If you’ve followed me long enough you’ll remember that I’ve got an affinity for offering some unsolicited career advice…and I’ve arrived at one that I’ve got to share.
STOP TRYING SO MUCH. STOP DOING THE MOST.
See, I’ve been a lifelong overachiever, overcommitter, overworker, and overproducer. As a kid, I learned quickly that I could access positive attention (that I lacked elsewhere) by getting an A or doing the most chores and being the most helpful. I strove to be “perfect” however I could and that meant being the best behaved, twisting myself to fit whatever it would take to become the favorite of any adult authority figure I had access to outside my home. Inside my home, getting the best grades I could and the best comments from teachers saved me from how bad the abuse could get.
Being Type A, doing the most, being the dependable one, getting a shiny gold star, filling in the gaps, raising my hand for every new task, going above and beyond, and sacrificing (my own interests, self care, friendships, and rest) was put above all else. My sense of self worth became reduced to what I DO instead of honoring who I am.
I’ve been earning my own money since 1997 and I got what I consider my first “real job” in 2001. Since then, I’ve held more jobs that I can remember as working 2-4 at a time was how I got through my 6 years of higher ed and through my 20s. No matter what the gig was….food, retail, higher ed, office admin, public policy, K-12 school programming, and for the bulk of my professional career, fundraising and nonprofit management……. I’ve prided myself in going above and beyond.
After 20+ years of this exhausting mentality, more recently, I’ve learned about toxic productivity and my own relationship with it. I’ve tried to unravel these mindsets I was given and do what I can to actually honor my own value aside from what I produce. That’s why my biggest and best piece of career is now:
Don’t be TOO good at what you do, or everyone, (including you if you’re not paying attention) will end up thinking you should handle everything, all the time.
Reflecting on those 20+ years of busting my ass, I’ve come to realize all it gave me, beyond some “employee of the month” type awards is the expectation on teams that I can do more so I should do more. That literally helps no one, most of all myself, so I’m breaking up with my perfectionism and overachieving. (Well, I lied, it does help your boss and they’ll delight in treating you like a productivity machine.)
Ambition like this (directed toward things I’m not joyful doing for myself) is a curse and a trap. Don’t get stuck in it. If I could talk to my 16 or 26 year old self, I’d say: Do less. Do just enough. Step back. Say NO more. And save that extra energy for yourself, on your own time. Thinking that you can be The Best and that you need to work the grind is a scam designed to exploit and extract as much from you as possible. Fuck that.
Now if I can just remember to follow this advice more, I’ll be great.
WOOOOOOW
I am really going through a situation that is an outgrowth of why I shouldn’t have been doing the most all these years right now. And I had totally forgotten I wrote this a year ago until someone just liked it and I read myself speaking some TRUTH.
i hope you don’t mind me adding on but this overperforming can also end up putting pressure on your coworkers to match your output, on the same pay and sometimes with less people. it can lead to friction in the workplace and people resenting you for indirectly increasing their workload to something that isn’t sustainable for anyone.
don’t kill yourself for your job, it won’t benefit you or anyone around you except your higher ups who have every interest in exploiting you.
I don’t mind at all, it’s a really good point.
It’s also a point that makes me feel even more regretful for this behavior bc that kind of thing has never been my intent. But my intent is not really important…what’s important is that I was basically acting like a good little soldier for the boss and who knows how all that was exploited beyond my first hand knowledge or awareness? It’s disturbing to consider. But consider it we must.
Sometimes solitary looks like doing less and that’s a fact I’m still only barely waking up to if I’m being honest.
It’s so fucked up how tiktok culture has made clout-poisoned people turn the public into content, every day I see people minding their business have their entire faces put online for thousands of likes, a couple kissing on the train, a lady dancing across a cross walk, a guy nodding his head to the music at a club, a lady buying a banana at the store, ring camera footage of the neighbors kids being stupid. Just let people live jfc
I think I may have made it seem like this is about wholesome content (which my sentiment towards that is the same) but most of the time when I see this stuff people are being ridiculed for being completely normal. And I didn’t make up any of these examples btw, I couldn’t find the dance one but only because there are too many videos of people being recorded at cross walks
(Faces censored and additional text added by me)
Im gonna add this to every post about this i see im never gonna shut up about it. This will get people killed. This will ruin lives. More people live in hiding than you think. So many people are one post away from having to abandon their whole lives. Dont ever post anything of anyone without their consent, stranger or not.
