people who by default can produce $100,000 in revenue per month. However, they’re also all sharks and snakes – people who snipe deals, don’t share info, are unpleasant to work with and don’t manage process well. They’re Toxic High Performers.

Manager B wants team players, so she hires exclusively based on performance metrics linked to those things. She looks for coachability, attitude, and fastidiousness. She maximizes those values even over prior performance. As a result, all ten people she hires are people who by default can produce $50,000 in revenue per month. However, they also come together into an incredible team with a lot of cohesion and camaraderie, immediately sharing best practices, supporting each other, and improving the overall process. They’re a Team.

Team A has ten people that, nominally, could produce $100,000 each per month, for a total of $1,000,000/mo. But remember, they’re all reducing the team’s effectiveness by 5% each as they get in each other’s way, sabotage each other, lose progress to inefficient or sloppy processes, etc So that number is reduced by 50%, leading to a total revenue per month of only $500,000!

Team B has ten people that, nominally, could produce $50,000 each month, for a total of $500,000/mo. – which is already as much as Team A is actually delivering! But because of the healthy environment, cohesion, and effectiveness of the Team, they improve by 50% (5% per person) and end up over-delivering to the tune of $750,000/mo.!

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. The players on Team A are going to be furious, each of them earning a lower commission than they’re used to and all of them blaming everyone else. Absolutely nothing can be done to improve it; hiring more rock-star salespeople will only make the problem worse, no matter how good they might be at selling. And trying to hire the kind of people from Team B will also fail because those people won’t work in that environment for very long, if at all. Turnover will be rampant and soon the team will implode.

========================================

You’ve seen this happen, haven’t you? You’ve experienced this firsthand at least once, and you had some inkling of why, but you never did the math like this. Now you know.

I want to be quick to clarify something else: this applies even if everyone on Team A is very, very nice. I described them as “sharks and snakes,” but that’s only one way this can manifest. They can also just be individual-minded. Maybe they work super hard because they’re nice, but they still view problems as things to be solved with the sweat of their own brow instead of through better management and process.

Need an example? Imagine Mary, who gets handed off the first half of a project from her teammate. Mary is preparing to do her half, but as she looks over the work already there, she realizes it’s sloppy and full of errors. Mary doesn’t want to rock the boat and also realizes that it will be quicker to just fix the mistakes and redo the bad work herself than to go back to the teammate and ask for revisions, so she does so. Mary seems overly nice, right? But she’s still absolutely a contributor to ICS.

Okay, so what do you do about it?

Well, it depends on who “you” are. If you’re not necessarily the leader of an organization, your biggest duty here is to carefully evaluate whether any team you might be joining has terminal ICS and run the other way if it does.

But if you’re a leader and it’s your team that has this problem, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Let’s be clear here: if you want to eliminate ICS, you’re also going to have to get rid of some Toxic High Performers. You might end up having to dehire your top performer. Surprisingly enough, I usually see this happen most efficiently in sales teams – every seasoned sales leader can tell you about the time they had to axe their top seller because he or she was a monster that made everyone miserable. But those seasoned pros know that if you let your ICS metastasize it’s all over.

But besides personnel decisions, what else can you do? The key is to focus on the incentives, as it always is:

1. Make sure people are recognized and rewarded as a team, and for contributions towards that team, not just for being awesome themselves. However you recognize and reward, make “the assist” worth more than “the goal.”
2. Do not, under any circumstances, reward people for “grinding out” a problem unless they’re doing so with a process improvement plan already in place. Sometimes you need to bail water; you should never be doing it without a plan to get into port and fix the ship.
3. Encourage people to manage their energy well, and give them the tools to do so. People often take the ICS way of doing things because it’s quicker/easier in the short term, at the expense of the long term. Try your best to give people plenty of ways to avoid that choice.

