New Study Says Being Good At Your Job Is Dumb Because It Means More Work For You

What is work?

Is it a meaningful experience, wherein the effort you put forth is equal to the satisfaction gained and monetary compensation earned?

Or is work an elaborate fiction created by the mechanisms of society designed to keep people — especially you — in line, behaved, producing, a construct which you should subvert and fight at every twist and turn.

If you believe the first, you are what is known as a “nerd,” who wants to have a “career,” and make “money,” and not be “fired from every job you’ve ever had” and not be a “drain on society.”

Which is fine, I guess. Just know your work life is gonna suck because of all the cool ass people like me who know that performing at your job is not a prerequisite for retaining your job.

Because you, who is trustworthy and productive and good at things, will be assigned more work. Which makes sense. Bosses want people who can perform to do the things that matter. Meanwhile, us less competent people are going to continue doing the bare minimum while raking in paychecks From The Atlantic:

A new paper by a team of researchers from Duke University, University of Georgia, and University of Colorado looks at not only how extremely competent people are treated by their co-workers and peers,

To begin, the researchers began by establishing that people do, in fact, assign more tasks to those they perceived as more competent. In a survey, participants read statements about a fictional employee “Sam”—different groups read different statements about Sam indicating how much self-control he had (self-control was used as a proxy for competence). When Sam was presented as someone with great self-control, participants expected much more of Sam’s performance at his manufacturing job. In a separate experiment, undergrads were asked to delegate essays for proofreading to other students with varying levels of self-control. Unsurprisingly those with more self-control ended up with more work assigned to them.

Poor fucking Sam. Don’t be Sam. Sam gets taken for granted.

A separate experiment found that participants not only assigned more tasks to the go-getters—but underestimated how much work it would take to get the job done.

See, yah done got fucked. And all that hard work you put in? It ain’t gonna make you happy.

In a survey of more than 400 employees, they found that high performers were not only aware that they were giving more at work—they rightly assumed that their managers and co-workers didn’t understand how hard it was for them, and thus felt unhappy about being given more tasks.

Basically, it pays to not give a fuck. Try it some time. I guarantee you’ll enjoy it more than being productive.*

*Statement not guaranteed.