I used to lose my shit at underpeforming co-workers all the time and then a more experienced guy pulled me aside and gave me a quote that was intended to do the same thing as Ram Dass's tree quote:

"Nobody comes to work to do a bad job."

What I realized that judging other people narrowed my vision so that I couldn't see any options. All I could see was that they were bad people who were going to hurt the project.

When I could hold off on personalizing other people's performance then I could start to spot other reasons and sometimes even figure out constructive solutions. Maybe the other person is not delivering the code I need because they were given competing priorities.

So, yeah, as you say, you still have to deal with these situations. I just found that I could see many more options for how to deal once I stopped being so judgmental.

If a man is crossing a river And an empty boat collides with his own skiff, Even though he be a bad-tempered man He will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the boat, He will shout at him to steer clear. If the shout is not heard, he will shout again, And yet again, and begin cursing. And all because there is somebody in the boat. Yet if the boat were empty. He would not be shouting, and not angry.

If you can empty your own boat Crossing the river of the world, No one will oppose you, No one will seek to harm you.

If you think someone would hold their tounge because their car got hot by an empty one, i got some youtube compilations to enlighten you.

> In practice, you deal with the unproductive employee, lying partner, etc. the same way you always have.

This is one option, but not the only one.

"When you go out into the office, and you look at the landscape, you see all these different employees. And some of them are highly productive and collaborative, and some of them are less so, and some of them are positive high-achievers, and some of them are whatever. And you look at each employee and you allow it. You see [or try to see] why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that they didn’t get enough love or understanding, and so they turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the person."

"The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."

I think what Ram is getting at in the last paragraph is something along the lines that, while we can engage with nature in an unassuming, open-minded way, doing the same with other humans is extremely difficult. Due to our lack of control over our own minds, they get up to all sorts of mischief, jumping to unfounded and epistemically unsound conclusions, feeding our conscience minds with a representation of the world that is largely a hallucination.

One way of dealing with this in the case of a problem employee, is to talk to them. Easier said than done though of course, because that process is subject to the very same problem, and others.

> In practice, you deal with the unproductive employee, lying partner, etc. the same way you always have.

> But it means you don't let it affect you emotionally in the same way.

“When the great doctor D. T. Suzuki was asked what is it like to be enlightened he said, ‘It’s just like ordinary everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.’”

— Alan Watts

Spot on! You shouldn't go to bed upset with that lazy/bullshitting coworker, yet you keep your healthy skepticism and protect yourself. And while you aren't "mad" at it, you don't pitch your tent beneath that dying, leaning tree with the exposed roots.