

How to avoid a lifetime of mediocrity - finchmedia
http://filthyrichmind.com/2011/06/how-to-avoid-a-lifetime-of-mediocrity/

======
smoyer
The author is only 23 but I'd like to offer another possibility with the
advantage of a bit more time (almost 25 years). Even if we manage to leave
university with "big ideas", corporate life is designed to create drones, and
once we've been assimilated, it spills over into the rest of our lives.

~~~
1point2
Same - and he has worked for himself since 21. But my other thought was - this
fellow is wiser than his age.

~~~
smoyer
I didn't say that I disagreed with his points ... I just wanted to add an item
to his list.

~~~
finchmedia
I am actually the author in question (I think it might be smart for me to
remove my age from the posts in future!), but I do agree with what you're
saying. It's much easier said than done to avoid the 'corporate drone' path,
and it's something that suffocates the life out of enthusiastic minds right
from a young age. I personally hated the idea enough to do everything in my
power to be my own boss - but most people simply don't care. They're
indifferent. It's a shame, but inevitable.

~~~
smoyer
You are certainly an enlightened "youngster" ... I didn't even think about
this sort of question until I was much older. But I did quit college to join a
start-up as the third employee (in the tech arena) and then went to work for 2
more start-ups where I was the second and seventh employee.

In 2001, I took a job with a publicly traded company which at the time had
around 1700 employees. The group I worked for had around 55 people and was a
completely new line-of-business for the company. The company's president
treated us like a start-up and was basically our investor. My first real task
there was figuring out why we weren't generating the amount of code we should
have been ... it led to getting rid of about 20 people that weren't
contributing but were slowing the rest of the team down. Curiously, these same
people were the BDUF, ex-military contract people that had injected the
corporate behavior into our little group.

Unfortunately, the larger company bought a few more companies in the same
space, merged the groups together without a mandate and we became just another
department. And with that there became a pressing need to behave as the other
corporate drones ... go get honey, bring it back to the hive and lay the
paperwork so others could also find the source of your nectar.

So this was the first and last time I intend to be employed by a large
corporation. I just find it hard to tolerate the low expectations of
productivity. If they only realized how much they give up in the interest of
conformity.

As far as putting your age on future posts, my question would be "why would
you remove it?" You wrote an excellent article and you'll be commended for it
by those who favor excellence. Everyone else is irrelevant!

