It’s the assholes who are focused on people—on controlling people—who make work miserable. Real assholes always make it personal. Their motivation is their ego, not the work. As long as they’re winning, they don’t give a shit about what’s happening to the product or what the customer has to deal with. These are the assholes who make it progressively more difficult to create something you’re proud of.

If you’re having trouble with an asshole, then typically you won’t be the only one exasperated. So find people who agree with you that this asshole has to go—talk to their peers, talk to HR. Find the right moment and talk to their boss—they’ll usually give you a nod and say they’re already doing something about it. It’ll probably take forever and be very messy, but hopefully they’ll either get off your project or entirely out of your life.

If that doesn’t work, you can try to transfer teams. But when you’re dealing with a real asshole, their reputation is probably well known in the company. If another team knows that taking you on will bring on the ire of the asshole in question, they might decide it’s not worth the hassle. I remember one instance where a person became a pariah—no other team wanted them, for fear that the losing manager would seek revenge.

I’ve seen way too many people come out of the corporate world, decide to start a company, and be completely unprepared for what it takes. If they’ve never been on a small team starting from scratch, they’re often a fish out of water. They spend too much money too fast. Hire too many people. Don’t put in the time, don’t have the startup mentality, can’t make hard decisions, are buried by consensus thinking. They end up making mediocre products or

nothing at all.

Don’t let that be your story. If you want to start a company, if you want to start anything, to create something new, then you need to be ready to push for greatness. And greatness doesn’t come from nothing. You have to prepare. You have to know where you’re headed and remember where you came from. You have to make hard decisions and be the mission-driven “asshole.” [See also: Chapter 2.3: Assholes: Mission-driven “assholes.”]

So do the work. Know what you’re getting into. Trust your gut.

And when the time comes, you’ll be ready.

When hiring, try to surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do. Genuine decency—an instinct for fairness and openness and mutual respect—is a rarer commodity in business than it should be, and you should look for it in the people you hire and nurture it in the people who work for you.

Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people. It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.

We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later you’ll become selfish. If you hang around someone who’s unkind, you’ll slowly become unkind. Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you.