Hi, as a fellow T-Nation citizen and this being some of the only therapy time I get away from the morons of the world, let me help you with your response. This is my opinion of what you should do based upon many of my bitter experiences. I normally don’t share responses like this due to numerous reasons but there are so many people on the TNation boards that I do respect and admire. I am an executive director at a large corporation and see this everyday.
The first 1/3 of this response is my opinion, the rest you don’t have to read.
Ideal Response - Don’t Make Waves.
When it comes to any type of employment review done by a board, they don’t care about the quality of work you do, the pride you take, or the man you are.
There is no overall because the majority of “professionals” that will be reviewing you are not
qualified nor care. Their only ability is to nit pick. They will not go into anything they don’t know or understand, they will only judge you on areas that they are comfortable in. This is why you are being nagged about filling quotas not about the spirit or upholding the ideals of your profession. The sycophants that kiss their posteriors get the glowing reviews by doing everything in their careers based on the expectations set out by these dangerously under-qualified people and not about doing the right thing.
Don’t make a scene.
Man is a social animal and cannot live without man. As a law enforcement officer you obviously know that if you throw someone into the hole, they go nuts without other people. The same is so with your review board, if you make a scene about doing the right thing, they will view it as an attack against all of them NOT you trying to enlighten them about you. These people work on the majority rules and will make your life difficult and do everything in their power to hurt you. (I will get into the reasons why later if you want to know.) They will always remember you. Every review board will be the same and they share information on who to watch out for because they all gossip like old women. There is no mythical champion of your cause, that is only in the movies. Boards like these always push out the “troublesome, argumentative” guy because it jeopardizes their jobs.
That is my opinion on what you should think about before you write a real man’s response that will deep six your career. The world hates real men and this is one of the only places that I found that the few can congregate.
Now that I have dispensed that. I would like to give a TC style rant that will probably get me into alot of trouble. BTW TC, I have boatloads of respect for you. Every male here can learn something from 3 important articles that he wrote, 1st was on the subject of scavengers, 2nd on MuscleMedia/ESA, 3rd on his pretending to call it a day and raise emu or some other large bird (can’t remember). I am writing this because I hope that someone here can learn from my experiences and mistakes.
The world that everyone takes for granted is actually upside down. Forget the sales and marketing terms that you heard. There are only Hunters, Gathers, and Scavengers. There are actually very few Hunters left in the world. The majority of people at the top and decision making roles are actually Scavengers. This is the sad reality of every company I have been part of and deal with. They are the most useless examples of human beings. I will get into the image of all of this later.
FIRST RULE:
Don’t let anyone inside your company know that you are a hunter “a real man.”
They will be nice to your face but do everything to sabotage you because they are afraid that you will get ahead and they will not. Eventually if you pass into middle management, all the managers will try to get you. They fundamentally know the following. They know that gatherer type people will work harder for you, they know that you will judge them and call them out on their BS. They know that you don’t define yourself by your title, they know that you work harder than they do. They make group decisions to preserve what they have. They believe that if you grow, they diminish. They fear that you will change the status quo. Remember they are the majority, you are not.
Second Rule:
Beware of your own altruism.
You treat your company as your tribe even if you are not the chief. You try to do what is best for everyone and for the company. Scavengers don’t care that you sacrificed your personal life for their paycheck. Altruism worries them because they cannot sacrifice for others, only take. They hate how you are nice to everyone and that you are adaptable to find solutions. They never do anything nice unless there is something to gain. Real men were taught by their fathers and mothers to be man, “This what a man does, this is what a real man does not do.” Most of the shitheads at the top were taught strategy. To them, strategy is people doing things in a predicable way. They were taught, “Son, this what a good man is, this is how to identify a good man, this is how to take advantage of him because he is predictable.” Their idea of negative predictable traits are: honor, duty, not lie-ing, stealing, not taking from people who don’t have anything. So when you are expending your energy, time, youth trying to do what is best, they are enjoying their lives and planning on how to screw you so that they get a small portion of benefits and leave you broken. Remember you cannot look forwards and backwards at the same time. If you look back, your not looking forward. If you want to win for everyone, you can never look back, only forward. I constantly use Schumacher for this example. Remember when he first started F1? He would never take the lead, he would always dog whomever was the leader until near the end of the race. Why? Because he was using the guy in front to correct his speed and entry/exits out of the corners and wearing the leader out mentally & putting him out the race. Now the leader has to concentrate on what is ahead and what is behind. He see’s himself screwing up entries/exits because there is no guide and sees Schumacher doing everything perfectly and becoming a bigger and bigger monster. The leader is now spending more time thinking about Schumacher than what is ahead and that’s it, his concentration & focus are crushed. When you do what is good for everyone, you hope that everyone will appreciate it and hope for the best since you are doing everything for everyone’s best interests. They do not precieve it that way. The idea is completely FOREIGN to them, you have to understand THEY DON’T think like you.
