One of the reasons I have often struggled with business related social situations is that I tend to refuse to comply with convention, choosing instead what is an authentic expression of how I view a situation. If "convention" happens to overlap with my own convictions, great... and if it does not, I feel free to criticize and explain why I think what I think.

I'm always surprised by just how many people are not comfortable with that. You're supposed to react in the way ”you're supposed to,” in a given situation. Any deviation is immediately suspect. People are supposed to be predictable. When did we become so formulaic, in our thinking?

It is as if there is an ”official” unspoken narrative and if you break from that narrative you immediately become persona non grata.

One of the ways in which I do this (that evidently irritates people a great deal) is that I don't think in terms of hierarchies. I don't look at people and "rank" them in terms of better than or worse than, on account of how high their position is in an organization of how large or small their salary is.

I just don't care!

I care about who they are as human beings and what their character is like and how they treat others.

Each time I get told off for doing so — perhaps in not so many words — my mind always drifts back to my University days in Business School where I learned (also “in not so many words”) that in order to get ahead in business you basically had to be prepared to be a ruthless asshole who doesn't care about anybody else.

It is not an approach that I care to pursue!

It all reminds me of a saying I came across, a long time ago: Just because the majority of the world is doing something and calling it "the accepted way" does NOT make it the right thing!

I suppose this is why I ended up spending most of my life as a self-employed individual!

That, and the fact that I wasn't willing to "just ignore" people who were making it patently obvious that they really didn't know how to do their jobs.

It is interesting how often we a taught that it is a good thing to "challenge authority," and yet we are often ostracized for doing that exact thing!

But then again, nobody ever said that life was supposed to be easy or make sense!

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=^..^=