It’s Miserable out there in Corporate America

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Well, what a lovely day to have to come in here and do a radio show. It’s amazing out there.

I was just driving around out there, going around looking at the world and thinking to myself…

…boy, what would it be like if I were trapped in an office all day long the rest of the day, all day long the rest of my life?

Trapped at Work

At one point in my life I was at that place. I was working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. I worked in the health club industry. It was an interesting little deal. How they had it set up is that you came into work and you worked from 9:00 in the morning till 9:00 at night and then did your paperwork and closed your club down from 9:00 till 10:00.

– so you really worked more than 12 hours, worked 13 hours. You worked Monday through Friday unless you didn’t hit your quota. And if you didn’t hit your quota, you had to work Saturday too, which the quotas were set such that you couldn’t really hit them if you wanted to. So you were pretty much trapped.

Work and More Work

I remember going through all that and one day decided that it just wasn’t worth it anymore and realized something that was just unbelievable. That was that when I worked an extra day 52 weeks a year I was actually working, you know, more extra days than I was getting for vacation. I got two weeks a year in vacation, and you had to take them during the time they wanted you to take them. Well, everybody, all the managers had to take off the same week, so you could never plan anything.

Everything was always, you know, two times a year that they had their lowest possible sales—which is the week before Christmas and the week in the middle of the summer before school starts or some crazy thing. And so we never could have vacations. We couldn’t go anywhere. So literally, for 12 years I didn’t go on one single vacation. Literally for 12 years I couldn’t plan anything in my life. I was totally held prisoner by this.

And what gets me, as I look back on it, is that I didn’t even understand how really bad it was. I couldn’t, you know, today imagine why I didn’t see it except that I was brainwashed into believing that my job—that I was lucky to have this job and that I would never, ever, ever qualify for anything else.

The More Money You Make at a Job, The More Dependent You Are

I remember my boss once telling me, you know, you’re so lucky to have a job that you can make this kind of money with — that you should beg to keep your job. He had this really crude saying he said, you know, if you work at a job and you have an employee that works for you, and they make minimum wage, he said, to be able to keep them working for you you probably need to go pick them up every day and buy them doughnuts and coffee on the way in to work ‘cause that’s pretty much the only way you are going to get them motivated to stay with you.

He said, now, if you raise what you’re paying to someone up to somewhere around 40 or $50,000 a year, they’ll probably show up for work most of the time. But if somebody is getting paid a hundred thousand dollars a year, they need to be kneeling down at your feet begging for that existence to survive. Now, I can’t even imagine somebody saying this. But he said it, and he really believed it. And hence, they hired people that they could intimidate into believing this. Me, without any college education, quite honestly I probably thought it was correct. What else is a guy without a college education going to do to make a hundred thousand dollars a year? Yet the whole thought of it is mind-boggling.

Couldn’t Take it Anymore

Then what happened one day is I just decided I couldn’t take it anymore. Someone came along and offered me a job in another city—in the health club industry but as city supervisor, director of the whole city. And I decided to take the chance and to leave to take the job. And I went up to Jacksonville, Florida and I took the job.

And I remember as I left my boss said to me, he said, are you insane? Why would anybody hire you to run their city? You are a manager. That’s all you are. Why would they hire you and not steal one of our supervisors?

And you know, in my mind I thought it was ‘cause I had won the manager of the year award four out of five years in a row, and I thought I was pretty good at what I did and that’s why he wanted me. But lo and behold what I found out was that isn’t the case. The guy wanted me because I was naive. And when I got out there there were five health clubs that I ran. They were selling very, very small amount of memberships.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

So I terminated three of the five managers which all happened to be females and all friends. And they were all really like cokeheads and never showed up to work, and when they did they weren’t very effective. And within a month we tripled the sales of what they were selling before in memberships. Well, then the guy that owned the place flew down and let me know that I was terminated. I said that’s interesting.

Why would I get terminated for tripling the sales? He said, well, you just don’t know how to deal with people. I have had those three managers now for five to ten years, something like that, and you came up here disrupted everything and fired them all. Obviously you don’t know how to take care of people. I said take care of people? They’re cokeheads, and we tripled the sales. And he goes, yeah, but they’re my cokeheads. And what I guess I figured out was they were all three his girlfriends. And because he lived in Dallas, Texas his wife didn’t know when he came to Jacksonville he was shacking up with three different girls.

Corporate America isn’t Fair

Again, what I learned is that corporate America isn’t fair, corporate America doesn’t make sense, corporate America is problematic in every way, shape and form towards your dignity and your intelligence and the well-being of yourself. I remember when I came back to town they tried to get me back into the health club industry here again, and then I told them no, I am not working 6 days a week anymore.

There’s no way — 12 hours a day, 6 days a week—I am not working those hours. I have to have a life. And so they told me that I could go to work 4 days a week. And so I worked 12 hours a day, 4 days a week—still over 40 hours a week—and yet working only 4 days a week I out produced every other manager in the city that worked 6.

Bottom line, when you work in corporate America, you go there, sit and waste your mind and your day away. When you get up and become productive, you go get something done and have a good time — two completely different ways to see the world, two completely different qualities of life. And that, my friends, is what it’s all about. It’s not the money. It’s the lifestyle.