025: Competing to Win with Dan Rust

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, thanks so much for appearing on the “How to be Awesome at Your Job” podcast.

Dan Rust
It’s great, Pete. I’m happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I really enjoyed your Twitter mini-bio, that you are a workplace provocateur.  Can you tell us what exactly does that mean?

Dan Rust
Well, I guess in the in the past I’ve always been the person who tends to be comfortable addressing the elephant in the room or the issues that no one else is really comfortable talking about.  Or sometimes, at least in my perspective is, people just need to be shaken up a little bit, so I like to…

I’m never a jerk, I’m never mean, but sometimes it’s nice to just present things and talk about things in a way that wakes people up, either through humor or borderline sarcasm, not too much but a little bit of sarcasm.  And so I guess provocateur in my mind is someone who provokes and hopefully what I’m provoking is positive, but inevitably provoking thought, no matter what.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely.  And I saw you had a provocative blog post recently, “Is it okay to say ‘boobies’ at work?”  Where’s the jury on that one?

Dan Rust
A couple of HR departments where they came out was “No”.

Pete Mockaitis
That was my guess, that was my guess.

Dan Rust
And not even okay to write about it, not even okay to ask the question.  And the ultimate intent of that post, of that article, was more what are the standards of… Behavior standards of language and how real can we be?

And not that I expect that what we say or how we say it at work is going to be as casual as what we say it in some other environment, like a social environment, but I do think sometimes we get so careful in the work environment that we scrub our communication, we scrub our personalities and it’s almost like we check a part of ourselves at the door, that we come to work, we do our job, and then when we leave then we pick up that real part of ourselves.

And unfortunately I think that that oftentimes leads to less productive employees; you wonder why aren’t people as engaged as we’d like them to be.  Well, maybe part of it is they don’t feel like they can truly bring their full selves to the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
That resonates with me, and indeed we had Dr. Todd do it back in Episode 13, he said some of those same messages associated with being able to reveal a little bit more of yourself and how that really goes along way with folks.

Dan Rust
And of course you never want to overtly offend somebody or overtly be crass, obviously not.  But at the same time I do think we’ve entered an age where people are a little thin-skinned when it comes to workplace communication.  And it’s amazingly easy for someone to decide, “Ooh, I’ve been offended, I’ve been wronged.  And you are the source of me being wronged and you shall be corrected”.

Pete Mockaitis
You shall be, that’s the dance.  So, we could probably talk back and forth about that for quite a while, but you’ve got a wealth of seems like some real useful actionable strategies and tactics encapsulated in your book, Workplace Poker: Are You Playing the Game, or Just Getting Played.  And so I’ve got several questions about that, but do you want to kind of lay that metaphor out for us upfront?  What’s up with the Workplace Poker title?

Dan Rust
Well, I’ll do that, Pete.  I’m a little concerned because I’ve followed your blog, I’ve read your blog and your overall purpose is to help people get better at their jobs and help people do better work and become really good at their jobs, which is fantastic, absolutely taking nothing away from that.

But the essence of Workplace Poker, the book and the overall, I guess, mindset behind it is that you can do a great job, you can have fantastic skills and keep honing your skills getting better and better and better and better, and still not achieve the level of professional growth, the career acceleration that you’re hoping for, that you’re striving for.

And then sometimes as you’re pushing, pushing, pushing almost like a hamster on a hamster wheel, you get frustrated when you look at others who don’t seem to as skilled, who don’t seem to be working as hard, or in other ways just aren’t earning it the way you feel you’re earning it, and some of their career trajectories take off.

And until you peel it apart and begin to analyze why does that happen, it can drive people nuts.  You can start to feel like it’s just not fair.  The world isn’t fair, work isn’t fair, and then you lose your motivation to keep improving your skills, because who wants to do that?  It’s like the ultimate insane asylum.  “I keep trying to get better, but other people who maybe aren’t trying as hard as I am, seem to be doing better.  Well, what’s up with that?”

