The TRUTH About Working in a Team
A nugget from Felix Dennis
💡 Nugget
✦ Felix Dennis:
“Team spirit is for losers, financially speaking. It’s the glue that binds the losers together. It’s the methodology employers use to shackle useful employees to their desk without having to pay them too much. While lives may depend on it in a few professions, like soldiering or fire-fighting, in commerce it acts as a subtle handicap and a brake to ambitious individuals. Which, in a way, is what it’s designed to do…
When it comes right down to it, ‘team spirit’ and not letting your colleagues down is a feeble reason for procrastination when opportunity comes knocking. Nearly always, it is an excuse to avoid the possibility of humiliating failure. If one of the team you work with inherited ten million quid tomorrow, do you really believe they would be checking in to keep up morale? Of course not. Neither would you, or anyone in their right mind.”
✨ Visual
💭 Thoughts
These are just my general thoughts on working in teams (not directly related with the nugget above)
Another factor that I don’t like about working in a team is that it makes me less accountable for the work output, and accountability is extremely important according to Naval Ravikant, as it is one of the 3 ingredients to get rich (the other two are leverage and specific knowledge). Besides, when I don’t feel 100% responsible about something, I also don’t work as hard and obsessively — and this is critical not only for making money, but also for finding meaning!
It’s true that if one’s mission is to build something big (next Google or Stripe) we definitely need partners and work in a team, but if one’s mission is more of a lifestyle choice (with a not-so-big product) then is definitely viable to go alone and make a living!
Related to this, from my notes of David Senra’s episode on Paul Graham:
How much of a difference can a single developer or a small team make? Increasingly much! (2018 interview). How far can it go? Always further than people expect.And finally one quote I love from David Ogilvy (known as “The Father of Advertising” and praised by Warren Buffet as a genius) on teamwork in the Advertising Industry:
“Nowadays it is the fashion to pretend that no single individual is ever responsible for a successful advertising campaign. This emphasis on "teamwork" is bunkum - a conspiracy of the mediocre majority.”
💥 Stuff I Loved
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