Charles Murray - The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don’ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life

Human Accomplishment

What It Means to Be a Libertarian

The Bell Curve

Losing Ground

Real Education

Coming Apart

Copyright 2014 by Cox & Murray, Inc.

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Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Murray, Charles A.
The curmudgeons guide to getting ahead : dos and donts of right behavior, tough thinking, clear writing, and living a good life /Charles Murray.First edition.
pages cm
1. Career development. 2. Success in business. 3. Business communication. 4. Interpersonal communication. I. Title.
HF5381.M848 2014
650.1dc23 2013045110

ISBN 978-0-8041-4144-4
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-4145-1

v3.1

To Bennett,

Anna,

Sarawan,

and Narisara,

who have heard all of this repeatedly.

The transition from college to adult life is treacherous. It is easy for new graduates to go directly to graduate studies that lock them into careers they will come to regret. Those who go directly to work are often in their first real jobs, not knowing how an office environment operates or how their supervisors are evaluating them. They often are emerging from universities that have ignored what used to be a central theme of university education: thinking about what it means to live a good life.

I wish I could tell you that this little book will fix all that. It wont, but it might help.

It began as a lark. My employer, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has an intranet site available only to its staff. About a year ago, some of my colleagues began running a series of tips for interns and entry-level staff on grammar and English usage. I decided to supplement it with a series of my own on proper behavior in the workplace. My wife and children have been calling me a curmudgeon for years because of my crotchety opinions. This was my chance to vent beyond the confines of the dinner table, but to such a small audience that I could give my unvarnished views without getting into trouble.

Over the next few months, I got enough encouragement from my readers that I expanded my topics first into tips about writing and then into more cosmic topics about life in general. Eventually I decided that I could broaden the audience without getting into too much trouble, and assembled the series into the book that you hold in your hand.

I wrote these tips with some assumptions about you, my reader:

You are in or near your twenties. You are intelligent. Its not essential that you have a college degree, but you probably do. Many of you attended a well-known college or university; some of you attended an elite one. You are ambitiousyou daydream about becoming a CEO, a high-powered lawyer, head of the World Bank, Pulitzer Prize winner, or president of the United States.

Your ambitions are not confined to outward measures of success. You want to become excellent at something. You plan to marry eventually, if you have not already. You aspire to be a good person. You aspire to genuine happiness.

To put it another way, you are me long ago. For better or worse, I am giving you the same advice I would give to that vanished person.

As The Curmudgeons Guide to Getting Ahead moves from success in the workplace into the deeper waters of success in living, you will find the occasional bromide, because some of the clichs youve been hearing all your life are actually true and need to be considered afresh. But I hope that most of the tips will offer ideas and options that you have not considered.

Charles Murray

Burkittsville, Maryland

November 26, 2013

The first thing you need to understand is that most large organizations in the private sector are run by curmudgeons like me. That statement may not be true of organizations in the entertainment or information technology (IT) industries, which are often filled with senior executives who are either young themselves or trying to be. But it is true of most large for-profit businesses, nonprofits, foundations, law firms, and financial institutions. Academia goes both ways, with many professors who try to be best buddies with their students but a few who are world-class curmudgeons.

Technically, a curmudgeon is an ill-tempered old man. I use the term more broadly to describe highly successful people of both genders who are inwardly grumpy about many aspects of contemporary culture, make quick and pitiless judgments about your behavior in the workplace, and dont hesitate to act on those judgments in deciding who gets promoted and who gets fired.

Be warned that curmudgeons usually dont give off many clues that theyre doing these things. Im an example. I dont snap at subordinates. When someone approaches me, I like to think that Im accessible and friendly. I try to express any criticisms cheerfully and tactfully. And yet behind my civilized public persona I am perpetually ticking off things in my head about the employees I encounter, both pluses and minuses, filing them away, and when the time comes for performance reviews, those judgments shape my responses.

Lots of the senior people in your workplace who can help or hinder your career are closeted curmudgeons like me, including executives in their forties who have every appearance of being open minded and cool. By their fifties, the probability that they are curmudgeons has risen precipitously. By their sixties, you can just about bank on it, no matter how benign their public presentation of self may be.

Curmudgeons of all ages and both genders remain closeted partly because they want to be polite, but also because they dont want to sound like geezers, old and out of touch. Voicing curmudgeonly opinions would instantly label them as such. So they never admit that they judge you on the basis of their inner curmudgeonbut they do. If you want to get ahead, you should avoid doing things that will make them write you off.

These tips about how to behave in the workplace range from matters of style to the meat of your work. Some of them advise you to conform to your curmudgeons prejudices on matters that you may think should be no ones business but your own. But lets get one thing straight at the outset:

Lets assume that youre going to work for a quality organization in the private sector. Within that organization, some of the people who run the place will be extremely good at what they do, some will be merely competent, and some will conform to the Peter Principle (Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence). Its not a good idea to suck up to any of them.

By sucking up, I mean flattering supervisors, pretending to agree with their bad ideas, or otherwise unctuously trying to ingratiate yourself with them. Sucking up is usually thought to be a great way to get ahead, so this advice requires some explanation.

My career has brought me into contact with many highly successful people from the corporate, financial, publishing, journalistic, and scholarly worlds. Maybe Ive just been lucky, but I have to go by my experience: Just about all of the highly successful people Ive dealt with have been impressively skilled. I cannot think of any who got to their prominent positions by faking it. They have also almost always been self-confident, not in need of stroking, and good judges of people.