![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/37AG65y
ekjohnston:
truefactsaboutlies:
one of the best tips for Real Life that I’ve ever picked up is to always highball your estimate whenever someone asks you “when can you get this done by” by about 25% (if you can get away with it). that way, if it ends up being harder than you thought, you’ve got extra time to figure things out and if you were right about how much time it takes then you get to look like an absolute genius instead of just a simply competent person.
what you may not have realized is that I learned this crucial piece of life advice from an episode of Star Trek where Scotty is telling Geordi that whenever he told Kirk something on the Enterprise was at full capacity, it was always only ever a notch or so below full capacity so that Scotty looked like the god of all engineers when he was able to magically hack the warp drive to run a little beyond what he’d told everyone else was “full capacity” and honestly that one throwaway gag from Star Trek has changed my life.
I have absolutely used The Scotty Manoeuver in real life. 10/10, would recommend.
This is actually something I learned reading a memoir by a cartoonist for the US Army newspaper during WWII– Bill Mauldin, who was a fixture of the Stars & Stripes (which, by the way, not to inject US politics into this but I gotta for a sec… while the Pentagon is appropriating literally seven billion dollars for the Space Force, they’ve announced that they’re cutting their sole newspaper, which has been in loyal nonpartisan service since WWI, covering rule changes, uniform “upgrades”, law changes, the basketball tournaments of servicemen’s kids stationed overseas, and local news only the military folks care about all over the world, so, a moment of silence for the venerable Stars & Stripes).
He wrote, and I’m quoting from memory so I might have it slightly wrong, “Never let them know how fast you can work.” He told a story of doing a cartoon using ink from a stamp pad on the back of an envelope on a beachhead pinned down by fire (I think he followed the 45th Infantry ashore at Sicily, or somesuch, as an embedded journalist), and turning it in on-deadline to his baffled editor. But his point was, you’ve always got to leave yourself room to work, because if they know you can do it in 20 minutes they’re gonna want it in 20 minutes every time regardless and sometimes you really can’t do it in 20 minutes. Always overquote, always mystify the process, because your bosses are assholes and if you give an inch they’ll take a mile.
ekjohnston:
truefactsaboutlies:
one of the best tips for Real Life that I’ve ever picked up is to always highball your estimate whenever someone asks you “when can you get this done by” by about 25% (if you can get away with it). that way, if it ends up being harder than you thought, you’ve got extra time to figure things out and if you were right about how much time it takes then you get to look like an absolute genius instead of just a simply competent person.
what you may not have realized is that I learned this crucial piece of life advice from an episode of Star Trek where Scotty is telling Geordi that whenever he told Kirk something on the Enterprise was at full capacity, it was always only ever a notch or so below full capacity so that Scotty looked like the god of all engineers when he was able to magically hack the warp drive to run a little beyond what he’d told everyone else was “full capacity” and honestly that one throwaway gag from Star Trek has changed my life.
I have absolutely used The Scotty Manoeuver in real life. 10/10, would recommend.
This is actually something I learned reading a memoir by a cartoonist for the US Army newspaper during WWII– Bill Mauldin, who was a fixture of the Stars & Stripes (which, by the way, not to inject US politics into this but I gotta for a sec… while the Pentagon is appropriating literally seven billion dollars for the Space Force, they’ve announced that they’re cutting their sole newspaper, which has been in loyal nonpartisan service since WWI, covering rule changes, uniform “upgrades”, law changes, the basketball tournaments of servicemen’s kids stationed overseas, and local news only the military folks care about all over the world, so, a moment of silence for the venerable Stars & Stripes).
He wrote, and I’m quoting from memory so I might have it slightly wrong, “Never let them know how fast you can work.” He told a story of doing a cartoon using ink from a stamp pad on the back of an envelope on a beachhead pinned down by fire (I think he followed the 45th Infantry ashore at Sicily, or somesuch, as an embedded journalist), and turning it in on-deadline to his baffled editor. But his point was, you’ve always got to leave yourself room to work, because if they know you can do it in 20 minutes they’re gonna want it in 20 minutes every time regardless and sometimes you really can’t do it in 20 minutes. Always overquote, always mystify the process, because your bosses are assholes and if you give an inch they’ll take a mile.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-19 09:54 pm (UTC)