The Asshole Survival Guide

I came across an interesting new book called The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt and went to Amazon to check it out. From the description:

“Help, I’m dealing with an asshole! What can I do?”

Since his book The No Asshole Rule became a national bestseller a decade ago, Robert Sutton has heard that question asked in a thousand different ways. He answers the question in a new book that shifts focus from building civilized workplaces to providing relief for anybody who feels plagued and pushed around by assholes.

Equally useful and entertaining, The Asshole Survival Guide delivers a cogent and methodical game plan. Sutton starts with diagnosis—what kind of asshole problem, exactly, are you dealing with? From there, he provides field-tested, evidence-based, and sometimes surprising strategies for dealing with assholes—avoiding them, outwitting them, disarming them, sending them packing, and developing protective psychological armor. Sutton even teaches readers how to look inward to stifle their own inner jackass.

Ultimately, this survival guide is about developing an outlook and personal plan that will help you preserve the sanity in your work life, and will prevent all those perfectly good days from being ruined by some jerk.

I looked up a recent interview with the author and found some tips for dealing with the troublemakers in your life. Here are a few:

1. Don’t fall victim to “a–hole blindness.”
2. Keep your distance, literally.
3. Get emotional distance, too.
Reduce your interactions with the jerk to a trickle since he may enjoy watching you react.

Here is my favorite tip:

4. Lay low.

This approach may be painful if you’re talented and productive, but being unnoticed and not making waves can shield you from an jerk’s wrath.

“If you’re charismatic or exciting, it draws more attention to you,” Sutton said. “When you’re boring, it’s amazing what you can get away with because people don’t pay attention to you.”

This is so true, I used to fight back against people more frequently, but one thing I have noticed is that if you don’t say anything or just say something positive and do what you want anyway, it seems to work well. Sadly, most people care about what you say, not how you act in the current political climate. I suppose that is what the MGTOW is about, doing one’s own thing and not asking permission.