Calling Bullsh!t: Burn Your Bridges

Written by  on April 15, 2009

…and the horse you rode in on!

Bridge DemolotionThe millennial generation can tell people where to go louder and quicker than any other generation in history.  And why the hell not?

We’re all after that kick-ass chair on the bridge of the Enterprise, aren’t we?  (That’s geekspeek for: “I’m going to own the world someday”.)

Like George Patton said, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way!” So often we’re held back by stodgy business beliefs, generational misunderstanding, slow application processes, competition, personal inhibitions.  It’s all bullsh!t.

Tell your boss that you don’t like him or his stodgy policies anymore. It’s time for a change – and he’s either with you (and the betterment of the company) or he’s against you – and you’re ready to walk.  It takes a lot of balls and a nice little savings account to take this approach.  There’s no reason why you should persist in a meaningless job doing meaningless work for 1/3rd of your day and – if you’re lucky – 1/2 of your waking hours.

You only have one life. Recession or no, you have to take what you want. There’s no point to doing work that isn’t meaningful or worthwhile.  You simply can’t allow yourself to be scared into thinking you’re not worth a better job, a better career, a better life, a better car, a better… whatever.  Businesses must adapt to us, or they will not survive. Our generation is the absolute best at perceiving bullsh!t.  How many times have you walked into a “hip” company only to find out they’re still running Internet Explorer 6? Or that they block Facebook and MySpace?  And how many times a day did you say to yourself and your friends, “why do I work for these monkeys when they don’t trust me to stay on task?”

Building on FireThere’s no excuse – not the recession, not your personal financial situation, not anything – that should hold you back from pursuing your dreams.  Don’t listen to what anyone tells you – you don’t pay your dues by taking it in the rear. If the path to your dreams doesn’t exist, carve it yourself.  Start your own business.  Start your own blog.  Talk about the things you like and the things you hate.  Shout it from the rooftops and through RSS feeds.  Tell your friends and make them tell their friends.  Be loud.

We’ve had enough and we’re gonna turn the f*ckin’ car around!

Seriously. I’m so fired up because I’m tired of this ageist crap. I’ve landed amazing jobs – during this recession and with a major that looked very bleak when I was graduating. If I can do it, you can do it too. Get angry. Get motivated.

Let’s set corporate America on fire!

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  • Josh Peifer

    I think this is great advice, Nick. For too long we have been told that we should be happy just to have a job. Well, eat me. If that is the life I am destined to live, working some horrible job just to get by, I might as well do myself in now.

    Every time I hear about our generation, there are two classic reasons for our “behavior:” doting parents, and technology. While the latter is obvious, I don’t think the reason we need to be listened to and not ignored at our jobs comes from our parents acquiescing to our every whim. I think we are the first generation that is EDUCATED. In what other generation was it unusual to NOT have a college degree of some kind? Because of education and technology, I simply believe we have more skills and knowledge than any other generation at our age, and we are sick of being dismissed because we are young.

    Anyway, my 2 cents. Keep it up, Nick. Damn the man.

  • http://modite.com/blog Rebecca

    Haha, I chuckled at “How many times have you walked into a “hip” company only to find out they’re still running Internet Explorer 6?” Funny. :)

  • http://5280fan.com 5280Fan

    For the record, Facebook and MySpace SHOULD be blocked unless you happen to work for them. Huge IT security risk, not to mention the massive amount of wasted FTE hours. Companies that don’t have a written “blog” policy face huge risks as well with hard-earned and expensive research going out the pipe… not to mention the problems an employee blog topic can cause.

    Gee I liked IE6 :-)

  • Margo Eve

    Yah know, having been young once I can tell you this much, it’s not because you are Millennials. It’s because you are young and think you know it all already. Just like every single youth generation before who:

    Gave no respect to those who came before them.
    Expect to start at the top because they just paid a small fortune for an education.
    Don’t understand that “burning bridges” can kick them in the ass down the road.

    Every singe youth generation thinks they can do it better than those before them. Every single youth generation will eventually become the bane of the existence of the next youth generation.

    You want to change things? Spend some time in inquiry mode before leading a revolution. Understand the history of how things got to be how they are in the first place. Understand that being a leader often means being the best you can be at your specific role, not necessarily leading from the front.

    Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to make the same mistakes of history. I don’t care what buzz word is attached to a generation (Gen X here), how different they THINK they are, they are all the same. They want to change the world without any understanding of how it works, or what the consequences of the change will be.

    Plus, it really pains me that anyone would ever thing “burning bridges” is a good business practice. It makes me question the education system that this generation doesn’t understand the meanings of this idiom is different than walking away from a job. But that’s another rant entirely.

    I’m fine with walking away from a soul sucking job, but I’d never sever ties in a way that they wouldn’t give me a good reference, or I couldn’t do business with them later down the road. THAT’S what burning bridges means.

  • http://www.psychoticresumes.com Nick Armstrong

    Josh – thanks for reading, I totally agree with the “doting parents” thing. That one drives me nuts. My parents sure as hell weren’t doting. I earned a total of one (1) participation trophy in my life. If I lost any other time, I lost. I got nothing except for experience. I didn’t lose very often.

    Rebecca – IE6 – the super-herpes of the internet. It is soon to be obsoleted, as IE8 is a high-priority update at the end of April.

