Tag: Mental Health

Joyful job offers

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(Written a month ago. Published only after their negotiations ended with a successful and satisfied signing.)

Today I helped someone with a job offer negotiation. I awoke this morning thinking about the elements I’d include. I wrote them down. Then I asked Claude for tips. It shifted the sequencing slightly and reframed two pieces of content. Performing skillfully in this negotiation could be worth 10% in annual pay. That’s huge! A few thoughts:

  1. Most people dislike negotiations, so they end them early. If one more back-and-forth is worth $5k in annual pay, isn’t it worth doing the additional back-and-forth? What’s your hourly work rate? Even at $200/hr, that $5k pay bump is worth 25 hours of work. There’s no way the single additional back and forth is bad.
  2. Ignore everything that isn’t a number. Sure, their internal process matters: when you hear facts about how that works, file them away. But most of the conversation is just bullshit fluff. Ignore their attempts to move you emotionally: numbers and actual contractual terms are the only relevant part.
  3. Use both logos and pathos. Just because the only thing that matters from them is the numbers doesn’t mean the only thing that matters from you is numbers. If you can move a number through fluff, that’s valuable fluff!
  4. Walk through the pathways. It’s like a chess move: follow each action down to the end of its pathway as far as you can see. (“If I do X, they might do A, B, or C. If they do A… If they do B… If they do C…”). You won’t know all the details. That’s okay. You can ballpark them. (“If I accept the offer as-is, we have a deal. If I ask for infinity dollars, they’ll either tell me no or rescind the offer. But in the middle, where do I think their lines are?”)
  5. Be positive, affable, and friendly. Everyone wants to work with someone friendly.
  6. Signal flexibility on things that don’t matter. If you’re proposing a $150k salary, offer to take it as $140k salary plus a $10k guaranteed annual bonus if it’s easier for their books. (This is an actual scenario I’ve run into: in some organizations, bonuses come from a different pool from salaries, and you don’t care where it comes from.)

Three additional rules:

  1. Know what you want.
  2. Get what you want.
  3. (Therefore, generally) ask for what you want.

The Pleasant Walkthrough

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Wednesday at 4pm is my favorite part of the week. My contractor, designer, and carpenter meet me at the apartment. We walk through the building, pointing out errors and making new decisions. We confirm what’s happened over the last week, and I agree to pay them. This structure is fun. A few key points:

  1. I enjoy paying them. I pay for work immediately after it’s performed. They invoice me with clear line items. This structure means I enjoy paying them. I look at a new wall on the invoice, verify it against the real, in-vivo new wall, and pleasingly transfer them their money. I don’t hound them for work; I confirm that the work has been performed.
  2. I create clear sources of truth. I’ve only signed a few documents. Those documents control. I like this structure. It avoids the standard sort of mistake: someone operating from the wrong set of plans.
  3. I indicate mistakes, quickly. With a subcontractor structure, minor mistakes will inevitably happen. They clearly have these mistakes built into their timeline.
  4. I don’t sweat the small stuff. One time, I walked into the apartment to find my designer working with the A/C on and the window open. Yes, someone should correct him. But the cost to me in goodwill for flagging it would be way too much.
  5. Bring food. When Partner is around, she bakes cookies or brownies. When she’s away, I bring dried mango. Today, my contractor brought some mango too. Sharing food creates friendship.

Today, I gushed about the apartment. I often do this, saying things like “What a beautiful space! This is stunning”. I mean it. I love the work that they’re doing and the team I’ve hired. After I mentioned this, my carpenter said, “Your friend said the same thing.”

“My friend?” I replied.

“Yes, the one you sent by with his girlfriend. The one with no hair. He said you used to work together. He came here, then he went to 1F. He also loved the exposed beams.”

I thought for a moment, then I said, “I don’t know that person. I bet he just wanted to see the apartment!”

We laughed, and my lead contractor said, “That’s New York for ya”.

Firing the wrong person

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Someone conscripted me for a project. 

I wasn’t super interested. 

I didn’t know the team, didn’t care about the topic, and the scope was out-of-wheelhouse. 

Still, they wanted to take on the topic, and the money was fine. 

The structure: a two-week work trial. We produce one article, after which the company may extend our contract. 

Someone & I worked on it for a week. Someone put in ~80% of the hours; I structured the content. We sent The Boss an outline. 

The Boss was livid. “Unacceptable”, he said, along with other epithets. He didn’t like the appearance, completely ignoring key traits and lacking in curiosity. I said to Someone, “If he replies like this, the price of the actual work just went up.” 

We hopped on a call. I spoke most on my team’s behalf: Someone prefers I do the talking because Someone wants me to own the relationship going forward. 

Afterwards, The Boss called Someone for a one-on-one. The Boss wants to drop me from the team. The irony? It wasn’t my work! I was just the point of contact! 

