My original title had “guys” tacked on to the end.

In The Big Money, a brief consideration of workplace goodbyes.

the latest review

“[T]urns the executive-heavy office-help book formula on its head . . . Like a pin-wielding kid in a balloon shop, Hustad uses her insightful little book to burst workplace-attitude myths.” —Las Vegas Business Press

P.S. If anyone’s wondering why I’m anal and put the [T] in brackets, it’s because in the actual review, the “t” is lower-case, and by the standards of Stephen McNabb (hello, Stephen!), just willy-nilly elevating a lower-case “t” to a capital “T” because that better served my purpose here would be wrong in every conceivable sense. Integrity, man. Or maybe it simply illustrates that what you learn on your first job stays. with. you.

Blog Love

A couple of months ago, Google Alerts alerted me to the existence of the paragraph below. It appeared on a blog that has since been dismantled. But darn it all if the author wasn’t generous in his assessment of my work. So, because the ego is brittle today, and HTBU isn’t being advertised elsewhere, and because I haven’t gotten around to making any adorable HTBU-related videos for you to enjoy — I was going to ask friends to do dramatic reenactments of their first job horror stories, but in 9 to 5-era skirt-lengths — I’m overriding my reluctance to post it:

“Finished ‘How to Be Useful’ last night, and it really lit a fire under me. Or stoked the fire that was already lapping at my heels. It’s unprecedented, at least in my experience: a self-help book whose author I trust not to make suggestions that, when followed in the hardscrabble real world…fall utterly flat. And a book that instills in you a real desire to do better, to work harder, to have a better attitude, without resorting to mind-numbing mantras that will inevitably be abandoned after a day or two of heavy repetition.”

All those other Q&As left you unsatisfied? Well, here’s another one.

I spent many an afternoon reading the City Pages back in the day. It went well with coffee and bitterness. Can anyone tell me what happened to the Twin Cities Reader?

(Here’s the last, perhaps best, line of the interview, if only for how it does that “ripped from the headlines” thing right: ”Ironic detachment is a carefree — or seemingly carefree — posture that only works in boom times.” i.e. My book =  Timely!)

New York Times Book Review

Last week I was on an airplane and needed to visit the bathroom. I clambered over my seatmates, up the aisle, and pushed open the lavatory door. A woman — a dignified older woman, dressed in white, topped by a floppy white church hat — was inside, pulling up her underwear. Oh! I apologized and let the door shut, embarrassed for the both of us. A couple in the bulkhead row mustered watery smiles in sympathy. The older woman emerged and shot me a look. “There’s a sign!” she said, indicating the VACANT / OCCUPIED window that had, when I’d approached, indeed read VACANT. She walked off, uninterested in any reply.

How I felt right at that moment is similar to how I felt upon reading Alexandra Jacobs’s review of How to Be Useful in this Sunday’s New York Times. A critical review I can handle — hey, I’m an anxious, middle-class striver from the Midwest; we love hearing of ways we might improve ourselves! But a review that doesn’t engage the book’s real premise is harder to process. People who don’t wrestle with what actually happened, be they an old lady who neglected to lock the bathroom door or an over-worked book critic…let’s just say they make life infinitely interesting.

All I’ll say in defense of HTBU is that I’m surprised it was read as evidence that I find careerism and the office “fundamentally boring.” I believe quite the opposite. I hope you’ll read the book and agree.

Did I mention it’s also available in the UK?

A few weeks ago I had a fantastic conversation with Oliver Burkeman, who writes for the U.K.’s Guardian. One, he liked How to be Useful. Two, he’d picked up on an argument that is more implicit than explicitly stated in the book, and that’s this: the way our culture frames work, especially working in office environments, is far too bland and sapless. And that hurts more people than it helps.

Here’s a portion of his column:

Ambition has become unfashionable. (”She’s ambitious,” Hustad quotes a workplace gossip saying of a colleague. “[It was] inflected the way you might say, ‘She has hepatitis B.’”) We’re cynical about the idea of finding fulfilment in a corporate setting, yet many of us work in one anyhow; to cope with that contradiction we adopt a detachment that ultimately leads to stagnation and unhappiness. Yet there’s something refreshing about the old-fashioned success books and the zest with which they explain the art of working – how to pay compliments strategically, how to seek out mentors, how to dress for success. “[I] wanted to reclaim professional climbing for the smart and sensitive,” Hustad says.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Millions

So there’s this books, arts, and culture blog called The Millions, and their contributors wrote short vignettes about their first jobs, and invited me to comment, and it was fun. You can read the results here. And here’s Garth Risk Hallberg’s kind introduction:

The concept of self-improvement through reading has always struck me as hopelessly vexed. I was surprised and delighted, then, to discover in Megan Hustad’s How to Be Useful an erudite, pragmatic, funny, and endearingly humble “Beginner’s Guide to Not Hating Work.” It was the kind of book I wish someone had given me when I was fresh out of college.

