Strands of Genius: What Is Fun, Dan Price & The Social Media Narrative, Silly Little Jobs

Plus, our thoughts on: Quiet Quitting

WRITING FROM | Malaga, Spain

WORKING ON | not getting frustrated about shitty wifi, recovering from food poisoning

LOOKING AHEAD

July 26-Aug 9 | Worcester Park, UK
Aug 19-23 | Malaga, Spain
Aug 23-27 | Madrid, Spain
Aug 27-?? | Worcester Park, UK
Sept 15-21 | Provence, France
October 24-29 | Athens, Greece

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:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::

Welp, add Spain to the list of countries where I’ve gotten food poisoning! Yuck, yuck, yuck. Can pornstar martinis give you food poisoning?! We (me, Faris, my mom, his dad) shared all of our food, but my mom and I ordered porn star martinis — and we were the only ones to end up throwing up. Not a fun way to spend part of the vacation, but these things happen. Funny enough, it was at the Kempinski Hotel in Malaga/Marbella, where the rooms run 700 euros a night — so don’t be fooled into thinking that street food and tapas are always the culprits!

PS: A quick note — We’ve got two pieces from The NY Times this week, but you won’t need a subscription to access. The piece on fun was too good to pass up — and while there’s been plenty that we’ve read about Dan Price, we most appreciated the Times perspective because it speaks to how social media played a roll in how many of us perceive(d) him.

This week, we’re especially thankful for:

Manuel & his family, the Douro valley, Bruno our tuk tuk driver, Lisa & James and our wonderful lunch at the Hotel Albatross, Cascais, TimeOut Market Lisbon, Leffe blonde, family reunions, time with our parents, & YOU.

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:: THE LINKS ::

WHAT IS FUN? WILL WE EVER HAVE IT AGAIN?

• While there’s been plenty of research into happiness, fun is more elusive. Jessica Bennett explores the topic, writing that “Unlike happiness, fun is not a state of being, though happy people do often report having fun. ‘Fun’ is not an action verb like ‘play,’ though of course it can be sparked by action. Fun isn’t necessarily guaranteed by leisure time or access to things considered to be leisure — vacations, rest — though you could argue that these things would free a person up to have more fun. And unlike pleasure, which sparks a very specific cortisol response in the brain (and has been studied in rats and humans), it is challenging to analyze a brain on fun, in part because for humans, fun inevitably becomes unfun as soon as you’re sitting in a brain scanner — and how to tell if a rat is having fun?” Exploring the topic, Bennett cites a paper by Dr. Chris McManus on the taxonomy of fun, which breaks down fun into the following categories: ecstatic fun (including excitement and unpredictability), sensual fun (sex, drugs, escapism), contentment fun (things like reading and gardening), achievement fun (which includes a goal or accomplishment), and sociable fun — the kind of fun that involves other people. It’s interesting that sociable fun is a category on its own though, because most of the research shows that all fun is amplified when you’re involving other people. So here’s to figuring out what fun is to you — and then trying to incorporate more of it into your life. (The NY Times)

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA HELPED DAN PRICE CONTROL THE NARRATIVE

• You might know Dan Price as the boss that raised the wage of all employees to $70,000, and cut his own pay by 94%. That’s how I remembered him. But the backstory is a bit darker — It turns out this announcement took place after a lawsuit from his brother. And it turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg. His ex-wife gave a TEDs talk detailing his abuse, but the University of Kentucky chose not to broadcast it. What continued to make the news were his tweets supporting victims of trauma and violence (that he didn’t even write), a video of his employees gifting him a Tesla (a stunt that turns out was suggested by senior leadership rather than employees themselves.) “Dan Price, the good boss, went viral. But more than two dozen former employees say the image fueling his clout, and that attracted his female followers, was a mirage. (The NY Times)

2 YEARS OF PANDEMIC, WAR AND CLIMATE CRISIS MADE US RETHINK WORK AS ‘SILLY LITTLE JOBS’

• When the pandemic was raging and we were obeying the first round of stay at home orders, it was hard to prioritize work. Whatever jobs we had (besides those front line workers) seemed trivial compared to the immense amount of people dying all around us. “Americans, the French say, don't have jobs — they are their jobs.” But with the world weighing heavily on us, it feels like our mindset is shifting as we rethink work’s place in our lives. More on this below, with my rambles on quiet quitting. (Business Insider)

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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: QUIET QUITTING ::

I AM *LOVING* THIS TREND OF QUIET QUITTING. Apologies for the all caps, but I just needed you to know my excitement around this.

