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Do You Thrive or Crack Under Pressure?
Flatline5150 writes "The New York Times has a good article on why some people thrive under stress while others crack under pressure. Among other tidbits, pessimists make great lawyers..."
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"When people start feeling that what they're doing is not meaningful, then they take more sick days, begin looking for another job, and complain of health problems."
This should be required reading for all managers.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Do You Thrive on Crack?
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
I do well under a little pressure, but if the pressure is unreasonable I will refuse to accept it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Pressure doesn't bother me, in fact I thrive on it.
My district manager just left my office after telling me that a huge project due for completion in January 2006 has been pushed forward. It's now due at 4:30 today. "No biggee," I said "is there anything else you WANT YOU MOTHERFUCKER?!"
Everyone handles stress differently. Tonight, long after the project fails, I'll go to my district manager's house and burn it down. Then I'll urinate on his smouldering crisp remains while screaming "HOW'S THIS FOR A FUCKING 4:30 DEADLINE, COCKSUCKER?!"
Most people would really crack at this stage. Not me. Tommorrow I'll come into work with a chainsaw. The first to get it will be the bleach blonde fat bitch at reception who always pronunces my name wrong. Then will be the district manager. He's only there through nepotism. Hopefully he will not have heard about how his uncle's charred, urine-soaked remains were found that morning. I expect to remove his spleen through his anus with my 18" McCulloch WoodMeister2000.
This is the point where the men are separated from the boys.
After a relaxing cup of coffee in the blood splattered cafeteria I'll quietly go the front grass of the building and stomp earthworms in my bare feet while awaiting the police. Little do they know that I'll have sticks of dynamite under my light jacket ready to go at the press of a thumb.
I'll show them.
det burg was here
I thrive on crack under pressure.
I thrive on pressure. By choice. See, I have a little issue with this thing called procrastination. I always wait and end up doing a large amount of work at the last possible minute, it keeps me on the edge, neat :D
I'm under the impression I would compress. Might be messy, though.
Seriously, if you don't give me a deadline of tomorrow, it doesn't get done. Period. (Why am I employed? I don't get it.)
Honest, when my mind goes blank, and no reasonable outcome seems nearby... I get more easily swayed by distractions. Probably the dumbest thing to do...
If I come home from work and don't occupy myself with something, I'll get tired and need a nap. If I find something to do for the evening (aside from watching TV) I'm active and energetic until about 1 am (I usually get up between 6:30am and 7:00am). After doing some reading, I've found there's a good chance I have ADHD to one degree or another. I'm awaiting a doctor's appointment to see if this is the case, not that it has a major impact on my life. I have suspicions that this thrive under stress and symptoms of ADHD are very related.
is perceived stress. ever come across a difficult coding problem that needs to be implemented asap, but you've become lost in it, perhaps for 2 days straight and come out the other end going "wow" at yourself?
Some people are like that when dealing with people, dealing with law, public speaking, managing teams, groups, or entire corporations. It's just not 'stress' in the way that many would imagine the stress of a responsibility for many people or millions of dollars.
I've noticed that people (including myself) who enjoy working under massive amounts of pressure don't work really well when there is no pressure at all. Go figure, huh?
I have ADD and I definitely do much better under pressure. If I don't load myself down with hours each semester, I get crappy grades. But, if I take way too many hours and never have enough time to possibly get all the homework done, I get better grades. I gotta have my time always allocated.. Otherwise I'm just completely unproductive.
For me, a little stress feels good. If I don't have anything to stress over, it feels like I'm not getting anything done.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
I make diamonds
(geology joke, carry on)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Unlike some who link ADD to thriving on pressure that isn't the case for me. But situations that tend to be high stress for most, tend to calm me down.
Main database server has crashed and the CEO is on the line? No problem. Someone cut the fiber to this block? Eh. We gotta move from one colo to the next in 17 hours! Ok. Driving 130 MPH down long loney highways? Blah. Tornado heading this way? Another Earthquake?!@ Whatever, let's get prepared.
However while these kinds of things don't get to me I've found that emotional issues can stress me out quite quickly. Issues with my girlfriend, friends or family tend to make me all loopy and panicky, much the same way other's get with the scenarios above. I wonder if this is true for other people who strive on situational stress?
--- I do not moderate.
Chronic stress has been linked to an array of illnesses, including heart disease and depression. But people who cope successfully, studies have found, punch in at work with normal levels of stress hormones that climb during the day and drop sharply at night. Their coworkers who complain of being too stressed have consistently higher levels of hormones that rarely dip very far, trapping them in a constant state of anxiety.
That means being able to "decompress" or forget about work after you leave. When I leave work my thoughts about it remain there. It's easy to do when you lead a completely seperate home-life than work-life.
Personally the way I do it is to not maintain any post-work social contact w/my co-workers. This keeps job talk to a minimum when I am out and about. It keeps workplace drama to a minimum because no one knows what I do when I leave (this might not be a problem where other people work but in an institution full of females I do notice a lot of petty bitching going on).
I don't work my hobby. I have several hobbies that I take part in that aren't work related at all. It gives me something to further seperate my life from work.