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, it’s a good thing we’ve got you to fill in the gaps.

Dan Rust
Well, the way I generally introduce it as a concept for people is that I talk about two different dynamics in the workplace – the co-operative dynamic and the competitive dynamic.  And the co-operative dynamic is one that everyone’s comfortable talking about –we want you to be a team player, we want you to work well with others, we want you to help people, we want other people to help you, and we want us to be in this together.

So that’s why you see so many motivational posters, “There’s no ‘I’ in team”, “We always need to be rowing in the same direction”.  You don’t see any posters that say, “There’s no team in promotion”, but in reality there is no team in promotion.

Pete Mockaitis
No, there’s no ‘A’ or ‘E’.

Dan Rust
We give promotions to a person, an individual.  So who do we decide to give a promotion to, or decide to, in some other way highlight?  And there does come a point in time where there is a competitive dynamic at work, and that competitive dynamic exists every single day, along with the co-operative dynamic.

Even though we like to say a business is like family or should be like a family, it’s not, business is not family.  I don’t know of any families where someone comes to you one day and says, “You know, we’ve been re-evaluating our priorities, and I’m sorry, little Bobby, but we’re just going to have to let you go”.

Pete Mockaitis
Poor Bobby.  What’s he going to do?

Dan Rust
Yes.  So we have to accept the reality, and it’s not bad.  I think part of what happens is people, when I start talking like this, they start to feel like, “Oh no!  That’s awful”.  No, it’s not.  Business is not family, there is a competitive aspect to employment.

And in fact I heard a great story a while back where a lady that I met, she was telling me that she had a roommate in college, who was not the greatest student.  The lady I was talking to was a 4.0 student and she’d done really well.  They both were accounting majors and when they were seniors and they begin interviewing for serious jobs toward the end of their senior year, the lady that I was speaking with – her name is Megan – she said that she was interviewing for some of the same jobs her roommate was, and in the end they both got nice jobs but she said she was surprised because her roommate landed a really sweet job with a great company where it was clearly growing, there was lots of growth potential.

And she didn’t think too much about it, it was a little annoying.  She even said, “I wondered what did she do to get that job beyond justgood interviews?”  But theykind of went their separate ways and years later – 5,6,7 years later – they reconnected and they started spending a little bit of social time together and one evening they were at the apartment of the woman who hadn’t been such a great student.

And what Megan was noticing was that the apartment was really nice, furnishing’s really nice.  It was just very clear that the last 6 or 7 years had been really good to her.  And as they began sharing stories about what’s going on with their work, it was clear to Megan that her roommate not only had landed a great job but it had a lot of growth potential.

And Megan was doing okay, but not nearly as well.  And at a certain point, the way she told it to me, she said they’d had a couple of glasses of wine, they were relaxed, they’d done a few things in the last few weeks so they were kind of okay with each other, and she finally just said, “You know, I’ve got to ask what happened.  How did you land that job?”

And the roommate – her name was Janelle – she said, “Well, let me show you something”.  And she went to a closet, she brought out a portfolio that she had used in their job interviews and it was a portfolio where Janelle had taken records from her days as a Girl Scout where she was selling cookies and she had won some awards for cookie sales and she had kept a spreadsheet from back then of her cookie sales.

And then when she was on the swim team,she had a spreadsheet of how she tracked her time and how that helped her improve.  And then she had documentation from some of the social clubs that she was part of in college.

And to make a long story short she had a 2-inch binder that she’d created which highlighted all kinds of things that she had done that were relevant to the position she was going after.

And the point of the story though came next, because Megan said to her, “Well, this is great.  Why didn’t you share this with me then?”  And Janelle said, “Well, to be honest you’re the reason I put this together ‘cause I knew I was going to be interviewing at some of the same companies and if I’m going to be competing against 4.0 Megan, which is what we called you behind your back then, I knew I needed to have something.  So this was my leverage, this was my way to compete”.