And most importantly: if you’re the leader, lead. Avoid any and all temptation to just “do it yourself.” Vince Lombardi never threw up his hands after a bad play and said “You know what’? Just give me the ball next time, I’ll run it in myself.”

Good luck out there, team. You’re all amazing, together.

You don’t need to love the smell of gasoline; you need it to be a cost-efficient way to make your car go where you want it. If you’re waiting to find a brand of gasoline you like the smell of before you buy it, you won’t get very far.

The point is that some things are allowed to be inputs towards our happiness rather than part of that happiness. If the gas in my car gets me to the concert I want to see, then hooray!

People often trap themselves by thinking that they need every input to independently be enjoyable, but that’s not the case. Some people might love the smell of gasoline, and then… good for them, I guess? Makes working in a gas station much more fulfilling! But it’s okay if you don’t.

Of course, if you hate the smell of gasoline so much that it makes you gag and vomit, then you might start looking for alternatives to driving (or at least, asking a friend to fill your car up for you). But for most people, “neutral” is a perfectly fine goal for the status of a variety of inputs.

The trick here is to focus your attention on the things you love, not the rest. If you ask me “What did you do this weekend,” then saying “I saw an awesome live band play” is a better answer than “Ugh, I had to put gasoline in my car,” even if both are true.

Here’s a more direct example: I save a lot of money on food versus the median person in my demographic. Why? Because I don’t care about food that much, so I buy extremely cheap, generic meats and veggies. I buy for nutrition rather than because I want something that tastes good. I don’t need every meal to be something I enjoy eating; I just don’t want any food that I actively dislike. Eggs, cucumbers, and rice are all very very cheap and work fine as the basis for most of my daily consumption.

But some people need to have every single meal be food that they actively love, that tastes delicious, etc. No judgment, but those people definitely spend way more money on food than I do. There’s an important secondary benefit, though – because I don’t care at all about “liking” my food (just “not hating” it), I’m able to optimize for other things – namely, health and cost. I pretty much never have to make a trade-off in that space.

Now, let’s talk about your job.

Some people love their jobs. Cool! It’s great if you do, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But it isn’t necessary, and if you let yourself think that it is you’re back to buying gasoline based on smell. If you instead accept that a job is an input towards a happy life, you can start optimizing that input for things other than creating direct happiness itself.

You can choose jobs that have fewer hours, or are closer to your home, or that are more secure, or that pay more, etc. Each of those other virtues can help you have more fun in the rest of your life, and that’s what you want anyway! I have a good friend who doesn’t like his job. He rarely talks about it, but if asked directly he’ll tell you that he gets no joy from it at all. But if you then ask him why he stays, his answer is simple: “It pays well, it’s extremely secure, the hours are always set, and it isn’t hard. Why should I care if I like it?” The rest of his life is full of all the awesome things he wants to do, fueled by the perks of the job he has no emotions for at all.

Your goal is not to optimize each individual aspect of your life for maximum happiness. It’s to maximize your overall life for maximum happiness.

Don’t smell the gasoline. Just put it in your car and drive wherever you want, my friend.

We are social creatures. We play games. We invent things to do with one another, often to sharpen some other piece of our minds and hearts. It’s healthy.

Some hobbies are introspective, meant to be enjoyed alone, but even these help create new wrinkles in your brain and personality that ultimately guide you in your social element.

Bored people are boring; there’s too much to do out there to be bored, and too many people who want to do more. They want to do it with you, too.

I love the concept of Type I and II fun. If you aren’t familiar, Type I fun is something you enjoy while you’re doing it, like playing a video game. Type II fun is often grueling or arduous while you’re doing it, but you remember it very fondly and greatly enjoy having done it, like climbing a mountain.

This concept made me think about the same model, but for negative emotions. Type I & II pain, let’s call it. Type I pain hurts while it’s happening. Type II pain might be fun while it’s happening, but agonizing later, like drinking into a hangover.

