If you work as a white-collar worker, the answer is you won’t be able to in the long-run. Basically what happens in many competitive workplaces is that you and your co-workers who do similar work are in an ecosystem designed to achieve maximum optimization. What that ultimately means is eventually either you leave or your co-worker leave via promotion to a higher position, a transfer or basically just quit or get fired. This is especially true with the highly educated who are high performers. Most of the time high performers end up working countless overtime to meet increasingly higher expectation due to performance punishment which causes burnout and their eventual departure. Low performance employees won’t last much longer either as when the economy goes bad or profits dip, these people will likely be the first ones asked to leave. I would say there is no point to get intentionally get along with anyone in a workplace if everyone are respectful to each other and work as a team because it will come natural. I think the reality is almost no one ever get rich working for someone else. Many workers I know suffer a lot of mental stress due to the daily work grind and all the politics. My honest take on this is don’t think of work as everything, think of it as transitory. Don’t even think about working for a company for years. At the end of the day, you will sacrifice a lot more than just your time. Your health will likely greatly deteriorate when you have to act and speak in a way that is not nature to you just for money unless it’s truly something you want to do. Even so use it as a platform to gain experience so you can eventually be your own boss. What is the point of living life and working hard if you never have the time nor the healthiness to enjoy the fruits of your labor?
If I were you, I would try to save and invest via 401(k) as much as possible. This era is not the time to get tied down by anything. Decrease as much liabilities as possible and don’t get pressured to establish a family if you are not ready for it whether mentally, physically or financially. This is an era of rapid changes and self-preservation. We are talking about potential migration to other planets, space exploration, AI that could change our world, humanoid robotics and more. In this day of inflationary pressure and ever increasing changes, the regular person needs a way to invest their money safely and easily. Once that occurs through a 401(k) or IRA, the next step is try to find something that you are passionate about and can make money from. You don’t have to do everything at once since you can get by with income from a regular job. Do this incrementally so eventually you will have something to fall back on. The truth is getting a job is not the hard part, it’s usually keeping a job that’s the hardest. When you are desperate, you will have no choice but to do things that sometimes are contrary to your best interests. To prevent this from happening, make sure you save enough and have an abundant and ready to use self-funded cash flow line so you can get by while you can find a new job if your current or previous job wasn’t right for you. When you have the leverage and is willing to and is able to defend yourself through legally compliant actions like quitting a job without training anyone else, you realistically just have your current or former employer the biggest FU finger. There is usually a 50-50 chance that either your boss compromises and work out how to make your work environment better for you or your boss may let you go. Either way, when you are financially able and have the necessary skills to find other employment opportunities, you really don’t need to worry at all. Even if your boss compromises, be sure to start looking for jobs anyway because you know compromising is not what bosses usually do for their subordinates eventually they will try to get what they want from you. To prevent that from happening, leave on your terms as soon as you are ready to do so.
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How to get along with coworkers.
Your colleagues are not your friends and probably will never be your friends. They are literally competing for the same promotion you are or trying to keep their job at your expense. Teamwork and all of that nonsense is basically for the birds. Even though you are at your job to make money for the shareholders but you from your own interest is to make money for yourself and maximize your net worth. What you should be doing is learn everything you can learn, try to not sign any BS agreements they usually make you sign and find an independent, self-sufficient way to support yourself. Your personal IP is very important for your future success. If all you did in life was working for others kind of like a subsistence farmer, you won’t ever get out of the rats race nor the rats trap. Don’t let these people to tell you any different. There is no such thing as job security because almost everywhere is at-will employment in the US meaning they can let you go immediately if you do not provide the value they want to see. Trust me, if they are paying you XYZ, they probably need to get a few times of value from the XYZ amount they are paying you. If you had the cash flow and experience, why the heck would any sane person cheapen their efforts like that if they can help it. Why would anyone be satisfied to make 1/3 or whatever amount less than what they could make if they are able to cut out of the middleman?
What is the meaning of living life if you are hand to mouth and don’t even have the time nor the resources to enjoy the modern world? There has to be some kind of balance between hard work and enjoying life. That equalizer should be work smart and not just hard. Finding arbitrage opportunities where your hard work is fully rewarded. Don’t just do busy work, try to do the type of work that will actually be highly valued. If a place can’t offer you that type of experience, look for it somewhere else. Don’t waste more than two to three years working at one place without significant growing and promotion. When you change a job the first impression when they review your resume won’t see what you learned but will probably focus on your career title change trajectory. If your title have not changed, explaining to someone you can do the type of work that is typically done by someone with a higher title will be difficult, even if you somehow get the position, you likely won’t be valued that much and won’t receive pay commiserate to that higher titles position. I think the most straightforward way for someone to give you your first few employment opportunities is through going to school and getting grades. Once you degreed up, gain the experience you need the try to get your field’s top licenses/certificates. Your money should be spent improving yourself and then you should think about saving. I know the conventional wisdom is to save especially into a 401(k) asap. While I do not think this conventional wisdom is wrong, I think the priority should be degree, experience then license in that order before you are overly concerned with how much you contribute into your 401(k).
When you first start out without an education and without significant experience and without top licenses/certificates in your field, even if you save, you won’t be able to save that much because you don’t make that much in the first place. How much you can save kind of depend on how much you can make from the market. So this is a balancing act. The earlier you start making more, the more aggregate amount of money you can save and invest into your 401(k). This is a delicate balance you have to know where the balance is. While the guiding principles may hold true for most people, how you execute based on these guiding principles will determine how well you do in life. The reality is retiring with five million versus ten million probably makes no difference for your lifestyle. The only difference is how much you can probably leave for your kid, your family and probably the government….Let’s be honest here, you sure you would feel good leaving that money to them if your kids and family don’t share the same hard work principles that you do? Should you even care what happens to the world when you are no longer here and do you even know if this world is a mirage or not? I think the bottomline is, you don’t have to be nice to anyone. Many people see extraordinary niceness from people as a sign of weakness or easy picking. You don’t need to be at any workplace for more than two to three years, when you have FU money, you actually should let people know you are unsatisfied the first second someone tries to encroach upon your rights at work. Small transgressions or micro-aggressions lead to more stress, bullying and ultimately burnout that cause you to quit or be fired anyway. Improve your own capabilities and increase your leverages by having the ability to leave at anytime at your choosing by making yourself strong enough to withstand turbulence.