Someone told him they don’t have bandwidth to shoulder this whole load themselves. I’ll still send him a finished draft, because that’s what we agreed. Then maybe he’ll seek to only hire Someone for the bigger project, despite a misread of the situation. 

There’s irony for ya. 

If I cared, I’d care. But I don’t; I just find it funny. 

In the “Do good work, turn it in on time, and have people like you” world of freelancing, with this particular gig, I’ve nailed the first two. The third one? Fortunately, it’s a “choose any two”. 

Games Played

“I was going to ask you what the Jewish creation myth is. I then laughed at myself when I thought of the question.” — Partner, who was raised catholic.

I enjoy enjoying paying

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Today I had a fun negotiation. My contractor said that he had invoiced me ahead of time for the plumbing because the plumber needs to buy materials. He asked if I could pay this ahead of time. (He usually invoices me at the end of the week for work that was completed that week, as per our contract.) 

I expressed my confusion. I asked a few questions: 

  1. What topics will he want me to pre-pay? 
  2. How does this work, considering I paid a larger-than-normal deposit (30% instead of the normal 20%)? 

He explained the position. 

Then, I said… no! 

It was a kind and friendly no. I was emotionally authentic and effusive. The best line was when I said, “I like paying you. I like looking at the things we’ve completed over the last week and feeling excited about it. This would be a different setup.” 

I also gave him an out. I said, “If it’s an emergency, I’m happy to re-consider this. But right now the process is working well for me, so I’d like it to continue.” 

I debriefed with Partner afterwards. Partner thought my “no” was just that we had a deal structured in a particular way, so continuing that way is good for record-keeping. The real underlying motivation is one of leverage. If I paid my contractor entirely upfront, who knows if they’ll actually show up to do the work? I like to think people take pride in their work and follow-through on their obligations, but good contracts make good working relationships the same way good fences make good neighbors. 

I once heard someone in therapy-world describe something like “Boundaries are the lines that enable me to love myself and you”. This setup is similar: these financial boundaries and processes allow me to feel excited when I pay my contractor. They allow me to gush about the work he’s doing, and to feel delighted by it instead of worried. 

We left it at “If it’s a problem, he’ll tell me.” And if it is a problem, I’m open to solving it. But this particular draw-down should be out of his account, not mine. 

So I’ll continue paying after completion, and I’ll continue enjoying paying him. 

Unambitious and okay

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Partner asked me today if I wanted to do a one-person show. We had just watched a beautiful one-person show about ghosts and loss and intergenerational lessons. Partner asked me over a Georgian cheese boat: “Does seeing that show make you want to do a one-person show?” I told her: “No. Right now, I’m very unambitious. I’m building an apartment. I want to have a family. I’m enjoying working for [client x], [client y], and I’m interested in working with [client z]. I’ve even written a one-person show. And I like it – it’s pretty good. But not really.”

Recently, my life has been fairly boring, and that’s okay. I’ve enjoyed watching the Starcraft Brood War ASL Season 11 World Championships. I’ve enjoyed going to the gym.

If 17-year-old me could see 33-year-old me, I wonder what he’d say. In some ways he’d be disappointed: I wrote a 10-year-from-today day-in-the-life back in 2017. Now, it’s about to be 2027. I haven’t achieved most of the things on that list. I don’t really care.

A friend contacted me last week about publishing my book. I don’t feel motivated to do so. I’m fine not feeling motivated to do so. 

I remember reading Tim Kreider’s Lazy: A Manifesto. On my deathbed, I won’t regret failing to close a client. 

Today, Partner and I took two hours getting ready to leave the apartment. We ate sausage and peppers, inventoried lights for our apartment, lifted heavy, voyaged to a meal she had been wanting for weeks, watched a play, and then ate a cheese boat. That’s enough for today.

(Partner thinks ambition is an instrumental good: it makes one do good things. I used to have a lot of ambition. I used to do good things. Today I have less ambition. I still do good things.) 

Rest days, work days, and the Sabbath

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Weeks don’t end, they loop.

I prefer working on weekends. 

Perhaps it’s the contrarian in me. I enjoy having free time on weekdays and working on Saturday. It’s certainly not respecting the sabbath. But today I ran through a bunch of necessary items for my apartment renovation. Lighting, mainly. Also contemplating a particular business situation. 

This gym session, I missed my bench press again. I’ve now missed it 4x in a row. After 3x, it suggests I deload. I did not deload. I should have deloaded. 

It turns out that the body decreases strength gains when it is too intensely stimulated. If you’re not increasing gains, you might benefit from another rest day, not another gym day. This is tough for me. So a program where I can still go to the gym, just at a lower level of intensity, is good. Better. Preferable. 

I’m learning about my body. Learning about intensity and how not to injure myself. Learning the value of pushing myself, but also the value of relaxing and resting. 

