Define: costumes

I had a boss once who told us, "inefficient people cannot pretend forever." This was in relation to someone supervising our team then, and didn't do a very motivating job of it. He would make us go on overtimes without clearly identifying what we needed to do. He would ask us to go to work over the weekends, and we find ourselves sitting with no workload. He would yell at people in the room to the point that some ended up crying on the spot with the shame and humiliation. He would accuse some co-workers of conspiracy and confront them as to "what they're up to". In a nutshell, he was terrible.

After a while, the horrible superior did leave. And so, I held on to that statement the higher boss made, to the point of it being a sort of mantra for me. Whenever I encounter difficult situations brought on by difficult people, I say, "inefficient people cannot pretend forever."

At some point though, you meet different people, and you see a wider view of the world, and you realize, aren't we all in reality, inefficient? A friend of mine likes to use the Peter Principle - you are only promoted to your highest level of incompetency. So, really, all of us are inefficient at some point. All of us reach a stage when we can't pretend anymore.

At which point, we start to actually do the job we should have been doing. We stop pretending to be the "face" of the job we thought we should project. Once we reach the point when we can't pretend anymore, we start thinking, "well, I've done all the things the self-help books, and management modules and MBAs taught me to do, and they don't seem to work." So we bring in ourselves, costumes and perceptions shed off, the self who got hired to do the job in the first place.

So, while that statement is still true to me - inefficient people cannot pretend forever - I don't render it applicable now to just the "difficult" people whom I think make life frustrating. It's a statement that applies to me now. With any given new task, project or job, I have to make sure that my "pretend" phase is short, because that's the phase I'm most inefficient. I'm too busy looking the part, I have little time to actually act the part.