Suits is back in a big way thanks to Netflix, which is currently showing its first eight seasons (there are nine, but for rights reasons, Netflix can’t show the last one). It’s the latest in a set of old shows — Friends, The Office, Breaking Bad — that got a renaissance thanks to Netflix.
I’ve been binging it as “video wallpaper” in the background while working on articles. You might think that it might be distracting, but I’ve found it to be inspiring and motivating. (I also find that if I’m ever stuck on a programming problem, putting the original Iron Man movie or the audiobook version of The Martian in the background gets me un-stuck.)
And of course I’m a fan of the show. Where do you think Harvey Specter gets his style tips from?
In the podcast series “The Diary of a CEO”, Gladwell told host Steven Bartlett that office workers should stop “sitting in their pyjamas” and return to the office and gather in one place in order to have a sense of meaning and belonging:
“It’s very hard to feel necessary when you’re physically disconnected. As we face the battle that all organizations are facing now in getting people back into the office, it’s really hard to explain this core psychological truth, which is we want you to have a feeling of belonging and to feel necessary.
And we want you to join our team and if you’re not here it’s really hard to do that.
It’s not in your best interest to work at home. I know it’s a hassle to come into the office, but if you’re just sitting in your pyjamas in your bedroom, is that the work-life you want to live? Don’t you want to feel part of something?
I’m really getting very frustrated with the inability of people in positions of leadership to explain this effectively to their employees. If we don’t feel like we’re part of something important, what’s the point? If it’s just a paycheck, then it’s like what have you reduced your life to?”
Now that I work from home I cook my dinner on my lunch break, take care of my garden during stretch breaks, observe the many ways my dog naps, jump directly into writing once I clock out, & read everyone’s tweets dragging Malcolm Gladwell for being a hypocrite who works from home
First of all, the “Diary of a CEO” podcast, where Gladwell gave his terrible take, isn’t recorded at a traditional dedicated workspace, but in the host’s home.
Malcolm Gladwell is the Jordan Peterson of Nate Silvers.
Take a look at the set where “The Diary of a CEO” interviews take place. It’s not a recording studio, but a dining room in a house or condominium.
It’s a rather upscale house or condo with more product placement than you’d encounter in real life, but a house or condo nonetheless. It’s most decidedly not the office environment that Gladwell insists we return to.
I will hear Malcolm Gladwell’s opinion on modern work culture after he’s compiled 3 spreadsheets, prepped a budget presentation, and answered 4 complicated emails w/his coworkers clucking about The Bachelorette behind him the whole time.
This from a guy who works where he wants. Explain the lost “culture” to my team members who save two hours of commuting a day. For some types of work, in-person is important. For our divorce law firm, remote worked beautifully for two and a half years. https://t.co/hiCGrHEDIH
There’s also the fact that Gladwell doesn’t go to an office.
Pictured above: An overused grinder in need of cleaning and maintenance. And to the right of Malcolm Gladwell, a coffee bean grinder and espresso machine.
Gladwell doesn’t go to an office because he doesn’t have to. He had a desk at The New Yorker, but you weren’t likely to find him there:
I worked at The New Yorker for several years. I didn’t once see him at his desk or in the office.
“He’s away from his desk” is something that’s now true of New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell. When he wrote his bestseller The Tipping Point, he remained shackled to his desk, mainly from habit. But while writing his new book, Blink, he unleashed his lust for wandering, in New York, Rome and London.
Malcolm says: “I hate desks. Desks are now banished.” He starts the day writing at home, but this is always done from his sofa, using his laptop. “I work better when I’m comfortable,” he says. After a stint on the sofa, it’s out into the world.
“I refer to my writing as ‘rotating’. I always say ‘I’m going to rotate’ because I have a series of spots that I rotate.”
The article goes on to list Gladwell’s decidedly non-office workspaces:
A spot in Manhattan’s Lower East Side where “The waiters are all Australian and they play The Smiths all day long which I find so fabulous.”
Restaurants in nearby Little Italy, where they let him linger in the middle of the afternoon.