These are only a couple of things that I have learned in my life if you guys want me to write more about these things, I will.
Next thing, why are Scavengers on top?
Simple, blame in on WW1/WW2/Korea/Vietnam. If you were fit for war, then you went. If you saw it as duty then off you go. Thanks to altruism, you sacrificed your life to save others. This left a glut of the wrong people in society. Then they changed the rules. They made it seem that the hunter was a neanderthal, chauvinistic pig and sold the world scavenger qualities as hunter qualities. Don’t believe me? Let me give you a few examples? Sorry, part of this is venting (me blowing off steam, I absolutely hate the crap our Cop brother is going through.)
What is the best way to make a consistent profit? Don’t pay people what they are worth because labor will always be your biggest cost.
What is the whole point of having a perfect V cut back and big shoulders? If it is your profession it is fine but if not it’s useless. How are you going to survive? Close shoulder to hip ratio is far superior like a sprinter or powerlifter. But strongmen & powerlifters are by mainstream considered ugly builds. The Kennel club deals with purebred dogs based on their aesthetics NOT on their function. e.g. not good hunter, not good tracker, not good guard dog, etc. Now that the majority of the population is promoting images of aesthetics over function just like the idiots at the Kennel Club. I’d rather have strong hips & back.
Why is everyone so mental these days? I have this fight with the marketing department all the time, even though I do not have direct authority over them. If media and everyone is telling you that something is beautiful eventually you will believe it is beautiful. If you have to fight your natural instincts and people telling you that everything that you like is wrong. It forces your brain to change in unnatural ways against our hardwired instincts. 50% of the marketing department is gay. No problems with that or what they do in their personal life. I have a problem when you throw it in my face. Everyone has a different idea of beauty. Telling me that we are using a specific girl because she is beautiful in a campaign…well she is not my idea of beautiful. It is their’s and since they like boys. Guess what, they chose a girl that looks like a 10 year old boy that is completely shapeless. Which just reinforces bad body image onto the population again. Then they tell me that I have bad taste and that they are “visually creative.” In English that means they can’t read. I love our beautiful T-Vixen women and the women that support us. Their builds say alot about them. Many don’t have pretty faces which they can’t change but they turn their bodies into art, have the discipline and passion to be someone either for themselves or someone else. This makes them so much more desirable to me. Everyone I show T-Girl pictures say it’s gross but then again I don’t believe that if you are a woman under 33 that you should be fat unless you have a medical condition or gave birth.
Girls get excited over titles because they associate qualities with the title. “Omigod, he’s the CEO.” They automatically assume that he is smart, strong, sophisticated, open-minded, determined, ya da, ya da, ya da. The majority of the board of directors of most companies got there on the backs of others by taking advantage of them and the social games. They have no big visions, they have no real plans, they have none of the qualities associated with them but people believe that they do. If they did have those qualities they would not be listening to overpaid consultants & business analysts and repeating everything they are told to their companies as Gospel. The majority are useless, when a problem happens they are running around, yelling at people and looking for someone to blame. They also usually don’t have the skills that people generally think they do. They just expend the majority of their time doing the social thing. Men think in terms of positioning and scenarios. I’m sure most people here think about worst case scenarios and what to do if it did happen. They don’t because someone else does all the work. 95% of all senior and executive directors I know, do not have a current prespective of their industry and have not kept their skill sets up to date or relevant. I spend most of my time dumbfounded at their insanity.