More on the Power (and Virtue) of Saying “No”

A couple of weeks ago, the Sunday business section of the New York Times ran an article about a popular class taught at Google, for Google employees, to help them deal with the stress of working at what is, if the article is to be believed, an incredibly stressful and demanding (albeit also incredibly creative) company.

Now, I’ve been to Google. I used to live 15 minutes down the road from its campus, and my brother worked for the company for a time. So on the one hand, I can attest to the fact that the campus is an energized place. Some of the people I’ve met who work there are compellingly bright, thinking individuals, with big ideas about changing the world. Who wouldn’t want to work in a place filled with optimism, a belief in possibility, and with people actively engaged in transforming the world? Not to mention the fact that the food options at Google really are impressive.

But the Times article–perhaps unwittingly–painted a different image of the place. It described a place where even people coming from “fast-paced fields, already accustomed to demanding bosses and long hours, say Google pushes them to produce at a pace even faster than they could have imagined.” It described 80-hour work weeks and pressure that led employees to go home and explode at their families.

Even if the article is–as journalistic pieces certainly can be–a skewed angle that suited the writer more than it reflected the “typical” reality of Google, my brother used to say that the reason Google provided such great food, recreation, and even “nap pods” (my term for them) was to encourage employees to never leave the place. And it does occur to me that if employees really are that stressed and exhausted, someone there might question whether the company’s “do no evil” philosophy should, perhaps, start at home, with the health, well-being and quality of life of its own employees.

Of course, from the company’s perspective, perhaps that’s where this particular class comes in. It’s called “Search Inside Yourself,” or S.I.Y., and its goals are to help individuals with “attention training, self-knowledge, and self-mastery, and the creation of useful mental habits.” Employees apparently rave about the class, and there’s a long waiting list. And, to be sure, some of the things it apparently teaches would be good for any of us to learn, such as stopping to breathe and really reflect on what someone is saying to you before responding, or being more “mindful” of how emails you send can be interpreted by those who receive them.

But in some ways, the course reminded me of the “time management” books the corporation I worked for back in the 1980s made managers read, with the expectation that if we only learned how to better manage our time and be more efficient in our days, we could handle the workload we were being given. It was, perhaps, an early, clear sign that I was not cut out for the corporate world that I never managed to get more than a chapter or two into those books (and yes, there were books, plural, handed to us) before throwing the volumes across the room. Because instinctively, I knew that the core problem wasn’t how we were handling the workload. It was the workload, itself. The company wasn’t interested in nurturing long-term, effective and happy employees. The unwritten corporate strategy was, quite clearly, to get the most out of us, for as long as the corporation could. If we could handle it, great. If we couldn’t, well, there would always be other, younger folks looking for a chance who would be happy to replace us.

Today, the time-management books of the 80s have been replaced with meditation-infused seminars on self-mastery. Which is, I guess, at least a small improvement. But as a friend of mine said recently, there is a belief, in Silicon Valley, that if you just have the right tools, you can handle anything and do it all. And that’s actually not true. Certainly not for any long period of time. Anyone can sustain a sprint for a short while. But if that pace becomes the norm, it will have long-term health and quality of life impacts, no matter what tools you have. There is no app that magically allows you to sustain an afterburner pace and still have a balanced life. Sometimes, what’s required isn’t a new tool. It’s the simple strength to say “no.”

So why don’t more people say no to what many of them surely know are unreasonable demands, not unlike the controller demands I talked about in my last post?  For sure, in a tough job market, there is very real pressure to keep bosses happy just to keep a job–especially if you have kids or a family counting on you to keep a roof over their heads. But the most telling sentence of the entire Times article was a quote from one of the S.I.Y. class graduates, who said of Google, “The pressure here is really quite intense. It’s a place filled with high achievers trained to find validation through external factors.”

What those people need isn’t a new tool to handle the pressure better. What they need is some serious soul-searching about why they’re looking for validation through external factors in the first place. Because as any psychologist will tell you, that is a guaranteed recipe for unhappiness. Real strength and happiness–the strength that is prized in all hero journey tales, and happiness that knows how to be content with “enough”–comes from learning how to find validation within yourself.

Of course, once you learn how to find validation within yourself, you’re more likely to look at a high-pressure, draining work environment and politely decline. So it’s not likely that too many companies are going to provide that kind of training. And yet, I still believe that the instinct I had in the 1980s was correct. Sometimes, the path to balance, health and happiness lies not in “managing” a situation that your gut tells you is draining you or a load your gut tells you is too much. Sometimes, it lies in finding the strength to say “no”–either by modifying how you approach the job you have, or thinking very seriously about making more substantial changes to create a life where balance is a more attainable goal.