And the lesson Megan took away from that was, “Man, you know, even with someone who you think is…”  They were roommates, they swapped boyfriends, they were as close as you could expect young women to be, and yet there was still a competitive aspect, when push comes to shove.

And so what I tell people is, “It’s not bad, it is human nature”.

Pete Mockaitis
|I see.  Well, that’s a… I actually really appreciate that story ‘cause I thought, “Oh man, Dan, where is this going to go?  Is it going to be like there’s a dark turn of, Janelle stabs her in the back 4.0 Megan?”

But no, Janelle just did a fine job of documenting every accomplishment throughout her life trajectory along the way, and that’s just a good best practice.  So that’s encouraging to hear is that you’re not advocating, “Take him out at the knees” but rather, “Be smart, get your act together and make sure that you’re shining in the best light possible”.

Dan Rust
Well, and I even had the CEO of a company read the book and he came back to me and he said, “You know,I would feel great if everyone in my company read this, because when you look at the accumulated set of practices, they’re all positive, they’re all ethical, they’re actually all really good habits for people to have, even the habits of self-promotion”.

I have a whole chapter on self-promotion, which when people hear that term, you think Donald Drumpf, blowhard, you think P.T. Barnum, you think someone tooting their own horn.  And yet, in reality in the workplace, if someone is tooting their own horn too loudly in a way that’s not realistic, not fair, not accurate, it actually works against them.

The worst thing you can be in the workplace is someone who is known as a self-promoter, or known as a horn tooter, because the moment you kind of get flagged as that, what people will do without ever saying it – number one, they’ll discount what they do hear about you, so when they hear good things or they hear you say good things, they immediately chop off 50% of the validity because they assume you’re overdoing it or overstating it.

But secondly, people will actually work against you; they won’t mention your name when something comes up in conversation.  They may actively keep you on the sidelines or not involve you in projects because they feel like you’ll suck up all of the credit if the project goes well, and if it doesn’t go well you’ll be one of those people who quickly scurries toward the door to make sure you don’t get hanged with an unsuccessful project.

So instead what I did is, I reached out to people who I knew were effective self-promoters who didn’t have that reputation.  And I wanted to know, how do you do it?  What are some of the subtle ways that you promote your work, that you highlight your capabilities?

And the portfolio is one great example, particularly if you are interviewing for jobs.  But even if you’re not interviewing for jobs, if you come into a performance review at the end of the year and you actually have documented the key things that you’ve done from January all the way forward.

The way it really works for most managers, they get to December or January and they’ve got to do these annual performance reviews and it’s overwhelming, they just don’t….And I get it, everyone’s busy, they’ve got a lot of stuff going on.  Nobody remembers January or February of the previous year.  But if you come in and you have documented reminders of projects that you’ve worked on, things that you’ve done, even it can be as simple as if put a little extra time into a PowerPoint presentation back in January, either printing it out or having it available so that you can remind whoever is giving you your performance review of the key things that you’ve done.

It’s amazing how much power that has, and you’re much more likely to get… If either bonuses are being allocated or raises are being allocated.  If you can go from getting a 3% raise to a 4.5% raise, that may not seem like a lot but if you do that every year for 5 years or 10 years, that accumulated difference can be significant.

And more important than just those dollars, by highlighting your contributions, I think it reinforces in your manager’s mind that you’re a player, you are someone who’s bringing your A-game to the table as opposed to the person who comes in and sits down and is perfectly fine but basically is expecting the manager to drive the discussion and to remember everything.  And it’s not bad, it just isn’t as effective as you taking charge.  Most managers really appreciate that you’re putting in the heavy mental work ‘cause they have a lot of other things to be focusing on.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that reminds me of something we heard from Kara Eschbach in Episode 18.  I guess I’m self-promoting there too.  [laughter] I’m a quick study, Dan.  Thank you.  But she was talking about in the performance review cycles indeed you also want to get some kind of a leg-up or some advanced notice going out there, because sometimes by the time you sit down and talk about the document, it may be too late.

