Mike Monteiro:
Very early in my career I was lucky enough to have a boss who gave me the gift of telling me I was a terrible employee. They didn’t mean it as a gift, of course, and to be honest, I didn’t recognize it as a gift at the moment. But it stuck with me, and in time I had to acknowledge that it was a correct assessment.
My boss at my first job after college did something similar to me: after a month and a half she told me she was supposed to “format new employees” (actual quote), and that I hadn’t been cooperating. The full story is a story for another time, but the short of it is that of course I quit that same day. Which was not her goal—her goal was to make everyone miserable under the immense weight of her incompetence. I also convinced myself I wasn’t a good employee—and I probably wasn’t, for some time. But it took me over a decade of being my own boss to learn how to be a decent, maybe even a good employee, but, to be clear, never one who’ll let anyone format him, whatever the hell that means.