The other thing about measles is that it resets your body’s memory of other diseases. So all those times you’ve gotten sick? Your body’s memory cells no longer remember those illnesses, so even if you get the same type of illness again your body will react like it’s the first time you’ve been sick.
It’s so much worse than “just a disease”.
Measles does WHAT
Holy fuck
What the fuck what the fuck what the fUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK
antivaxxers also, in part, helped sabotaged the human lyme disease vaccine for lyme disease caused by borrelia burgdorferi infection
(until 2016 the only known species of lyme disease causing bacteria in the USA). In 1998, the first lyme disease vaccine for the strain of the bacteria prevalent in the USA licensed. It passed clinical trials and was shown to be safe and effective; it was between 76 and 92% effective at preventing lyme disease with 3 injections. Antivaxxers proceeded to abuse the adverse affect reporting system, often complaining of arthritis, and this caused media and general hysteria about the vaccine.
if you remember the flu vaccine hysteria around the swine flu epidemic, it was kind of like that.
despite double-blind trials conducted both before and after licensing, that was unable to support their claims and instead displaying that the vaccine was safe and effective, the damage was done, and the vaccine was shelved in the USA. you can get a lyme disease vaccine in Europe, but Europe has a different strain of the bacteria that causes lyme disease.
Lyme disease can become very serious, it can infect the nervous system and cause neurological problems especially in young children who are often bitten on the head or the neck, undiagnosed it can cause chronic health issues that mimic other diseases. Without safe prophylactic measures beyond trying to minimize contact w ticks, this has driven people who have had lyme disease, have chronic effects from mass-disseminated lyme disease infection, or people who believe they have chronic lyme disease to go to quack doctors and undergo unsafe, unapproved medical treatment in an attempt to stop suffering.
This would not be happening on the scale that it is if antivaxxers didn’t straight up execute a supervillain plot to sabotage the lyme disease vaccine. the vaccine was licensed in december 1998, which was the year andrew wakefield published his fraudulent research on the MMR vaccine
antivaxer are terrorists and should be dealt like one
H.Bomberguy’s video on the anti-vaccine movement is absolutely worth watching in its entirety. Because it lays out just how fucking twisted and wrong the entire thing is, and how this entire movement that is KILLING CHILDREN is based on a lie for money.
wait wait wait wait WAIT!
YOU GUYS HAD A VACCINE AGAINST FUCKING LYME????
AND THOSE ASSHATS HELPED TO SHELF THAT STUFF?????????
Do you people even KNOW just how much trouble lyme disease makes every fucking year? Holy shit think of the possibilities!!!
So when I say I hate anti-vaxxers, yeah. This is why.
Fucking ANTIVAXXERS MAN- Oh, there’s a virus going around. Okay! We’ll introduce a weakened strain into your body so it can learn how to fight it off, with little risk to you and your health, and it will keep your kids safe too :)… what do you mean you’re gonna’ go and expose your kids to it anyway.
i LOVE watching clips from high school productions on youtube. geeky high school thespians are my favorite people on this earth
leading lady who’s been taking voice lessons since she was 7 vs leading man who got the role because he showed up. girl in chorus who is 100% convinced she could be on broadway right now if she had the right connections (she could not). autistic girl who is clearly the most talented one in the cast but the director definitely thought she was too weird to believably play the female lead. gay teenage boy trying to play a ladies’ man. jock who auditioned as a joke but got in and now his mom won’t let him quit so he’s ready to kill himself at any moment. this is the funniest combination of people you will ever see in your life.
;lakdjsfh that adhd feeling when you’re hungry and you feel your brain actively becoming one with the void but you cannot think of a single thing that you could possibly enjoy eating
sorry this is by and far the funniest way to announce you’ve lost a leopard
For the record Nova is a clouded leopard, not an African one. They weigh about 30 pounds and are not very aggressive or considered a serious danger to humans. Probably best known by this meme:
