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“The life so short, the craft so long to learn.”

Hippocrates

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• I once wrote this:

“And, let’s face it, I don’t care who you are and where you have worked you have eyed what another person is doing and thought you could do it. At some point, if you have had some success, all jobs start having some commodity-like characteristics which tease you into believing shifting from one to another just isn’t that difficult.”

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So. Let’s go back in the wayback machine to November 2016. Trump was the president elect and a shitload of people were freaking out. The world was bifurcated by “he can’t do that job” and “of course he can do that job.” It’s as if half the world thought, well, anyone can do “this job” if they had some success doing another job. It became a lazy argument on one side and an incredibly complex argument on the other. Regardless. That argument failed because it was grounded in the wrong fundamentals. The truth, the reality, was Trump was not a good business man, he was a good salesman. Not to disparage salespeople, I’m just making a distinction. And he ‘sold’ enough people on whatever he was trying to sell (I thought it was weird because he was selling America was a shithole, but anyway …) to get a job he was supremely unqualified for.

And, if people were truly honest, he really sucked at being the president. He certainly, objectively, was not a calming leader who offered certainty to 330 million people on a daily basis nor did he produce results matching the “sales promises” he made (as noted earlier, economy was good, not great). He ran on crushing ISIS (which was 90% done by the time he came into office), build a border wall (he did send a shitload of money on 55 miles worth), created huge deficits through a tax cut which disproportionately benefited rich people like hm combined with huge subsidies to subsidize whole industries to compensate for a dull axe tariff strategy and, well, he mostly didn’t do anything constructive. For the most part he didn’t fulfill responsibilities of being a prescient, he didn’t act like a president, and made an American president the comedic punching bag of the world. So, when people tell us to calm down with regard to Trump, I think they are nuts. He didn’t do the job the first time and hi seriously doubt he will be able to do the job this time and, oddly, the price at this stage is higher. Why? Well. Everything is going pretty well for the United States at the moment. Economy great. Growth great. Employment great. And all of those things are a fragile complex weave of things. Do I believe the Biden administration crafted all the great things in a whole cloth fashion? Nope. The outcome, the good stuff, was partly good decisions, some good nudges, and a confluence of unplanned good events. But you know what? That is what knowing how to do a job works. You put yourself, and your country, in a good position to take advantage of emergent opportunities. That’s doing a good job. Trump never did that and he never will. He doesn’t have the vision to see patterns before they occur – he is too transactional. Basically, he can’t do the job of the presidency.

Anyway. I am saying we shouldn’t have calmed down then and we shouldn’t calm down now. He is still supremely unqualified, and he may actually be even less qualified now than then (I find it unqualifying in business if someone’s competency digresses over time).

Gays and LGBT and blacks and minorities and women do not need to calm down. While his agenda is not theirs, his agenda creates negative consequences and effect on theirs. Business leaders should be scared shitless and should not calm down. All immigrants, legal or illegal, should be scared shitless and should not calm down.

No one should calm down because Trump will continue use “loose lips sink ships” type of asshat rhetoric and will continuously create unneeded trouble for himself and the country and the citizens. And he will deserve the trouble, but the country and citizens deserve better.

But what makes him most unqualified not just as a present but also as a leader is the fact he bases all practical tactics and actions on hope. Yeah. Its kind of like trickle down economics; another hope concept. You do something and you hope something else happens so that it creates the outcomes you hope will occur. That last sentence is Trump in a nutshell.

He wasn’t very good at anything other than (a) playing victim, (b) absolving himself of any responsibility, (c) blustering and bloviating every day, and (d) creating chaos and uncertainty. He, and his administration, is amateur hour which is simultaneously funny and scary.
I had one delusional friend say in 2016 “don’t worry, there are so many things in place anyone could do the job.” That is fucking nuts, but I think a shitload of people actually think this. This is a dangerous cultural issue we face now. The commoditization of qualifications & competency. In today’s world there is a general concept that anyone can do any job as well as anyone else. We sit around bitching about decisions leaders make and say ‘we could make a better decision than that.’ It leads to a belief that certain skills don’t matter and qualifications, particularly if you can be called an ‘expert’, aren’t worth a shit. The consequences of this is real skills and qualifications are commoditized and no one can tell the difference between the qualified and the asshats. And once that becomes a non-issue those being evaluated by the larger public are considered equals in people’s eyes with regard to skill & competency. And, holy shit, what a fucking false equivalency that is whenever Trump is involved. He is a salesman. He is a carnival barker. He is not someone who can do the job of president.
Anyway.
Not anyone can do this job, we learned that lesson the hard way in 2016 and I worry we will have to relearn that lesson in 2024.

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“Being covertly spiteful with the intent of inflicting mental pain.”
Ashta-Deb

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I get asked for my thoughts all the time.

Literally.

All.

The.

Time.

