What’s better than having skin in the game? Having soul in the game. Caring deeply about the outcome for reasons other than money, or your own liability, or being potentially scapegoated. Caring for existential reasons, not commercial ones.
Soul in the game is incompatible with mazes. Mazes will eliminate anyone with soul in the game. Therefore, if the people you work for have soul in the game, you’re safe. If you have it too, you’ll be a lot happier, and likely doing something worthwhile. Things will be much better on most fronts.
In general I worry that the advice you are giving is phrased too confidently. This quote about soul in particular stood out to me. I have a few friends who have worked for big hierarchical non-profits, and their experience seems to contradict it. Plenty of people who do seem pretty passionate about ‘the cause’ and yet lots of dysfunction, bureaucracy, office politics, metric-gaming, etc. Maybe these problems didn’t rise to the level of a true moral maze, or maybe the people weren’t actually passionate but really were just posturing. But maybe not, and at any rate how do you tell at a glance?
Overconfidence is a reasonable thing to worry about. This in particular, that finding people with soul makes you safe, does seem likely to be too strong a claim. It certainly greatly helps your odds, versus the alternative. But yes, it does seem plausible that some passionate people surviving could be compatible with remarkably high maze levels, especially if those people provide good out-facing looks or are willing to do absurd levels of grunt work for low pay as a result of their passions.
One key is that this asks about the people you work for, not the people you work with. That’s an important distinction. Mazes are fine with object-level workers having passion, and even prefer it, since they’ll work harder and more reliably for less pay, and complain less, and so on.
In general I worry that the advice you are giving is phrased too confidently. This quote about soul in particular stood out to me. I have a few friends who have worked for big hierarchical non-profits, and their experience seems to contradict it. Plenty of people who do seem pretty passionate about ‘the cause’ and yet lots of dysfunction, bureaucracy, office politics, metric-gaming, etc. Maybe these problems didn’t rise to the level of a true moral maze, or maybe the people weren’t actually passionate but really were just posturing. But maybe not, and at any rate how do you tell at a glance?
Overconfidence is a reasonable thing to worry about. This in particular, that finding people with soul makes you safe, does seem likely to be too strong a claim. It certainly greatly helps your odds, versus the alternative. But yes, it does seem plausible that some passionate people surviving could be compatible with remarkably high maze levels, especially if those people provide good out-facing looks or are willing to do absurd levels of grunt work for low pay as a result of their passions.
One key is that this asks about the people you work for, not the people you work with. That’s an important distinction. Mazes are fine with object-level workers having passion, and even prefer it, since they’ll work harder and more reliably for less pay, and complain less, and so on.
Even if they were posturing and not truly passionate, that leaves the question of how to tell from the outside before entering an organization.