Respect is earned by suffering in silence
A CEO's midnight shifts are now seen as a mark of character, not just necessity.
The story
Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi worked overnight as a dorm receptionist to fund her Yale degree, and claims this earned her respect due to her hard work.
Source: fortune.com
Our reading
Nooyi worked from midnight to 5 a.m. as a dorm receptionist to pay for her Yale degree, and she says people respected her more for it. It’s not that she was a better student or manager because of the shift, but that she had the stamina to endure it. The idea that working through the night makes you more worthy of respect is a strange one, but it fits neatly into the myth that success is earned through suffering, not skill.
Her story implies that respect is not given to people who work hard, but to people who work hard in ways that are visible and inconvenient. If she had just worked a daytime job, would she have been seen as less committed? Maybe. Maybe the real test was not the work itself, but the fact that it happened when no one else was around.
Now she’s on Amazon’s board and has a $340 million net worth. The same people who respected her for working through the night probably don’t know what to do with someone who no longer needs to.
