- Murray, Charles.
The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead.
New York: Crown Business, 2014.
ISBN 978-0-8041-4144-4.
-
Who, after reaching middle age and having learned, through the tedious
but persuasive process of trial and error, what works and what doesn't,
how to decide who is worthy of trust, and to distinguish passing fads from
enduring values, hasn't dreamed of having a conversation with their
twenty year old self, downloading this painfully acquired wisdom to
give their younger self a leg up on the slippery, knife-edged-rungs
of the ladder of life?
This slim book (144 pages) is a concentrated dose of wisdom applicable
to young people entering the job market today. Those of my generation
and the author's (he is a few years my senior) often worked at
summer jobs during high school and part-time jobs while at
university. This provided an introduction to the workplace, with its
different social interactions than school or family life (in the
business world, don't expect to be thanked for doing your job). Today's
graduates entering the workforce often have no experience whatsoever in
that environment and are bewildered because the incentives are so different
from anything they've experienced before. They may have been a star student,
but now they find themselves doing tedious work with little intellectual
content, under strict deadlines, reporting to superiors who treat them
as replaceable minions, not colleagues. Welcome to the real world.
This is an intensely practical book. Based upon a series of postings
the author made on an internal site for interns and entry-level personnel
at the American Enterprise Institute, he gives guidelines on writing,
speaking, manners, appearance, and life strategy. As the author notes
(p. 16), “Lots of the senior people who can help or hinder
your career are closeted curmudgeons like me, including executives in
their forties who have every appearance of being open minded and cool.”
Even if you do not wish to become a curmudgeon yourself as you age (good
luck with that, dude or dudette!), your advancement in your career will
depend upon the approbation of those people you will become if you are
fortunate enough to one day advance to their positions.
As a curmudgeon myself (hey, I hadn't yet turned forty when I found myself
wandering the corridors of the company I'd founded and silently asking
myself, “Who hired that?”), I found nothing in this
book with which I disagree, and my only regret is that I
couldn't have read it when I was 20. He warns millennials, “You're
approaching adulthood with the elastic limit of a Baccarat champagne
flute” (p. 96) and counsels them to spend some of those
years when their plasticity is greatest and the penalty for errors is
minimal in stretching themselves beyond their comfort zone, preparing for
the challenges and adversity which will no doubt come later in life.
Doug Casey has said
that he could parachute naked into a country in sub-saharan Africa
and within one week be in the ruler's office pitching a development
scheme. That's rather more extreme than what Murray is advocating,
but why not go large? Geronimo!
Throughout, Murray argues that what are often disdained as
clichés are simply the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of
generations of massively parallel trial and error search of
the space of solutions of human problems, and that we ignore
them at our peril. This is the essence of conservatism—valuing
the wisdom of the past. But that does not mean one should be a
conservative in the sense of believing that the past provides a
unique template for the future. Those who came before
did not have the computational power we have, nor the ability to
communicate data worldwide almost instantaneously and nearly
for free, nor the capacity, given the will, to migrate from
Earth and make our species multi-planetary, nor to fix the
aging bug and live forever. These innovations will fundamentally
change human and post-human society, and yet I believe those
who create them, and those who prosper in those new worlds
will be exemplars of the timeless virtues which Murray
describes here.
And when you get a tattoo or piercing, consider how it will look when
you're seventy.
May 2014 