It can be very hard to acknowledge and protect ourselves from Type II pain, even though it can devastate us. But when something hurts, look to the source – and as hard as it might be, you need to remove that source quickly.

Sometimes, delay is a curse. In such instances, “now or never” can be a good call to action for yourself; a good reminder that you should have a bias for action. But in many circumstances, there’s a third way – and it’s more viable than either.

Often people need to make a major change in their life. They know they do, but they avoid acknowledging that they should do it now. They come up with reasons why now is the wrong time, and they kick the can down the road, blocking it from their minds. When it inevitably rises up again, it’s even worse, even more urgent – and you’re no better prepared.

You don’t need to choose between “now” and “never.” You can say, “In exactly eight months,” for example. And that lets you plan.

You’re not kicking the can – you’re setting reasonable timetables, intelligent goals, and action steps. Things you can achieve. The key is asking yourself: “If not now, when?”

And then actually answering that question with a plan.

It’s not “fake it ’till you make it.” That indicates that there’s ever a threshold where you stop doing one and start doing the other. The fact is, you’re always doing both. You’re always leaning in a little ahead of what you’re certain you can do. How can you be certain, until you do it? But the doing is the making; you’re creating every step of the way.

There’s water shooting all over the restaurant kitchen because of a broken pipe. There’s zero water pressure to the dishwashing station, and there won’t be any until it gets fixed. The dishwasher complains about it, and the complaint is reasonable – after all, the dishwasher can’t do their job under these conditions, so their ability to add value has diminished. The manager calls a plumber.

There’s water shooting all over the restaurant kitchen because of a broken pipe. There’s zero water pressure to the dishwashing station, and there won’t be any until it gets fixed. The plumber complains about it, but the complaint is quite unreasonable!

Why is the same condition reasonable to complain about for one person, but not the other?

In this scenario, the answer is obvious: it’s the plumber’s job to fix this; it’s literally what they signed up for. So for the plumber to complain is sort of like the plumber complaining about having a job. In fact, it’s exactly that.

And therein lies the trap.

You see, “fixing the plumbing” is somebody’s job. But it’s not necessarily yours. If you don’t want to fix the plumbing, that doesn’t automatically mean you’re a lazy plumber. It could just mean you’re a very focused and industrious dishwasher.

Cases aren’t always as clear-cut as the hypothetical above. In more complex working environments, which things should and shouldn’t be your job can be far more complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to just have everyone do whichever work is closest or most urgent. People add the most value when they focus on tasks that they’re best at, and that means the organization itself needs good workflow management.

If the restaurant manager told the dishwasher to fix the plumbing, it’s possible it could get done. But it would be far from the best solution. The trap is that sometimes voicing that can make you feel like you’re just trying to complain your way out of work, and bad managers can double down on that and make you feel that way, too.

Ask yourself – are you doing the work that adds the most value, or are you fixing problems that are getting in the way of your work, even if fixing those problems is far outside of your area of expertise? Not all writers are skilled at fixing broken typewriters, not all bus drivers are skilled mechanics, and not all dishwashers know anything about plumbing. Be careful of being trapped where you don’t belong, and then being judged for how well you do there.

There’s an imperfect but pretty easy & reliable barometer for career success, and it’s this: how much fun did you have today?

People often think they’ll make more money by sacrificing fun. In fact, they think that a “fun” job can’t possibly be lucrative – after all, who would pay you to have fun?

The truth is, money and fun exist in a symbiotic cycle. If you aren’t having fun, you won’t make much money in the long run. And if you aren’t making money, you won’t have much fun in the long run.

Sure, an un-fun job might pay well. But you won’t last if you’re miserable, so the long-term won’t be filled with fortune. But if you are having fun, you’re much more likely to be engaged in such a way as to notice and even generate new opportunities.

So make sure you’re asking yourself – daily – if you’re having fun. It’s easy to notice if you are or aren’t making money, but if you want to make sure it keeps up, you’ve got to be having fun, too.