So, I’m loving that idea of presenting those things at performance review, but even more so, figuring out the timeline associated with who’s talking what about your performance and ensuring it gets to those people at the right time.

Dan Rust
Absolutely.  If you know the culture in your business is, the “performance review” is actually the point where we just tell you what we’ve decided, then you’ve got to back that up and know when are those decisions being made and essentially create your pre-performance review engagement, whatever that might be, whatever the right timing might be.

I also spoke with a guy who said that when he was laying out his various projects for the year, he always… Because January was performance review time, he always made sure that he had some kind of a high-profile project that was likely to generate some positive recognition in November and December, because he wanted…

If you do your best work in January, a year later no matter how good it was, it just loses some of its “oomph”.  So he said this had been part of his strategy for over 5 years, where when they were laying out their objectives for the coming year and the various things he was going to work on, he always tried to think of something that was going to be kind of a high-impact, quick-hit project that knew he could do it, he knew he could complete it, he knew it was going to be a little bit different and get some recognition.

And again, it was something he had never shared that strategy with anyone until he and I started talking.  And even when we were initially talking, he was hesitant because I think a lot of the non-obvious self-promoters are not exactly comfortable acknowledging that they have these strategies, but they do have them.  He did say eventually, “The thing is, this isn’t going to work for me if everyone in my business starts doing it”.  And we agreed, but in the end he allowed me to use the particular technique, or include it as one of the self-promotion tips.

Another thing I heard from a lady was… Again, these are subtle things that can be used every week, sometimes every day.  They’re not the big, huge blow-out ideas.  But she said to me she noticed a while back that some people, when it comes to business meetings or conference calls or webinars, when you’ve get your team together, she said most people are not comfortable stepping forward sharing a distinct new idea.

She said most people, if you watch carefully, what they’re comfortable doing is either echoing someone else’s idea or refining someone else’s idea.  So she said, “I noticed that if I had a new idea that I shared, or a particular perspective that I shared, it was amazing how often then throughout the meeting people would say, ‘Well, like she said…’, ‘I think this is good and we should do this’”.

And she recognized early on that the person who really gets credit is the person who initiates the thought.  Even if it’s a thought that people ultimately don’t agree with, being the person who steps forward and initiates is a much better self-promotion strategy than just saying, “Yeah, I agree with what she said, and maybe we can improve it in this way”.

And it was such a subtle thing,but then I started watching in my world of work, and she was absolutely right.  The self-promoters, the effective ones, were people who put themselves on the line a little bit, and it didn’t even always have to be an idea that people jumped onboard and said, “Oh, that’s great”.

Sometimes being the person who’s willing to share a thought or an idea, and in the end everyone goes, “Yeah, you know what?  Thanks, probably not going to work for us” – and then we move on – you still are better off in terms of self-promotion, and you’re better off than the other three or four people who picked your idea apart, ‘cause anyone can pick an idea apart.  It’s the one who’s willing to at least put it forward in the first place that gets a little bit of subtle self-promotion credit.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.  And I think if you can just let it go with humility and grace as well, you get some extra points.

Dan Rust
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Fair enough.  I think they got that.  Thank you.

Dan Rust
And have that sense of how much to defend your idea, because you don’t want your idea just to die because of a misunderstanding, or because people don’t get it, but at a certain point, once you realize, “Okay, they do get it.  I’ve communicated it clearly and it’s just not working, it’s not resonating”.  You let it go and you let it go graciously, and then sometimes you decide strategically, “I’m letting it go but I’m putting it back in my pocket because I think there’s a reason to do this, but I’m going to be sensitive about how I bring it up next time.

‘Cause you don’t want to be perceived like a dog with a bone who just won’t… Oh, man.  “Every meeting, the moment we mention X, we can count on hearing Y and Z from him, or Y and Z from her”.

And you can’t just say, “I’m not going to play politics because it’s distasteful”.  Well, it’s kind of like sitting at a poker table – your chips are on the table, someone’s putting your chips in the pot every hand – like it or not your chips are going away.  You can’t just sit there and fold your arms and say, “Well, I’m not going to play”.  The game…

Pete Mockaitis
…will eat you alive.

Dan Rust
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
You talk about the strategic piece in terms of how you invested your time and energy and when you’re putting forth the idea.  And I like that “November” idea as well, because in a way we can endure kind of a sprint for a short period of time, so long as we know there’s a little bit more relaxed or downtime coming, and so you can even kind of plan that in your calendar with your family and such, like, “Hey, let’s not plan any big trips or anything over the weekends in November, ‘cause I’m really making some moves on this thing”.

So, I like that, but in your book you suggested that you have some perspective on how to go about achieving the high energy, both mental and physical, necessary to drive an exceptional career trajectory.  I am always craving more energy, so Dan, what do you have for us there?

Dan Rust
Well, so I should first say in the chapter on energy, in terms of actual tips and strategies, there’s probably nothing new there that many or most of us haven’t heard before, but when I try…

Pete Mockaitis
Are you telling me I should put my phone down an hour before bed?

Dan Rust
You probably should, and you’ve probably heard that 14 times before, and you should drink more water, and you should have more fiber, and you should exercise more, and you should take time to dial down, all of those things.  And so you have to ask yourself, why don’t people do it then?

And that’s the real value in the chapter, is understanding if there are these things that you know you should be doing and you’re not, well, let’s get some clarity around why you’re not and then what the cost of that is.  Because when you can finally help someone see, here is what that extra 20 pounds is actually costing you, not just in terms of energy but in terms of your personal brand and the way you’re perceived, in terms of your mental acuity.

And I share a fair number of stories of people who have faced the hard truth of what it’s costing them in terms of the low energy, the low mental energy, emotional energy,physical energy.  Because I find when I talk to people one-on-one about these issues related to workplace politics, human dynamics and the thinking and engagement required to do it well, one of the common responses is, “Oh man, I don’t want to work that hard.  It’s hard enough just to do my job.  You mean I have to do my job and I have to think about all of this?”

And it floored me until I began to think about it more deeply and realized what they’re really saying is that they don’t have the mental energy to do all of this.  And yet the people who I have met who really do this very well and very naturally, they would say to you it doesn’t really require that much more.  Maybe a little more mental energy.

But really you can sit in a business meeting and you can mentally check out because you’re bored, or you can mentally engage but only at the surface level and make sure you’re reading the PowerPoint slides, or you can engage more deeply and read the PowerPoint slides, listen to the presentations and watch the people and how they’re interacting with each other, and over time develop that baseline understanding of who does what in what way.

Because one of the keys for reading people in the workplace is not trying to be like a carnival trickster, where you instantly read someone and you instantly know everything about them.  No, the real key is to over time observe what people are like, who shows up on time for meetings, who shows up late, who doesn’t show up, how do they communicate.  And I list a whole bunch of things in the book.

And essentially by noticing these things you develop a baseline and you get a deeper understanding of who people are, how they communicate, and you’re able then to notice when that baseline changes.  The person who used to never share in meetings, who suddenly starts piping up and sharing his thoughts or ideas, or vice versa, or other ways that the baseline is changed.  The person used to greet you warmly, who now is just sort of flat.All of those subtleties.

I had a lady talk to me 3 weeks ago.  She said that she’d been suddenly laid off and it was a complete shock, there was absolutely no way to have predicted it, except after she read the book and she’d been thinking she realized that for 2 months there had been a change in the behavior of certain people, and she’d just noticed it in the way she was being treated in the projects that she was being assigned in the work.

