The Asshole Survival Guide

Author: Robert I. Sutton

• Or, in recent years, I point to articles such as Jerry Useem’s 2015 Atlantic piece on “Why It Pays to Be a Jerk.”

• Hundreds of experiments show that encounters with rude, insulting, and demeaning people undermine others’ performance—including their decision-making skills, productivity, creativity, and willingness to work a little harder and stay a little later to finish projects and to help coworkers who need their advice, skills, or emotional support.

• “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”

• And children who were bullied by peers may be haunted the rest of their lives—they are prone to adult problems including higher arrest rates, financial struggles, depression, and heavy smoking.

• And treating others like dirt is contagious—so if you work with a jerk (or, worse, a bunch of them), you are likely to become one too.

• waste, theft, absenteeism, and surliness. Professor Bennett Tepper of Ohio State University and his colleagues estimated that abusive supervision costs U.S. corporations $23.8 billion a year (based on absenteeism, health-care costs, and lost productivity). That was in 2006; the estimate would be far higher now.

• Be slow to label others as assholes, be quick to label yourself as one.

• The main reason, however, is that people who act like assholes are often blind to their bad behavior and how others experience

• The main reason, however, is that people who act like assholes are often blind to their bad behavior and how others experience it.

• The first diagnostic question follows from the late writer Maya Angelou’s assertion that “at the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”

• Assholes tend to breed like rabbits because of what psychologists call similarity-attraction effects.

• Such “infection” problems happen because emotions are remarkably contagious—bad moods, insults, rudeness, and sabotage spread like wildfire.

• She finally confronted this jerk, asking, “Since when are you the self-appointed hall monitor/time clock here?” He was “truly shocked” and stammered out that he was just assisting coworkers as a “mentor.” The sales rep said, “I immediately replied and got very close to him, looking straight into his eyes, ‘Well it is more like torr-mentor.

• Two-faced grinfuckers have certain signature moves. They pretend to enthusiastically agree with every decision you make or idea that you have, but rather than telling you when they disagree, they never actually implement the ideas, or do the exact opposite, or intentionally implement the decisions or ideas so badly that failure is inevitable.

• So take a little time to figure out how bad your predicament is and what you ought to do about it. Then charge forward with fierce resolve. But stay on the lookout for clues about little things that aren’t working—and that your entire strategy is wrong and needs to be massively revised or junked.