I like this style. I like this growth. I like this muscle. 

I can currently bench press 185lbs for 3 reps. When I can bench press my bodyweight, I will benchpress Partner. I might only be 12 weeks away. How nice it is to have a long-term goal. 

Humans experience beautiful variation. I like working on Saturdays and Sundays, and prefer taking some weekday afternoons off to compensate. Plenty of people (most, even) prefer the typical workweek. Maturity is a process of learning yourself. Plus I can get a pickleball court without waiting for 45 minutes. And weekday lunch specials / theater tickets are delish!

Then again, one friend of mine stays up until ~5am, then sleeps til the afternoon. He thinks it’s healthy. In his case, I disagree. 

The Bounty Hunter

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On Tuesday, a friend told me they wanted to fire their therapist and felt uncomfortable about it. I asked how much they pays the therapist, and they said $350 a week. I offered them a deal: you give me a hundred dollars and I’ll send an email that fires your therapist. They laughed, then I said, “And the best part: then I’ll give you a hundred dollars back. So you get to have no therapist, and a hundred dollars!”

They said that they would go home and fire the therapist and that they wouldn’t come back to the office (we share a coworking space) until they fired him. 

For two days, I didn’t see her, which surprised me. 

Then on Friday, they text me saying:

  • “Okay, I have like 90% succeeded at firing my therapist, I am going to count that as enough success to return to the office today. I technically need to send a follow up email on Sunday confirming that today will have been my final session as we agreed I would think about it over the weekend but the groundwork is clear.“

I had thought she was joking! 

I find this very funny. Not only due to the amusing structure of someone wanting to fire their therapist but feeling unable to because they don’t want to hurt their therapist’s feelings (which is already funny). Not only due to the amusing financial machinations (paying for another session this week – at $350 – when I’m pretty damn sure the whole point of that session was to cancel), which is itself the sort of thing that a therapist should help someone upskill but apparently this therapist does not (lol at therapy financial incentives). But also due to the self-inflicted rule that was clearly some sort of self-enforced punishment to mandate a behavior, but which was quite possibly not good for anyone as it prevented them from working from their ideal location despite no meaningful connection between working from my living room and firing their therapist. 

Games played

I realized today what my job is: I’m a bounty hunter! I establish bounty-based contracts with people for achieving specific ends (often paired with a small retainer). I’ve now signed one agreement to this effect, with a ~70% chance of another coming in the next week. So far, I have happy clients. Now, ‘tis time for me to deliver. 

If only that friend had paid me the $100: she’d’ve saved $250 ($350 if she wanted the $100 back), and we’d both be better off. 

Too much insufficient conflict 

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I realized today that the amount of conflict in a relationship does not necessarily align with the quality of the relationship. 

One of my game-playing buddies is a high-conflict person. The two of us have a high-conflict relationship. (I bet he has a high-conflict relationship with everyone.) 

Another is a low-conflict person. I have never seen him in conflict with someone else. 

I enjoy playing games with each of them. 

Some family dinnertables are full of raised voices and spirited debate. 

Others are calm and gentle. 

Today I played a single game with both of those people: one on my left, the other on my right. Low-conflict on my left, High-conflict on my right. 

Mid-sentence, I caught myself code-switching. High-conflict person will make some super aggressive claim. I’ll tell him, “That’s insane. You should have done it this way instead.” Then I turn to low-conflict and ask calmly – like a kindergarten teacher: “What would you do differently?” 

High-conflict can get to truth faster, in an engineering sort of way. Low-conflict is more rejuvenating. High-conflict is the storm; low-conflict is the calm after. 

My main dissatisfaction with relationships stems from wanting high-conflict when it’s low-conflict, or vice-versa. And a specific relationship is not always best in a single state. Sometimes I’ll get annoyed at Partner for nitpicking something I say (implying she’s higher conflict than I desire at that moment). At other times, I’ll say to her, “I”m feeling spicy. Let’s fight about something” (I want more conflict than the moment is giving). Monty Python even has a line pertinent to the topic: a man enters an argument clinic to purchase an argument. In the middle of the argument, he says, “I don’t want to argue about that.” (at 3:22 in this sketch)

Most of my social dissatisfaction stems from wanting more conflict (feeling bored) or less conflict (feeling drained). 

As the Buddha would say, one must accept the conflict. Even the conflict containing insufficient conflict containing too much conflict, containing…? 

Yes, even the self-possessing recursion, spiraling ever downward. 

Against Middlemen 

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My project manager/apartment designer sent me on a wild goose chase because he likes pretty things and I like money. 