But it was only in hindsight that she said, “Oh,I realize now what was happening is they had had a contraction in the business, they were looking to reduce costs and they had to eliminate a number of highly compensated positions, hers included.  And she said, “Now as I look back, I probably could’ve seen it coming sooner, which would’ve given me 2 months more time to look for new work, or might have given me time to sell myself better internally, if I’d been paying closer attention”.

So I do think that when people develop or have the energy, both physical and mental and emotional to focus on these things in the workplace, in the end it becomes almost like just a natural part of you and doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything extra.

But I would say the one thing that’s most mentally draining for people in the workplace is the judgments that they place on other people.  When you decide that so-and-so is a jerk, or you decide on the positive side – so-and-so has my back, so-and-so is my colleague or my buddy, my friend, or this person is incompetent, or this person is abrasive and insensitive, it’s very difficult to read people well if you’re judging them at the same time.

And one of the metaphors that I use in the book is I use Jane Goodall as an example.  And if you remember Jane Goodall, in the ‘70s and ‘80s she did the studies of chimpanzees and other apes, and she was an observer in the wild.  What she was known for was getting very close to chimpanzee colonies, but then simply sitting and observing.

And if you read her journals, she observed and noted some really horrendous behavior – along with really good behavior as well, and intelligent behavior – but she observed killing, stealing the children of other chimpanzees, killing the children of other chimpanzees, the chimpanzee version of rape.

But all of it was dutifully noted and objectively described without judgment.  And I’m not saying in the workplace we should view each other as apes, but if you notice that someone has this tendency to just be abrasive no matter what, whether there’s a disagreement or not, he’s just abrasive.

Rather than judge him, step back and ask better questions and try to discern what drives that, what might drive that.  You may get the answer, you may not.  But by setting the judgment aside, you’re much more likely to actually see him and crack his code a little bit, than if you’re just saying, “Man, what a jerk.  I don’t want to ever have to deal with him if I can help it”.

But also the same is true on the positive side.  When you start deciding, “I’m really impressed by this person, I can really trust this person, I’m really attracted to this person”, you start to lose some of your objectivity as well.  And I’m not saying you can’t have critical or positive assessments of people.  All I’m saying is, in terms of reading them, the biggest skill and the toughest thing for some people in terms of mental energy is the energy required to set your emotions aside for a bit, and to set your judgement aside for a bit.

When you can do it and just observe the chimpanzees in the corporate setting, it’s amazing what you see and how the real world of work opens up for you.

One good example, I have a colleague who I know, he taps his pen… I figured it out a while ago, he taps his pen on the table when he’s thinking about something.  When someone has said something and he’s thinking, he doesn’t do it loudly, it’s just the little tapping thing.

And once I realized, “Okay, that’s like your thinking finger, or your thinking pen.  And when that’s moving I know you’re processing something”.  It’s a little thing, but it’s just cool then to realize, “Okay, I’ll watch him in a presentation”.  And there’ll be nothing, nothing, nothing, and then suddenly something will pop up on a slide and his little pen will start to tap ever so slightly.  And I’ll realize whatever was on there, it grabbed him and he’s still processing it even as the presentation moves on.

So it helps me read what’s grabbing him and also helps me read what’s boring him.  And over time, you just learn to notice more and more of those little ticks that help you crack the code of the individuals in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun.  Thank you.  And so, I’m thinking to the energy point.  If I’m hearing you correctly, you’re saying there’s that game underneath the game.  It requires a little bit of extra mental energy, but most people don’t feel they can spare it, therefore even a tiny upgrade to your energy can have dramatic impacts on your career trajectory.  Is that a fair synopsis?

Dan Rust
It is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  Well, thank you for that.  I think we could go on for many minutes, but in the interest of having a reasonable episode length, I might just ask is there anything you really want to make sure we cover before be kind of shift gears and move into the fast faves?

