Sometimes, your service to the company consists of being thrown under the bus. The older I get, the more I find the prematurely cynical people I grew up around

Sometimes, your service to the company consists of being thrown under the bus. The older I get, the more I find the prematurely cynical people I grew up around had it half-right. And the naively, or ignorantly, or cluefully -- I still don't quite know which -- happy people I grew up around, had the other half of that right: Do your own thing, enjoy it as much as you can, and walk away from the negativity. Maybe if we could do enough of the latter, places like Marriott would never get the traction to step all over their employees. As for China, well, I'm a bit older. The people I met who got over here from China, tended not to go back. Take that as you will.