In your interactions with family, friends and community, The Golden Rule is a profoundly simply guideline for being a good person. It lives in the teachings of most religions and ethical systems and for the most part is sound advice.
Except at work.
Like it or not, work isn’t a family or community. How do I know? They pay you to be there.
Work is a capitalist institution, where how you are perceived, spoken to, and spoken about will eventually effect your own success and bottom line. The golden rule is a guide for being proactively and preemptively kind to those around you – but a Pro needs something more robust. They also need a guide for reactively dealing with others.
This is where the 15% comes in handy.
When someone at work does you a favor or goes out of their way to help or praise you, and is an all around pleasure to do business with – I encourage you to beat them. Be 15% better to them than they are to you. Treasure those co-workers, for they are truly rare. HOWEVER, if someone disrespects you in meetings, condescends to you when making requests, stabs you in the back – do unto them 15% worse than they did unto you.
It’s really the only way they’ll learn. Taking the high ground may be noble, but letting people get away with fucking with you at work just encourages them to keep doing it.
Pro tip:
A Pro’s revenge is never blatant, so don’t mistake this advice as a “tit-for-tat”. For example, if someone condescends to you when making a request, don’t condescend to them back. Just make them work a lot harder to get that request done than you would have if they were normal. And keep doing it for their next few requests. Tada!
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Author’s reflection:
Of all the rules in the Code, I’ve used this the most and it has held up the longest. I’ve lived by it for almost 3 decades now, and it has never failed to make my life better. I attribute this to the following:
* It attracts good co-workers and makes them want to be reciprocal
* It repels bad co-workers and makes them want to not deal with you at all.
Probably the funniest consequence of doing this is since everyone tends to like the good co-workers (and they like you), when the bad ones talk shit behind your back they wind up sounding crazy and vindictive. Their complaints about you erodes their reputation.