If you haven’t seen the Tik Toks or the numerous articles, quiet quitting isn’t quitting your job, but quitting that attitude of going above and beyond. It’s something I’ve been practicing since leaving New York City in March of 2013, and like anything, it gets easier the more you do it ;) Some people call it a survival tactic (I agree!), others call it setting boundaries (yep), or even self care (which it totally is), and still others have said it’s privilege (that too — and an indication of a larger cultural problem.)

Essentially: “You’re no longer subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that work has to be your life,” said Zaid Khan, a 24 year old engineer in NYC.

As Faris once said, “The greatest trick corporations play is that they fool you into thinking that you are not an economically viable unit by yourself but only as part of a larger system — a cog, as it were.”

It’s unfortunate and ugly, but I think many corporations would argue it’s a good business practice: to make employees think that they are only worth something as part of their big machine. Or perhaps articulated differently, that the way to make money is to create a social environment in which people are expected to go above and beyond, but aren’t compensated fairly.

In advertising agencies around the world, the junior teammates often pull heavier loads and work longer hours for fractions of the pay as the executives. You don’t get rewarded with overtime pay unless maybe you’re a contractor. And raises? How many times have you heard of people who were given a more senior title instead of a raise. When raises are offered, they often aren’t in line with inflation. A 7-10% raise is not a raise since it’s simply keeping up with inflation. And the national raise average is 3%. THREE PERCENT, Y’ALL.

Switching jobs seems to be the only way to be fairly compensated, with raises from 10%-100% depending on a host of factors. Going from a small agency where I was underpaid to a larger agency where I was likely overpaid, I was able to double my salary.

And yet when I was managing a team of junior strategists, there was a time that still gets my blood boiling when I think about it: I wasn’t able to get one of my junior teammates fairly compensated at market rate. I wrote in what I expected her new salary to be, following her review and HR rejected it. I set up an appointment to explain my case: She *wanted* to stay, but was getting job offers for higher pay at other companies. She turned down at least one in the time that she was waiting for her review, so her ‘foot out the door’ was really only because she had started as an intern, at a low pay — and we all know that a large percentage of a small number is still a small number. Percentages didn’t matter, I argued — It was about paying market rate. If she left, we would have to pay market rate to replace her. And on top of that, we’d be paying recruitment fees/costs. And on top of that, the rest of us on her team would have to pick up the slack during that time. My argument was ignored, and I was told it simply ‘wasn’t possible’ and that there wasn’t enough money. It was one of two times that I burst into tears at work.

Phew. End rant. But it’s infuriating thinking about it.

One of the things I most love about running our own company is the freedom that comes with it. Freedom to make our own schedule, sure, but also freedom to do what the big companies we worked for didn’t always do: treat people as we’d want to be treated ourselves. Our payment terms for contractors are NET 15, and we aim to pay within 24 hours of receiving an invoice. We’re happy to pay people via Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, Zelle, or bank transfer based on their preference (though we do warn people that bank transfers typically take 24hrs-3 days to go through — that’s Bank of America, not us.)

Our contracts detail that any IP the contractors use that was created prior to their engagement with us remains theirs. And the IP they are developing for us only becomes ours when they receive a payment in full from us. Oh, and we encourage them to steal from our contracts and negotiate these terms for future engagements. And when we worked with a junior strategist who we felt under-charged us? We simply told her that she was undercharging us, and suggested that the project fee she provided be a weekly rate — and she made 3x what she asked for. (And at the end of the project gave her some feedback and statistics as to why we were paying her more and how she might approach fee negotiation in the future.)

I truly believe that quiet quitting is the result of employers treating their employees unfairly. It’s the result of corporations investing in stock buy backs rather than their individuals. It’s a pushback against ping pong tables and free beer as a replacement to fair wages.