I left his office at 3:45pm. Partner & I walked the 20 minutes to the lighting showroom for our 4:45 appointment. It was hot. Partner was grumpy due to lack of food (an all-liquid diet will do that to you, especially if you make the mistake of giving away your protein shake). At 4:15pm, my designer texted to cancel: see, the showroom closes at 5pm, so what about a meeting on Thursday? I told him tomorrow (Wednesday) is good but Thursday is no good. See: we have an appointment with my designer’s boss on Thursday, and I really want the lighting nailed down before then. Partner has already designed a new lighting package, so this whole experience of look-at-this-new-lighting-package feels like a wild goose chase to me anyway. It’s all because my designer wants no visible flange around my lights, while I want 1.5% of a million-dollar farm upstate. 

Having already walked to the showroom (and being an impish sort of fellow), I entered anyway. After a 5-minute wait, I spotted the same saleswoman who had previously helped me. I asked her about the 4:45pm meeting. She said there never had been a 4:45pm meeting. 

Aha. 

I asked her if she had designed the new lighting package that my designer mentioned. She said yes. 

Me: “Could we schedule an appointment for tomorrow? Any time after 1pm.” 

Saleswoman: “Sure: I’m wide open anytime from 1pm. And you’re my top priority.”

Me: “Could you send me the product list and spec sheets ahead of time so I can research them?” 

Saleswoman: “We can only send it to your designer.”

Me: “That dramatically decreases the likelihood we will buy lights from you.” 

Saleswoman: “Sorry, it’s store policy.” 

When I shared this experience with Partner, she laughed and said wedding plans often have a password, to avoid e.g. the mother of the bride changing things. 

“That’s fair enough,” I said. “But I’m the bride!” 

I’ve heard it’s reasonably common in German culture for someone experiencing consumer anguish of this sort to say something like, “But I’m paying you money!” And maybe it’s my German genes, but that’s my natural response! 

If you’re not going to share your information with me, I won’t give you my money! I already am disinterested in the fact that you charge $20k for something that I could nearly mimic for $7k. And now you’re not going to share MY INFORMATION with me? It’s like a HIPAA violation, but for lighting showrooms! 

I emailed my designer. I started the conversation by requesting that he only tell me meetings are booked when they actually are booked. (Shots fired.) 

It’s even more frustrating because I don’t mind the flange. 

In reality, a small issue. The demolition on my apartment started yesterday, and is going swimmingly. The meeting with my designer and the owner of the contracting company went well. This is just one small drop in a sea of good news. 

And anyway, not giving them my money is the best revenge. 

Musing on Connective Tissue

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Imagine 10 or 100 people describe you, and their descriptions become a word cloud. Now take your word cloud, and compare it to other people’s.

Would we find that the people you spend time with have similar word clouds — similar descriptors, similar nouns about them? Does your cloud sit close to the clouds of the people near you? If so, in what ways alike, and in what ways different? (That’s graphing friend groups or political links in n-dimensional space according to personal traits, as a word cluster of noun descriptors of the person: clustering by cloud similarity and then drawing lines between the points based on social or political ties.)

My bet: people befriend and connect based on proximity. But the friend network is different than the leader. The map of who we like is not the map of who leads us.

Maybe “Yalie” is a noun about you, and a bunch of the people around you are also Yalies. Maybe most of the people you spend time with are quite tall — about the same height. But what about groups with diversities of traits instead: An office might cluster around Yalies but diversify by role: one person described “HR,” one described “accounting,” one described “CEO.” Some friend groups are all CEOs; other circumstances produce diversity. How does that work in an office? In politics? 

I wonder what they’d learn about politics. Is the most successful politician of a group the person who overlaps most with the rest of the group? I wouldn’t think the leader is necessarily the person with the most words overlapping others (because that person might miss a key trait, e.g. the desire to lead). Maybe the person who is friends with everybody is the one with the most in common with everybody. Or maybe the leader’s lowest commonality is higher than anybody else’s lowest (i.e. “The leader is nobody’s stranger.”). It’s got to be more complicated than that, depending on the group structure and incentives and the outsized impact of specific traits like desire for power.

Why I’ve been thinking about this: in a group that I interacted with today, the leader shares the most traits with the other group members. Each bloc shares one of her dimensions. Thinking about the descriptors of these different people and how she ended up being president: she is the person all of these different groups can agree on.

But often the leader of a group is not the leader because they have much in common with everybody, but because they plan things. That’s an interesting difference. The leader of a friend group is not the one most overlapping with others but more likely the one who organizes the events. In her case, part of it is she makes the thing happen — the leadership thing. This differs from the second-in-command, who doesn’t organize people, just makes the wheels run. Doing isn’t organizing.

Does anybody map social groups this way? A thing I’d be curious about: how do the friend network and the leader differ? The mapping half is studied — sociologists call it homophily. The gap between who connects and who leads is the fresher question.

—

Games Played

The writers missed out by failing to name it, “The Devil Wears Prada 2: The Devil Still Wears Prada.”