I would say about 75% of the time I’m asked in good faith. What I mean by that is these 75% genuinely looking to improve or augment what they already think that they know. I thought about this for two reasons. The first was a recent piece JP Castlin offered where he discussed giving second opinions in business. Basically, it came down to fundamentals and the fact somebody who is offering the second opinion should be asking about assumptions rather than giving an opinion on a decision. That’s a truth I believe overlooked by far too many people who are either asked for thoughts or just give thoughts without being asked. The second reason is that other 25%. Yeah. The 25% who asked for thoughts in a passive aggressive way. What do I mean by that? You get forwarded an article, a thought piece, an image, and the only thing that’s attached to it is either ‘what do you think?’ or just the word ‘thoughts?’. It’s a trap. Let me just tell everyone who’s reading this; it’s a trap. And worse it’s a passive aggressive trap. The asker does not really want your thoughts, what they want to do is to tell you their thoughts and what you are missing and where you are wrong. Let me be clear. I love to hear other people’s thoughts, I love to hear if I actually miss something, and I love to be wrong, because every time any one of those three things happens I’m learning something new. But that’s not what is happening here in the passive aggressive situation. You are purposefully being asked in a way because they know, in general, you are gonna offer an answer or offer some thoughts or offer an idea which is going to be counter in some significant way or ‘a way’ that they’re gonna be able to make their point from what they already believe. Its passive aggressive, it’s annoying. However. It is indicative of an unfortunately large swath of people.

Which leads me to the underpinning issue of passive aggressive questioning.

So, yeah, well it would be easy to just call that 25% assholes but the reality is that they are representative of a larger societal issue. To be clear my 25% will have an incredibly high likelihood of having a high level of business experience, a broad level of business experience, and college education. I say that in combination with the word representative because if this 25% has the characteristics of what I would consider a shallow intellectual depth, on a larger scale there will be more of them. The underpinning is far too many people have rejected the discipline of the mind, of critical thinking, and the ability to be able to reexamine their beliefs and opinions. But they are sneaky in their lack of discipline. Sneaky in that they absorb external information, so they appear to be assimilating it into morphing views and attitudes. but they sift through all this information plucking out the proof points for their existing beliefs AND highlighting the things that make opposing views seem “absurd”. **

• ** note: those things are typically (a) without context or (b) reflective of some random event).

So, while they view trends and developments in the external world -economy, technology, social, culture – and they state they are important to follow, they don’t really allow it to directly or indirectly impact their views. They are really only observers of knowledge and not participating thereby not experiencing the connections and correlations which would create the traction for wisdom.  While they may seem to have an open mindset they actually have a more traditional mindset where they “feel” beliefs and focus primarily on the things that support their views rather than spending the time that they are watching the external world using it to inform their views. This was actually outlined by Philip Tetlock:

“Regardless of what side of the social intellect scale you reside on what you think isn’t really based on the level of Education or even actual experience instead it comes down to the way someone thinks. The ones who typically do amazingly badly with regard to how they think about things were those who believed that there was a big idea which explained everything world was simple and could be understood simply and that they could just stamp their big idea unto every situation. The ones who do well thinking through things were those who had no such big idea, who regarded the world as complex took their information from many different sources and were willing to be self critical and learn from mistakes. The key inevitably comes down to checking whether you were right or wrong. And even that is tricky because the majority of people seek out proof for what they predicted or thought rather than broad based information to check against it.”

I believe it was Jonathan Haidt who said when we are presented with evidence for or against a hypothesis, we ask ourselves one of two questions.

• When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves “can I believe it?” Then we search for supporting evidence and if we find even a single piece of pseudo evidence we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe.
• When we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves “must I believe it?” Then we search for contrary evidence and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it.

I believe this is called motivated credulity and motivated skepticism.

The incredibly sad thing is by rejecting the discipline of the mind people are corrupting the one tool which elevated us everyday schmucks to some intellectual rigor of thought. This rejection inevitably creates an almost purposeful disregard for common knowledge replacing it with the oft mis-placed and oft-misused common sense. If we are truly honest, a significant swath of society lacks the penetrating critical intellect needed to pierce some of the complex issues we face hiding behind “common sense.” A complex world increases a craving for a simplicity, for something to follow, and it chases anyone who feeds into the desire for simplicity with hollow simplistic rhetoric. The urge to chase is encouraged if there is an overall disenchantment with the culture of the country – decline of national spirit, disappointment in idealism defeated by some institutional realism and materialism in business. All only encourages people to double down on the accumulated burden of ideas and attitudes over a lifetime, and the growing up experience, which consequently very few people will ever get around even to questioning. We all grow up in the context of certain ideas, which create some attitudes and beliefs, and it is difficult for us to shake free of them. I admit all of that, I acknowledge all of that, but there are a shitload of people who do not. and, relevant to this piece, it seems like the more educated, and more experienced, the 25% passive aggressive asshats are, the less likely they are to see themselves in anything I have written. And that, my friends, is indicative of an unfortunately large swath of people in the world today. Ponder.