In this world, more often than not going above and beyond does nothing except tell your bosses that you can and will go above and beyond. Perhaps there’s a small social reward, but it rarely translates fiscally.

And of course this problem isn’t unique to advertising. I’m reminded of a teacher who used her own money, along with a GoFundMe to raise money to get the materials she needed for her classroom. The next year, her budget was cut even further because she “proved” that she was able to get the money/the items without the support of the school or government institution.

And with jobs like teaching or fire fighting or health care workers, there’s this added weight of impact on the larger society. Not answering an email when you work in entertainment seems like it might have a less serious impact. But doing the bare minimum when people’s lives are at stake is harder to justify. Maybe because these jobs have purpose?

And then there’s also privilege, sexism and racism that come into play. Those who don’t feel they have a strong safety net may be less likely to feel like they can push back on their employers. Historically, womxn — especially Black and Latinx womxn — have to work harder to prove themselves. And often people who identify as such are already underpaid and overworked. This feels like a relatively absent part of the conversation, though Bloomberg Business Week quotes Jha’nee Carter as saying

“Unfortunately in corporate America minorities are held to a different standard. We are looked at differently, there is unconscious bias still, and so we have to go above and beyond in order to be successful. We can’t risk being looked at as not performing, if we are not meeting those expectations, we are the first on the chopping block.”

In the USA, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, healthcare is a privilege, and is often tied to your job. Starting our own company meant we went from paying less than $1000 a year to more than $1000 per month — and that’s just for the privilege of having bankruptcy protection (since health crises are the number one cause of bankruptcy in America). After we pay more than $12,000/year, we’ll have to pay another $7,500 each or $14,000 as a family before any of our benefits kick in. These costs are not insignificant — and could be one of many reasons people who are employees with benefits may rally against the idea of quiet quitting.

Perhaps though, the idea of quiet quitting will become less of a privileged position the more people stand against the idea of going above and beyond? I don’t have all the answers, but these threads are swirling in my mind.

The larger tangled web that plays into this? Capitalism. Capitalism tells us that we shouldn’t be lazy, unless we work more than we’re being paid for, says Claudia Alick. “You’re not quiet quitting; You’re resisting wage theft. You’re resisting being stolen from,” she says over TikTok. “It’s how capitalism works. That’s how they make the profit. The profit comes from you not making your full value.”

(Side note: In another video by Claudia, they make a pretty solid argument that commuting is wage theft. They talk about how when they take on “rich people jobs,” transportation is covered. Accommodation is covered. And yet capitalism preys on poor people: Your commute is not paid for, and furthermore you are damaging your own vehicle at service to your job. They don’t pay for the wear and tear; It’s assumed that’s yours to cover. It was only this year that I found out pilots and flight attendants weren’t paid until the boarding gate closed. Pardon my French, but what in the absolute fucked up fuckery is that?!)

Quiet quitting is one way we can fight against the less savory parts of capitalism. For those in charge of budgets, compensating people fairly is another.

But painting quiet quitting in this light implies that it’s bad for the employers. The Economic Times argues this isn’t true. Research shows that happier employees are more productive and engaged. And, of course, productivity rather than presence leads to higher profits.

“Quiet quitting could be a “great liberation” in response to the great resignation. People are rejecting overwork and burnout and choosing balance and joy. They are establishing boundaries so their identity and self-value is not tied to their work productivity.

Instead of getting nervous at loss of productivity, employers should take advantage of the quiet quitting movement to support the wellbeing of their staff. Encouraging a better work-life balance will communicate to workers that they are valued, leading to greater engagement, productivity, and loyalty: everyone wins.”

I wrote only a couple weeks ago about my waning ambition. If only I had heard of quiet quitting then, maybe I could have reframed it as such ;)

Faris is the partner in our relationship known for organizing his thoughts in ways that are structured and more academic — They are well-suited as pieces for WARC and The Guardian, etc. I’m afraid I’ve been all over the place with this piece — and it’s because my brain really is all over the place when tackling this topic. I’d love for you to weigh in and help me make sense of some of my writings, and/or add your own commentary or perspective that I didn’t cover.

I’m curious — what do you think about quiet quitting?

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faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co

@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed

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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.

Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.

Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)