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How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work, By Megan Hustad (B.A. '97) Houghton Mifflin (2008)

What could some musty old self-help manuals teach a laptop-toting, BlackBerry-punching professional about moving up in the 21st-century corporation? Plenty, says Megan Hustad (B.A. ’97), whose degree from the University of Minnesota is in history.

Former book editor Hustad dusted off stacks of classic advice tomes and found their instructions still valid. Human nature being what it is, today’s high-tech offices apparently aren’t all that different from workplaces in the late 19th-century, when steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie praised the value of can-do enthusiasm; or in the 1920s, when socialite Emily Post preached the importance of being a good conversationalist; or in the 1930s, when Dale Carnegie’s best-selling How to Win Friends and Influence People taught readers to get ahead by stroking the egos of their superiors.

Hustad’s How to Be Useful: A Beginner’s Guide to Not Hating Work is both an exploration of this potentially underappreciated publishing genre and an advice book in itself. Deploying a breezy tone and contemporary cultural references—including television’s The Office, Gawker.com, The Gap, and America’s Next Top Model—Hustad avoids scaring off modern readers while reiterating time-honored recommendations: listen, show optimism, keep your shoes polished and desk neat.

Among her dos and don’ts: “Don’t walk in the door with wet hair.” Instead, arrive looking prepared for the day—and get there before the boss does. “Do be careful whom you compliment,” because complimenting someone higher up “suggests you imagine yourself in a position to judge their performance.” And for goodness’ sake, don’t “just be yourself.” Rather, Hustad writes, heed the counsel of Andrew Carnegie: “Forget yourself, he essentially said, and maybe try being somebody else a few hours a day. Maybe somebody better than you.”

Speaking by phone from her home in Brooklyn, New York, Hustad explained why modern professionals should pay attention to success literature and what she learned from it herself.

How did you decide to write this book? I’d always had this guilty fascination with success literature. It’s something that I think a lot of people in my generation find sort of tacky and sort of suspect—intellectually, politically, and otherwise. I started reading this to see if I could address some of the problems I was facing—and some of the problems my friends were facing—in our jobs.

So it sounds like you went in with a pretty open mind, a sort of snark-free attitude about it. It seemed like, we can deconstruct it all day long, but we’re still suffering in our jobs. I thought of it as a literary salvage operation, reclaiming these materials for an audience that otherwise would never come to it.

If you look at the motivations of a lot of the people who were writing this, they were humanitarians in a profound way. Emily Post, Andrew Carnegie, even Steven Covey [author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People], they were really motivated by a sincere desire to help. There was nothing cynical about their projects when they wrote these books. I thought

Megan Hustad, PHOTO BY PETER ZANDER

that was quite relevant. I think it’s been a very cynical 10, 20 years. My generation was raised to be cynical and look askance.

Where does that attitude come from? I think part of it comes just from sheer exhaustion, spiritual exhaustion. Everywhere you walk, you’re being marketed to all the time. At some point you just have to shut down. You put your defenses up, and you take everything with a grain of salt. Because your next question is, “What are you trying to sell me?” You get this reflex.

You suggest that the best way for young professionals to advance their careers is to change the focus from presenting themselves as talented stars and, instead, to pitching in and being helpful and humble team players. Well, team players, yes. But I think it’s a little more complicated than that. You have to realize you’re ultimately performing. It’s an act. And you can be sincere at some things, but, you know, there’s a last chapter about how to get out [of your job]. That was certainly my goal: How can I do so well that I can ultimately leave office life?

Because the thing is, if you don’t succeed with the team, you can’t leave. You’re stuck. . . . So yeah, be a team player—but toward your own ends.

Where did the title come from? Useful probably isn’t the first word to spring to most people’s minds in terms of succeeding at work. I think there’s something very human about wanting to be of service to other people.

And also, there’s a theme that’s subtle throughout all these books, that you’re not going to be successful if you’re not doing something that’s of use to someone. You can have all these bright ideas, be selling amazing widgets, be doing work that’s so much more clever than anything that’s been done before, but if there’s no demand for what you’re offering it really doesn’t matter. If you’re not meeting someone’s needs, you’re not going to advance.

How do you predict success literature will hold up as the American workplace changes—for example, involving more telecommuters and contract workers, becoming more distance-oriented? If anything, greater distance will make things harder for people, because you’re not learning by osmosis by being in the same space as people and able to trade on the loyalties that come from sharing the same space. If you’re just sitting in your house somewhere, how are you going to communicate how valuable you are?

If you had to recommend one success book from the past 100 years, what would it be? The one I had the most fun reading, and that expanded my understanding, I wouldn’t have even thought to include. This guy said, you should really read Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl. And then I read it. First of all, it was just very funny. Really changed my mind about how even to think about who she was about. Because I had never read Cosmo in my life. But she actually has a very coherent philosophy about the things she had to do to get power for herself. Being a girl from the sticks, the wrong side of the tracks, literally, in a very male-dominated environment, is something that I think women my age can learn a lot from.

—Katy Read