Working Alone is Clearly Better
I have never counted myself among the people who prefer working in groups or working alone. That is, until I really thought about it. Working in groups or teams sucks to an ultimate degree.
In school, there was always a group assignment at some point during the year. I remember this particularly bad experience during college. It was a project for my Israeli/ Palestinian Conflict class and the group had to pick an aspect of the concept and report upon it. Our group chose The Arab Lobby- a subject that should have been a piece of cake. Instead, our group could not decide upon what aspects of the Arab Lobby each of us were going to report upon until a couple days before our presentation was scheduled. In addition to this stupidity, a couple of minutes before our scheduled presentation, half of my group members were still putting together their PowerPoint slides.
When one thinks about working in a team or with a group of people, one assumes that these team members will not only be on a similar level of intelligence, but capable. Capable of handling things that normal people in that class/ job are able to handle. Sadly, and I know this from personal experience, this is not always the case. Sometimes you’ll get that team member who expects you to critically think out all their decisions for them because they can not do it for themselves. Other times you will get that team member who is lazy and pushes all the work onto you- which is more annoying than if you were just assigned to the project all by yourself. Sometimes you’ll get the person who just asks all the stupid questions like “What is communism? I know it’s bad, but why?” or “Why would anyone want to be President?” Keep in mind, these are quotes from team members my age or older. I have had to teach people how to save Word documents and even that I can logically excuse and chalk up to unfamiliarity with computers, but which still baffles my mind.
So, I have come to the conclusion that working alone causes less stress and less anger which leads to an overall happier life. Isn’t this what we are all striving towards? Why must we drag ourselves down with groups? I can work fine in groups. Just give me a group of me.
We are Legion
Teamwork… If I honestly believed in my heart of hearts that true teamwork was completely possible to cultivate, I’d have no problem just writing up a few sentences and calling it a day. Truth is, I don’t entirely believe in teamwork. In fact, I did not even go through the effort to read through all of Lola’s post as I am quite certain she made a good argument based on personal experience (probably involving that one jag-off in school that doesn’t know his head from his ass… you know the one).
Yeah! That shithead!
The issue here is that we judge teamwork based on a very foolhardy perspective… our youth. The worst time to expect anything from anyone is when we are dealing with people barely know what they want to go to college for, let alone the initiative that you do (its especially worse when we have no say over who gets to be in our team, and most of the people in it couldn’t care less). Teamwork by its very nature will always fail. There will undoubtedly be fools, lazy people, and pricks that you deal with in a team setting, simply due to the fact that you have no control over the situation. But I don’t believe in the “teamwork” that you believe in. I believe in manipulation. A real team is hand picked, and should always be a collection of people who share a common goal and a strong responsibility to see things through to the very end. Real teamwork is less about a team. Instead, it’s about management.
I have had the opportunity to work in a field that had its fair share of incompetence (and in certain situations, I was the incompetent one in the pack), but the ability to distinguish someones strength and weaknesses and shifting their responsibilities accordingly was the pinnacle of success. This was an essential for a field where someone could not be fired, but it was always understood that the end goal would never succeed on self reliance alone -even more so in my field where you had to literally rely on the people next to you to stay alive. You need a team to achieve success… but even more so, you need a team that has a strong tolerance for your bullshit to fine-tune the perfect group of super-stars.
My point is simple, if you own the project, the “team” that you work with can achieve the unthinkable, but it requires you to be proactive. It’s that same feeling you get when you know you’re the smartest one in the pack but instead of being fussy, you decide to manipulate them to churn out work. Granted, not all of us have the luxury to lead, reorganize, and remove people at will, but a team is a broad enough term where I can go so far as specify that a team you build from the ground up, is yours to control. But to truly create something amazing, you need to trust in others and in their skillset, which means you need to harness their potential by being a gigantic douchbag.
I want to run something by you. I want you to look at the images below and tell me which of these people have been successful in their careers, and which of them did so by not being a prick…
My point isn’t necessarily to belittle the people that work for/with you to achieve success, but in order to compose a worthwhile team that will deliver on the things you cant do (and trust me, there are a myriad of things YOU CANNOT ACCOMPLISH ON YOUR OWN), you breed impossible expectations out of your group that they hate you for at the time, but respect you for when all is said and done (kinda like that one professor that you hated but you came to understand that they wanted you to go above and beyond your own expectations and you have been grateful for that ever since).
If we take the teamwork argument at face value, Lola wins this long before I even start to write. However, the core function and end result of a real team crafted by blood, sweat, tears, yelling, and sheer talent is a force to be reckoned with.
Who the fuck is Jeff Bezos?
A very important person that you have given money to in several occasions. I suggest you click the link on his name above.