I really do feel for people that can't let go of their problems once they leave the job. Might want to try something different to get out of that rut. No one wants to die thinking about how much they hate their job.
I don't know... I see a high pressure situation and make myself scarce. Let some other sucker handle it.
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
Stress and pressure, while similarly manifested, are distinctly different. Stress is "the bad stuff" you have to deal with while pressure is the positive. Worry over your job being outsourced is stress. Pressure is needing to make a deadline with a project to support a marketing effort, assuming the deadline is realistic. Stress is having to carry the weight of five coders not getting their job done. Pressure is being responsible for guiding the success of a project by mentoring those five coders.
For myself, I thrive on pressure, withstand stress, but even more importantly, know precisely what my limits are for both. One important point not made in the article (on brief perusal) is that while pressure is beneficial to some, even those who flourish with it have their limits. Eventually, even pressure becomes counter-productive.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Understanding whether people "thrive or crack under pressure" is relevant. All of the things the troll is complaining about are VERY stress inducing. If we could learn to not crack, or to deal with stress in ways other than lashing out against those we percieve as "enemies", maybe we and our "enemies" would both live in less fear. Less fear all around leads to less violence, which leads to less fear, which leads to less violence...
Hopefully it also would allow us all the levelheadedness to adress our disagreements constructively.
My experience with pressure and pressure-holics, is that they make more mistakes when they are working under a deadline than when they have planned things out. Since many of them believe that they cannot perform well unless they are under some pressure, they either (subconciously) blow it off until the deadline or they sabotage themselves until there is some pressure.
In addition, many of these people cannot distinguish between important and urgent. If you have read First Things First, or The 7 habits of highly successful people then you have seen the 2x2 matrix showing the difference between important and urgent. Draw a box, then divide it in half vertically and half horizontally. Label the left column urgent and the right column not urgent. Lable the top row Important, and the bottom row not important. The pressure-holics cannot see the top right, nor the lower left corners. To them, anything in the left column, belongs in the top left corner. Anything that is in the right column belongs in the bottom right square. A phone call is urgent. If it is a customer, or boss, then it is important (upper left), if it is someone selling carpet cleaning, it is not important (lower left). Doing your taxes is important, but it is not urgent until early April. As important things "ripen" they become more urgent.
The worst bosses are the ones who cannot see the difference between important and urgent. The TPS report might be due on Friday, but if you are working on it on Monday, then you are screwing off, and they will dump some imaginary crisis on you, to stop you from doing what (to them) is goofing off. Or, they will arbitrarily move up deadlines because you aren't sweating enough. You cannot make plans or schedules when these sort of people are around, as they will deliberately mess things up for you.
I am an underemployed lawyer, and silly me thought it was the terrible hiring market for lawyers. I guess the other underemployed lawyers I know are also too optimistic as well.
On a side note, there is indication that some lawyer functions might be off-shored in the near future, so I've got that to be optimistic about as well. Nothing like have Gurpreet in India writing your legal briefs.
Well, that's a vote for "Cracks under pressure."
People who need stress put on them are the reason managers create unrealistic deadlines and tell employees they're not good enough. Put another way, these people are not self-motivating. They can't maintain a steady pace of work on their own. Their work ethic is too weak.
The article blurs the difference between what people do under occasional, warranted stress like a death in the family and continual artificial stress. People who need the latter kind need to re-evaluate themselves, people who can cope with the former are simply healthy.
Among other tidbits, pessimists make great lawyers...
I wanted to be a lawyer, but I didn't think it wouldn't work out.
Interestingly, it seems that it is the profession itself that causes the depression. In one study I read a few years back, when individuals were assessed the summer before law school, they showed rates of depression equivalent to the general population, but even after just the first year of law school, let alone once they graduated, rates of depression jumped to anywhere from 20-40 percent of the population studied.
Thug with a baseball bat trying to kill you? Crush his throat. Firetruck 20 feet away going 70km/h? floor it. Lying in the street with broken bones? Get out of traffic, do (minimal) self first-aid, and make sure someone's called an ambulance.
Most of the real emergency things that have happened to me, I was too busy dealing with the situation to notice stress. What gets to me is the things that I can't do anything about.
I spend a good chunk of several weeks of the year sitting on my ass doing not much of anything at work, which would suck ass if I didn't have linux to learn.
:P
:P
Underutilized employees are in all likelihood unnecesssary- which means they're a waste of money, right?
Fortunately, the variety of things I do adds up nicely- they'd need three different people to replace just me, so I'm cheaper. And I'm not the only one with occasional VAST GULFS of slack time. And I don't get training or any kind of tuition incentives. So I use that time to learn stuff, since it's the only way I'll be able to leverage myself out of this place.
Am I a Workaholic? Yes. Just not for the day job.
I've always thought that there might be an intentional diversity in the genetic components of human behavior, not unlike the hypervariablity found in the genetics underlying the immune system. Human society functions better in a nonstationary environment (= ice ages, floods, dry spells, changes in diet from whale blubber to potatoes) if the society is structurally non-homogeneous. Society needs risk takers and risk avoiders, optimists and pessimists, manic spenders and thrifty savers, lone achievers and gregarious team players. How else can we cope with the rich times, the poor times, the peace times, war times, the stay-at-home times, and the move-to-another-land-times.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I think this kind of thing is also useful for many kinds of computer programming, especially in high-reliability areas like operating systems and compilers. I've had to fix an awful lot of bugs in programs written by optimists.
