I was the kid who made all the other kids laugh in the 5th grade. It was mostly about something Mrs. Grantham said or did. I loved putting her on the spot. I loved getting all the attention from all the other kids. I loved feeling special. I was a jerk.
Mrs. Grantham didn't seem to mind for quite a while. She even laughed along with the rest of the class. Funny thing, This made me want to try harder to get a reaction from her. Yep. I was a real jerk.
But I was a successful jerk. One day, the little ten year old version of me went a little too far. Mrs. Grantham said something that left her wide open for one of my attacks. I charged in. The whole class laughed and the hallway echoed. Mrs. Grantham did not. With one sigh, she broke me by saying, "There's always one in every class."
I didn't know why but from that moment on, my class-clown was emasculated. I'd never try to userp the attention of my class again.
In retrospect, I can see Mrs. Grantham's genius. I wanted all the attention because it made me feel special. At home, I was largely ignored by my double shift working immigrant Korean parents. So it's understandable that a ten year old would want to fill that gap. But Mrs. Grantham was not about to let me satisfy my emotional vacancies at the expense of 32 other kids in class.
She broke me of my emotional vampirism. By saying what she said, she made one little boy realize that every class in the world had a duplicate clone of me. She made me realize that no matter how funny I became, no matter how much attention I could steal away, I was just falling into a preset mold. Making a class laugh no longer made me feel "special."
In the ecosystem of emotions, 1. anger creates joy; 2. joy creates love; 3. love creates sadness; 4. sadness creates fear; 5. fear creates anger.
The Five Emotional Saboteurs Who Will Destroy Your Company
By the time I was in my early 23 working in San Francisco's Pre Bust Dot Com, I became pretty good at managing people. We worked 18 hour days, had an inhouse chef, shower, massage and laundry service. It was like being in prison for launching a multi-billion dollar ponzi scheme - some idiot has to try to establish his prison rep. Some idiot has to make his mark by bending you over and you get the rest.
That guy would be the angry guy. He imposes on you, shit-talks your most promising ideas, and interrupts you in the conference room. He breaks up team spirit like roots to a sidewalk. But he's not the only emotional idiot who destroys productivity.
There's the overly happy guy. Harvard B School admonishes, "Do not celebrate too soon." But Mr. Premature Champagnepopjaculator never went to B School. He celebrates before the check clears the bank. He lulls everyone into a false sense of security. This is how I lost most of my money during the Dot Bomb.
In the ecosystem of vision, staring at 1. green makes everything look red; 2. staring at red makes everything yellow; 3. staring at yellow turns everything white; 4. staring at a bright white sun makes everything black; 5. staring in a black room reveals green stars
Then there's Mr. Love-a-Lot. He falls in love with a concept so deeply, he ignores overlooks the marketability, the profitability, the scalability, and even the doability of it. He insists that this project will change the world. He insists that women around the world should be able to shop from home without endangering the lives of their children by driving on dangerous roads to a supermarket with even more dangerous plastic bags children can suffocate from and shopping carts they can fall out of. I believed him. As a 24 year old, it never occurred to me that women like to shop. And they like to touch the produce before they buy it. This is how I lost most of the rest of my money working on eGrocer.com.
Just as destructive as Mr. Shit-Talking Back Stabbing Angry Guy, Mr. Premature Champagnepopperjaculator, and Mr. Blindly Love-a-Lot, is our next-to-last emotional saboteur, Mr. Downer. Mr. Downer always has to sit closest to the water cooler. No matter how charged up and caffeinated you are, one innocent jaunt to the water cooler drains all of your energy . His cubicle is an emotional vortex. That swivel lamp of his looks alarmingly like a hungry blood sucking leech. Sure, after the Dot Bomb, all my team mates lost everything. I lost my apartment. I lost my cars - both of them. I even lost my girlfriends - both of them. This cold metalic depression cuts all chances of reinventing yourself. If you overcome situational depression, you can build a multi-million dollar business out of the dirt. Zappos did. They overcame depression and sold to Amazon at the peak of the new recession.
Last on the list of the five emotional saboteurs is Mr. Fear Monger. B School drills into you the importance of "burning your boats." This is to create the kind of fear that happens when Vikings face an opponent five times their size then realize (by observing their burning escape boats) that the only way off of the island is to fight your way to victory. This fear creates passionate martial anger. Mr. Fear does the opposite. He is the one who brings up all the what-ifs but not in a way that makes your game plan tighter. He lists off a litany of reasons you shouldn't follow your dreams. Mr. Fear Monger's fear is not the constructive, exhilirating, "bet the company" kind of healthy fear. His will make the company's funding evaporate if the emotional toxins waft up to the VCs.
I had already amassed enough priceless 20/20 hindsight to make me a billionaire but I was broke. After several failed dot coms, destroyed credit, and being pulled out of my dream European retirement from being penniless (I retired to Europe for several years with what little money I could pull out of my shares before it all crashed. I left Europe from Valencia, Spain after spending a week eating only oranges because I was too proud to beg), I decided to start another dot com. But this time, I was determined to neutralize emotional saboteurs. I was going to build one more dot com but this time, I was going to be 100% armed and ready.
This is when I met a Kung-Fu Master.
Continued: How To Control That Emotional Jerk at Work (10 lessons I learned from a Kung Fu Master and 5th Grade Teacher - The Dao of the Five Elements | Reference: Dangerous Errors In the Acupuncture and Moxabustion Textbook: 5 Elements
How to Get Into the News Media and Pull Big Bloggers Like Guy Kawasaki With 
Comments [0]