16/10/19

Today my boss told me he hadn’t put me on the shortlist for promotion this year, even though I’d been kind-of going for it. I say ‘kind-of’ because I’d been doing more than I normally would but nowhere near the kind of pointless facetimery that staying until everyone else had gone engenders.

I’d never been that kind of person to stay late or be constantly thinking about how to improve their job. There just wasn’t the motivation. WIthout a direct motivation (do X get Y) I start to ask myself what’s the point? I’ve lost the link which encourages entering a flow state. My job has always been a means to an end: get money to fund life. Compare that to something that really motivates me and I’m willing to go quite far past the point of diminishing returns to eek out more productivity, for example, Daygame, or going to the gym five or six times a week. At the end of the day, though, it’s just sexual strategy: working on my body and opening sets is much more conducive to my strategy whereas for a higher beta it’s maxing his income.

He told me and said he expected me to be angry about it… I might have been, but in truth I felt close to nothing. In fact I felt more cognitive dissonance than anger. I thought that I ought to feel anger but didn’t. Instead I took on a kind of aloofness and said “I’d have to digest it.” Whether that’s actually just repressed anger… who knows? It certainly wasn’t a kind of raw, visceral anger which leads to violence.

It’s amazing to think that that kind of conversation might make or break someone’s year, but that for me it was more like just telling me what the next leg of the decision tree would be followed and that was it. Either they gave me the promotion this year then I would do one year’s work before quitting and ‘going travelling,’ or they give it to me next year and so I stay the year after that before leaving, or they don’t give it to me next year and I leave immediately. In this case ‘going travelling’ means a two year mini retirement to see whether starting my own business was feasible. The promotion itself is only important inasmuch as proving to a potential future employer that I levelled up during my time there, should my own endeavours not work out. And so by telling me it wasn’t going to happen this year it just meant that I struck off one leg of the decision tree. Nothing more.

While this journal entry isn’t related to practical Daygame it’s a perfect example of how it changes your view on other parts of life and your reactions. Has my heart hammered harder at any point during my career more than when I try to extract a potential SDL? No. Did I feel more fear walking to my interview or when attempting my first sets? Obviously it’s the latter. The thing with Daygame is that it puts the rest of your life into perspective and you realise nothing is really that scary.

Yours unfaithfully

Thomas Crown