Have you read my blog lately?
Stress is a biochemical reaction of the body on exceptional situations, like threats, danger and excitement. The oldest part of the brain (reptilian brain) sends messengers which make it possible to deal with those situations. These exceptional situations are often called stress. But the messengers can also contain endorphines which let us feel good with the so called stress.
In fact stress is a very clever builtin algorithm to ensure survival.
We are even not aware of many situations which are handled by the stress algorithms in the human brain, like accident avoidance and life saving. If you ask people who rescued someone else under totaly weird circumstances why they have done this and why they did not think about the danger, then most of them will have no answer because the survival mechanisms of the brain take control over the rational waging of feasabilities. This can also be observed on job related challenges where the either technical challenges or the competition against a coworker or a competing company pushes people over their limits. Most people set those limits very low due to unawareness of the own abilities and everything exceeding those self set limits is called stress. The stress complaint is hip in our modern society. Our ancestors would laugh heartly about those complaints.
On the other hand there are people with limited capacity of dealing with those challenges. This is often caused by personal deficits, but those deficits are not seldom a result of education in a sheltered environment where all sources of natural and healthy stress were hold off from the kids and young adults. If they are confronted later with the reality of challenges they are predestinated to fail.
tglx - I personally need challenges to be productive
What a surprise. Who would have thought that the mouthpiece of the corporate world would turn out an article like this that essentially glorifies the Velvet Sweatshop that America have become. The article here subtly hints that if you do not thrive under pressure, and accept the sweatshop environment, well, then there must be something just a bit wrong with you.
People, when are you going to open your eyes and see the grave looming in front of you a sparse few decades ahead?
When are you going to take a look at the workplace environment and rules and social safety net that many European countries have created, thus ensuring that their citizens are somewhat shielded from overwork and sweatshop environments?
PLease consider the perspective taken by this article. Could it have been written another way? Why was it written with the particular perspective it took?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I strive under pressure when I'm on crack. Which is daily.
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me - Hunter S. Thompson
I clearly stated that I was comparing America to Europe. Yet you ignored that, and compared America to Indonesia, a third world country. I find it very telling that you chose that comparison. So I guess as long as we are better off than the 3rd world, then everything is hunkydory?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Let's take a look at some of the language used in this article, in order to see what connotations are associated with people who thrive on a stressful environment (i.e., a sweatshop, as opposed to those who do not thrive. Tell me what message this article gives us.
Here are some selected excerpts from the article:
"juggling multiple projects and running on four hours of sleep is business as usual."
So that is the Brave New Workplacein America. But that is not the workplace in France, and many other countries in Europe, where 35 hours per week is the mandated maximum work week, and where everyone gets 4 to 6 weeks of time off.
"But for Mr. Jones, the stress is worth it, if only because every now and then he can gaze at the Manhattan skyline and spot a product of his labor: the soaring profile of the Chatham apartment building on East 65th Street,"
Teaching us to accept our place in the sweatshop. Slavery is Freedom, dontcha know, and sweatshop workplaces are heaven.
"Mr. Jones belongs to a rare breed of worker"
Oooh. I wanna be a "rare breed", too. How about you?!
Let's take a look at some of the words used to describe our stress-loving heroes:
"they grapple
Wow! If only I could just be like them!
"People who are high in hardiness enjoy ongoing changes and difficulties,"
OK, Slashdotters, did you get the memo on our Brave New Sweatshop Economy. No, it is not a Velvet Sweatshop that we are headed for, it is just "changes and difficulties". Now get back to work!
But what about the rest of us non-heroic types? How does this article describe us?
"Their coworkers who complain of being too stressed have consistently higher levels of hormones that rarely dip very far, trapping them in a constant state of anxiety.
Oh. OK. We are "complainers" trapped in our anxiety. Gotcha!
"Some people will say 'No, I don't like a lot of stress,' but they find themselves in one stressful job after another, so there must be something that's pulling them.""
Hmm, or maybe, just maybe, it is because our government has sold us out to the corporations and the wealthy, thus creating a sweatshop environment where nearly EVERY job is becoming more and more stressful. Naw, that couldn't be it. Could it?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I'd like to hear what these people's spouses and kids think of their "resilience". They'd probably use a different word, probably one like "selfishness".
Yes. It will require legislation, but so will anything else.
With outsourcing, you're job can go to someone who can live on pennies per-day. Do you possibly think you can make that up by working harder? Unless you've been completely useless up to this point, there's no way you can work an order of magnitude harder... So working harder isn't even a real option.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Underutilized employees are in all likelihood unnecesssary- which means they're a waste of money, right?"
In many situations the systems run by themselves most of the time, so employees want an SA that knows the system and is available at the drop of hat in case there is a problem that requires immedite attention.
It seems like such a guy is doing nothing, but the peace of mind he provides to a business relying on technology more than justifies for his salary and apparent idleness.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.