To be gainfully employed is...

A rather challenging act to perform.

It's not just about having a job nor about the money that the job brings.

It is a constant juggle to balance our personal and professional lives.

I've shared with many people I encounter in my careers a personal attitude that may help reduce one's own stress in a work setting and be able to feel secure on and of our own: that work is just a vehicle for us to meet new friends and earn income to support our family.

Professionally, the level of quality of my output and my team's output is much less driven by our individual talents, but more about the principles we go by and use in our teamwork:

• Kanban: Just-in time (classic production understanding in manufacturing industry of what's now called Agile in the software industry).
• Kaizen: Continuous improvement; our work is never done, even when the output has shipped. This translates personally to set a goal where we can pace ourselves according to our health and ability and professionally to always understand that the best we deliver today should hopefully be better tomorrow.
• Gandhi engineering: A combination of irreverence toward established way with a scarcity mentality that spurns superfluities while at the same time maintaining consistency of applying the principles in play.
• Einstein tolerance: That can't be paraphrased, but simply understood in what Albert Einstein himself said: "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thoughts in clear form", to help us maintain composure in an adversarial environment. This also relates to what I wrote earlier in my post: The 道 of Writing, the sublime of Work Ethics...

A customer is NOT always right

1. If he is belligerent and makes my team and employees unhappy.

2. If a customer makes me choose between unreasonably serving his business or my relationship with good colleagues and employees. My employees come first. (This is along the line of: "If an employer makes me choose between unreasonably serving his business or my devotion to my family. My family comes first.)

3. If his business is bad for my business: we all have a finite amount of resources serving a customer that does not further our own goal. For example, serving a bad customer who takes so much more time and efforts where consequently we are unable to provide an equal or better time and service for a good customer, we'll have to say goodbye to the bad customer.

4. If he is unreasonable despite our best effort to serve him/his company with a good service, and that they have been receiving good attention and services.

5. If we happen to get a glimpse, somehow, that he doesn't treat {another person | his own employees | general public} fairly and with dignity as it is a telltale of what is to come for us as an outside vendor.