The One Thing You Should Never Bring To Work

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Sure, you should probably leave the firearms, illegal substances and salmon steak with kimchee and durian relish that you planned to heat up in the office microwave at home, but the real contraband that should never make it across the workplace threshold? Your ego.

There's no room for ego in an entry-level job. None. Learn as much as you can, find opportunities to flaunt your skills, become an avid student of human behavior, but be pragmatic about your place in the corporate solar system.  Seems like a simple lesson (the first few years of your career constitute an eight-hour-a-day test, FYI), but the hilariously haughty and utterly off-base email from a former lifeguard to his old boss published by Deadspin shows that not all young ladder climbers have grasped this logic. And while this dude takes high dudgeon douchery to a new level, I see plenty of entry-level peers who struggle to strike a balance when it comes to figuring out how much of their on-the-job interactions to take personally and how much to write off as typical professional white noise. At one end of the spectrum, you have folks like our lifeguard friend who are so convinced of their own greatness that they can't conceive of anyone else not being suitably impressed by it. If there's a problem, it's clearly the job (or their coworkers, boss, industry, etc.) and not them. At the other, you have tentative tenderfeet who take any critical feedback as a direct reflection on their skills and ability. Having to redo a PowerPoint pres from scratch kills a little bit of their soul. Without a daily dose of praise, they'll simply shrivel up and die, y'all.  Both reactions are ego-driven and call for a dose of perspective.

To discover that you're likely starting out as little more than a cog in the corporate wheel is a humbling and uncomfortable realization, especially if you've previously tripped through life thinking of yourself as the star of a movie playing only in your mind, or graduated magna cum laude with a major in idealism.  But it's also oddly liberating. A single mistake on your part likely isn't going to sink your career (although your snotty correspondence going viral could put the kibosh on your BMW internship) or drive the company into bankruptcy. The trick is accepting that it's not about you…except when it is. And then figuring out how to tell the difference between the two and letting the former go, while working to overcome the latter without lashing out or lapsing into self-pity.

Don't worry,  the parsing eventually gets easier, especially if you spend eight hours a day practicing. Until then, save the indignant emails for your mom.

Thanks to J. Maureen Henderson / Blogs Forbes