    5280Fan – You gain 9% in productivity when you do not block internet sites for personal use (Facebook, MySpace, etc). You LOSE that 9% in efficiency to texting, boredom, and daydreaming about that hottie you’d otherwise be cyber-stalking when you block those sites. I agree that if allowed to get out of balance, those sites become a major drain, but trust is a major component to job satisfaction. Blocking sites indicates that the trust is missing.

    Margo – I respect my elders. It’s idiots who I don’t respect. Unfortunately, a lot of idiots have made their way into upper management and are quite content to try to spread the dumb, so to speak. I had no expectation that I would start at the top – but I do have the expectation that my ideas (if they’re worthy) will be heard by those on top.

    Burning bridges is a VERY important business skill. It’s the power of fire – and it must be respected. And just like fire, it can be misused. Burning your bridges not only protects you from prowling idiots, it allows you to garner a reputation as being someone with the audacity, the temerity, the outright business fortitude, to tell an idiot to take a long walk off a short pier.

    We live in an environment of fear. Fear of the unknown, fear that we’re going to get fired tomorrow, fear that we won’t be able to put food on the table for our children. That fear allows the possibility for abuse. And there are plenty of people using the “wait and see” approach because they’re too afraid to speak up for themselves and for others.

    I am very happy to lead from the front. I’ve had no problems brandishing my sword, nudging the horse to a gallop, and storming the “enemy lines” straight through to unemployment. “Leading from the front” isn’t just potshots and bravado, it’s planning, strategy, and a lot of trust in yourself. These are skills I’ve learned, not because I’m young (although I can credit a fair bit of my bravado to that) but because I’m a millennial and have the ability to research, use technology, connect, and network a lot faster and easier than my older, wiser counterparts. No offense. Plenty of my older, wiser counterparts are able to network just as well as I am, but… the majority can’t (and don’t want to).

    You’re quite correct when you say that if we forget what came before, we’re doomed to repeat it… well – we’ve got the span of human history at our fingertips. We’ve got YouTube, Hulu, Discovery.com, Google, and a library of tools to help us learn about history and add context to our actions.

    Millennials (and to some extent, Gen-Xers) are so easily able to drum down through the depths of history and find whatever we need to succeed.

    Including the definition of “burning bridges” found in my article: “Tell your boss that you don’t like him or his stodgy policies anymore. It’s time for a change – and he’s either with you (and the betterment of the company) or he’s against you – and you’re ready to walk.” For many employers, this would be quite adequate to burn a bridge – severing ties in a way that they wouldn’t give you a good reference.

    The point is, we should never be afraid of burning the bridge in the first place.

    -Nick Armstrong

  • Margo Eve

    “and he’s either with you (and the betterment of the company) or he’s against you”

    Fallacy of false choice there. It didn’t work well for Bush in international politics, it’s not going to work so great over the span of a career. If you leave no room for other choices, you eliminate room for growth and learning.

    There are idiots at any age. I can’t tell you how many “millenial” generation folks can’t write a simple 5 paragraph essay. Or don’t understand how to evaluate a source of information. In a day and age when any person with a computer can publish what they say in a blog, so few take the time to fact check that it’s like a scene out of Idiocracy.

    There are ALWAYS exceptions to any generalization about any age bracket. That whole “entitlement” stereotype doesn’t apply if you are from certain cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. There are millenials who know how to use a shift key and actually understand the value of learning from the bottom to get to the top. (If you are going to run a company, it’s good to know how it actually works from the eyes of the workers you manage.) So called Gen Xers are also more in line with the whole technology issue than you give them credit for.

    When you say “we shouldn’t be afraid of burning bridges in the first place” it comes cross, not as arrogant, but ignorant. This is not a how to do it with finesse issue, it’s a you are using the wrong words to describe what you mean issue and detracts from what you are actually trying to say. The saying “Burning Bridges” means that you are damaging a relationship so much that you can’t possibly return to it. Ever. Do you really want make it so you can never work with a person in your industry again? What if you end up running a company that works on contracts and you could, in that roll, greatly improve the company you are leaving? What if the company finds itself under new managment with practices and values that appeal to you?

    Think of it this way, burning bridges means burning future revenue. To Burn a bridge means, not walking away, or even severing ties, it MEANS destroying a relationship and/or any options of revisiting something. Just like, before alternative transportation, burning a bridge meant closing off possibility of return.

    No, we shouldn’t be worried about severing ties, walking away from a job that makes us miserable.

    But that is NOT what burning bridges means. Especially not in the context you are using. To paraphrase my favorite Spaniard, “You keep using that phrase, It does not mean what you think it means.”

  • http://www.robfrankel.com Rob Frankel

    Never put things in writing that you’ll wish you’d never said.
    And more importantly, never get mad.
    Get even.
    As Mr. WIlde once said, “Living well is the best revenge.” Nothing feels quite as good as beating them at their own game.

  • http://www.psychoticresumes.com Nick Armstrong

    Rob – totally agree with that… except that it’s doubly true now that anything you put into writing is almost instantaneously cached by Google. I don’t think any of us can live up to that version of perfect and still play in Social Media.

    Margo – All great points. Just outside the scope of this particular article. I’d be very interested in having you write a guest post on that very topic.

    -Nick