He also said that he’d love to work at the Monmouth Coffee Company in London’s Covent Garden, which he describes as “warm and idiosyncratic.” And hey — having been there and done some quick coding and developer relations work there — can attest that it’s a decent place to get work done. But it’s not an office.
The Guardian article’s final paragraph tells us about one of the biggest benefits that Gladwell gets from ditching his office desk: he enjoys his job more!
By leaving his desk behind, Malcolm says that he’s been able to disassociate writing from work. “It seems like a fun activity now. Kind of casual. It’s been more seamlessly integrated into my life and that’s made it much more pleasurable. I never want to be at a desk again.”
Malcolm Gladwell is up there with Ayn Rand in being important for my mental development; in both cases, thinking “hey, that doesn’t add up, I think this is a bunch of shit” and working through *why* led to me to being a much better thinker
Malcolm Gladwell is on my front porch, rolling around on the ground and crying, he’s saying something about how gas station attendants should be a thing again because it reminds him of how much petroleum is about community, can someone please come get him
Malcolm Gladwell is mad because an intern at the New Yorker wasn’t available one night at 8 pm to fact check his piece about the history of carbon paper and he had to do it himself.
Even when he shows up at an office, it’s a much better setup than most of us have.
His company, Pushkin Industries Inc., is one of those companies whose name evokes images of “blue collar” and heavy lifting name, but which actually specializes in the kind of white collar work where people have a nervous breakdown when the Nespresso machine is broken (namely, podcasting and audiobooks).
Pushkin lists hybrid on-premises/remote jobs at the time of writing. While Pushkin’s main office is in Manhattan’s Union Square and the job description says that they’ll eventually get everyone back to on-premises work, if Gladwell shows up at an office, it’s Pushkin’s satellite office in Hudson, the small upstate town where he lives:
So when he does show up at the office, it’s the office that’s conveniently close to home.
The Dunking Point, part four
Because there’s never enough: MORE DUNKING!
Malcolm Gladwell needs you at your cubicle if he’s going to write more pseudoscience self-help books marketed to dummies who were in a gifted class forty years ago https://t.co/jyfCM0R4oD
I was going to write something about hypocrite Canadian Malcolm Gladwell’s stance on working from home but remembered I already summarized in this thread why offices don’t work for so many people https://t.co/PtcxzzZ6Ou
Jordan Peterson crying over unmade beds and Malcolm Gladwell having an existential crisis over people not going to the office is really all the proof that you need that we’ve evolved past the need for Guys That Think About Stuff All Day For A Job
Malcolm Gladwell’s hottest takes:
4. “Working from home is for losers”
3. “Jeffrey Toobin shouldn’t have been fired for jerking off on a zoom call”
2. “Somehow I found myself on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane and I don’t know how it happened”
1. “Joe Paterno did nothing wrong”
The home office, a work in progress. Tap to view at full size.
I’m a remote employee at Auth0, and as such, I fell under their home office expense and reimbursement policy. It was the perfect opportunity to upgrade to a standing desk and ergonomic chair, which I bought as a package from Autonomous during their Black Friday sale.
The desk and chair were delivered in early December, but I decided to wait until the holidays to put them together as part of my project to turn our guest room into my office (which can still double as a guest room when the need arises).
My only complaint about the Autonomous MyoChair is that it comes with bog-standard plastic office chair casters, which would turn the lovely hardwood floor into a scratched-up mess. Luckily, we live in an age of wonders, which includes these wheels and the ability to have them shipped to me in very short order:
Okay, so it’s not a iPhone box, but it’s still a lot nicer than the sealed bag of plastic replacement wheels you normally get. Tap to view at full size.
I’ve enjoyed a chair with Office Oasis rollerblade wheels before, and they’re worth the little bit extra. They won’t ruin hardwood or laminate floors or leave black scuff marks like some rubber wheels do. They glide over floor or carpet, and they look pretty sharp. They’re so good, they almost make rollerblading seem cool.
Even the way they’re packaged is nice. Tap to view at full size.
Next task: Find something to put up on those walls.