Back then, in the giddy afterglow of the Clinton years, my enormous sense of entitlement hid behind a contorted ideological posture. Sure, I would benefit financially from global capitalism, but I would maintain my purity by doing a really mediocre job. (Take that, Milton Friedman!) What’s refreshing about How to Be Useful is that it presents an ethical, rather than a moral, argument for working hard. Hustad doesn’t attempt to say that you should work for The Man; rather, she argues that if you have to, you might as well do it well.

Surprisingly, the secret to success, according to Hustad’s meta-analysis of a century of business advice, is making yourself indiscriminately useful to those around you. At some point, she argues, people will want to return the favor. And in the meantime, while you may not have addressed global economic inequality, you will have made the world around you a little more pleasant for your coworkers and for yourself.

Because I’m not on a plane to L.A. this morning

So the Los Angeles HTBU event has been “postponed” (and yes, we’re going to keep on believing that it will happen, and that it will be great good times for everyone when it does), the below Q&A isn’t going to run on Laist as planned. But it’s not bad, so here goes:

When you were working in the publishing industry did you ever get frustrated enough to read “success literature”? If so, which book?

No way! Are you kidding? Frustrated, absolutely, but picking up a book specifically designed to help cut through that frustration? That seemed lamebrained. Plus, I thought all career advice amounted to Tom Peters, rah-rah middle-management! type stuff, and I wasn’t interested in that, so no…never.

What inspired you to write How to Be Useful? Why would you take one for the team and read all those advice books?

Pretty much discovering that being so discriminating in my reading selections wasn’t doing me any favors. I also think I became drawn to them as a genre precisely because they were taboo, in a sense, amongst the arty crowd I ran with. Anything avoided with a ten-foot pole deserves closer investigation.

Which person’s advice surprised you the most?

Helen Gurley Brown, former editor of Cosmo (a magazine I don’t read, and never have), who wrote a book called Sex and the Single Girl in 1962. I’d first heard of the book when I was a kid — it was on a Trivial Pursuit question! God, that’s nerdy. But anyhow, it’s not as sexy as the title suggests, not in the literal sense anyway, and is fundamentally about squirming your way up in the world (clothes on). She’s a very entertaining writer.

Do you think the grads coming into the workforce today are spoiled? Entitled? I recall reading in your introduction that our experiences in college don’t prepare people for office life…at all.

Um, yeah, I think that’s probably fair to say. Or at least that’s what many people who are currently bossing recent grads around tell me — that their new employees increasingly “don’t get it.” The more inane parts of the college experience are partly to blame, yes, but I also think the culture at large now just spews out these totally *idiotic* messages. “Just be yourself!” Etc., etc. Bleh. Some of the advice given to job seekers today is so not helpful it almost makes you want to indulge in some conspiracy theories.

But then there’s also the overwhelming proliferation of ironic posturing — or the idea that if something doesn’t satisfy, the best and most honorable thing to do is to cross your arms, stand on the sidelines, and make snide remarks. Used to be, only the avant-garde was snotty and cynical; now mainstream pop culture is really cynical. It’s weird. I’m still trying to figure out what the implications are, beyond making it harder to get through the work day.

When you advise people to not be themselves…are you advocating lying in the workplace to get ahead?

Not at all. I’m basically saying, if you think you have some obligation to represent your true and soulful essence every waking moment of the day, and you’re working in an underling or assistant capacity, you will get frustrated and angry with yourself really, really fast. Also — certain kinds of personalities and behaviors get rewarded in corporate settings, and others…less so. Telling young people that anything goes as long as they’re sincere and they work hard, when, in fact, that’s totally not true, is just not…kind. Or useful to them. But it’s complicated. [Insert plug for Chapter 1, where I discuss all this at length, here.]

Next to an ad for “Son of Rambow”

New York magazine recommends HTBU. A pleasant surprise, I’ll admit. ‘Success Lit’ Distilled for the Meta Age.

Breaking into print

A How To Be Useful-inspired piece in the Times.