I always felt sorry for anyone stuck with the job of managing me.

Toward the end of my career, my last manager seemed to be trying to ease me into management. He had me "lead" a couple of tiny, short-term projects.

On one of them, I was really busy with something else, so I just told the other guys, "Here's what we're trying to do," and let them go do it without me, while I worked on the thing I needed to get done. And in a few hours, they came back with the work entirely completed. I was able to go back to my manager and say, "Hey, those guys you asked to help me did the whole job for me! Here's what they came up with."

It was the first time I began to understand why someone might want to be a manager. But mostly, I'm sure being a manager would suck: Your entire success depends on other people doing work that you couldn't do yourself. Ugh.