Dan Rust
Yeah, I think the one thing I want people to know more than anything else is Workplace Poker, the book, is about so much more than just office politics.  That seems to be the sexy part that grabs people’s attention, and it’s an important part.  But it really is all about human dynamics in the workplace, both the external dynamics with others and the internal dynamics with yourself – how do you deal with disappointment, how do you deal with failure.  And it’s all designed to help someone accelerate their career trajectory, and hopefully when things do go wrong, to recover more quickly and to move on and keep moving upward as rapidly as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Great, thank you.  Alright, well let’s kick it off.  Could you share with us a favorite quote, stuff that you find inspiring?

Dan Rust
Favorite quote of all time is, “If you’re committed enough and creative enough, there’s always a way”.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or a piece of research or experiment you cite often?

Dan Rust
Well, the most recent one is, there was research done that indicated that executives who have a negative attitude toward office politics and personal dynamics in the office, over the course of their career earn 22% less than executives who have a positive attitude toward it.

It had nothing to do with competency, it was simply, “How do you think about this in the workplace?”  So I think just adjusting how we think about human dynamics in the workplace, clearly it has an impact not only on our success, but on our income.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating.  And 22 is my number.  Do you know who did that or we can find that?

Dan Rust
It was a Frontline Learning survey and it’s available at the Frontlinelearning.com website.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.  And how about a favorite book?

Dan Rust
There’s a book that’s out of print, but I think it’s still available online in a Kindle version.  The book is called Mastery, the name of the author is George Leonard.  It is a small book, a quick read, but it is a great book that focuses on how do people truly get better at complex skills over time.

‘Cause what happens to a lot of people is, they’ll start working on something and then they’ll feel like, “I’m not getting better, I’m not getting better, I’m not getting better”.  But in fact they are getting better.  It’s just that they’re getting better at such a subtle level, it takes a while before they suddenly see a burst of improvement, whether it’s playing the guitar or practicing a martial art or learning a particular human skill.

I read this book 20 years ago and what I took away from it is the sense that, okay, decide the important things to learn and keep working on them even if you’re not seeing external evidence of getting better.  Keep working, keep working, because you are getting better and it’ll take a while before that burst of external evidence comes out.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.  And how about a favorite website or online resource?

Dan Rust
Okay, I just have to say Workplacepoker.com is a great resource where I’m constantly posting the latest research, latest examples, interesting ideas, all dedicated toward“the game after the game”.  How do you help people accelerate their careers by playing the human dynamics game?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, noted.  And a favorite tool or gadget, software or trick?

Dan Rust
Evernote is something where I can always quickly capture things and always then have those available on all of my various technology screens.

Pete Mockaitis
Great.  How about a favorite truth bomb or nugget, something you’ve shared gets Amazon highlighted, re-tweeted, nods …

Dan Rust
Workplace politics is a lot like sex – if it’s making you or others uncomfortable, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.  You’re a workplace provocateur. [laughter]  And how about an ideal way to find you?

Dan Rust
Again I’d say Workplacepoker.com.  That’s how you found me – you went to the site and we make it really easy on every page just to reach out to me directly.  So I’m on LinkedIn, I’m happy to connect with anybody on LinkedIn.  I’m a, what do they call it… I’m an undiscerning LinkedIn connector – you want to connect with me, I’m happy to connect with you.  And Workplacepoker.com

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a kind of a final parting word or challenge or call to action you’d like to leave folks with?

Dan Rust
Yeah, I would say make it fun.  That’s the other thing that was really important to me with the book, is that this whole topic can become kind of dour, ‘cause people talk about how they were wronged, and all the various hard stuff or challenging stuff that they faced.

And I like to keep it light and fun and amusing, even though we’re talking about a serious thing and even though being taken advantage of or being wronged in the workplace can feel tough sometimes.  Just keep it light, because I think most of us are much better off, much more productive, much more effective, we learn better.  Everything’s better when we can just keep it light and fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.  Well, Dan, thank you so much.  It’s been a real treat having you, and I wish you all the best of luck here.

Dan Rust
The feeling is totally mutual.  Thanks, Pete.