johnnyx9 wrote:
Well in Montauk's book he says that about one in ten sabotage either with an outright "Don't admit this person," type warning, or with faint praise like, "Well they manage to show up on time once in a while, and they seem to be really good at the internet so I would consider that their main strength."
So if one in ten recommendations does this, then like I was saying, that means one in five (assuming most people need two recommenders) people are being sabotaged. It's awesome that a lot of you have recommenders who showed you what they wrote, so I guess that means that for those who don't know what their recommenders wrote, the odds of being sabotaged are probably even slightly higher than 20% ??
I'm not really this paranoid, I'm sure Montauk could be wrong, or maybe his definition of "sabotage" is a little more benign than what I take it to mean.
I gave a pretty solid rough draft to both my recommenders and I assume they tweaked it a bit, but as gogetter said, you're still always going to be curious.
I think his definition of sabotage is not writing a bad rec per se - though that would certainly qualify - I think he means that sabotage is occasionally unintentional. People write lukewarm non-specific recs that says things like "John is quite capable as an analyst. He consistenly completes work on time as assigned. He is always willing to help more and asks for more work. The quality of his work is also very strong." rather than saying "John is an exceptional individual who proactively identifies needs early, develops innovative and well thought out strategic solutions on his own and completes tasks with a caliber and efficiency I've rarely encountered in my twenty years of professional experience."
It's the difference between "good" and "exceptional" between "strong" and "oustanding" between "valuable" and "unique".