You can’t effectively go through your ooda loop at speed if you are constantly allowing yourself to go (or be pushed) into either child or parent mode.
Ergo, stay on your feet!! Don’t dive in.
Of course, your opponents will – consciously or unconsciously- try to interfere with your decision-making by scolding, pushing you off the adult role, and so hope to destroy your will to fight.
The obsession with fame is an interesting phenomenon. In a lazy kinda ill-thought-out speculative way I will say that now that the dream of salvation by God or Marx is gone (in Europe, if not everywhere else!), then the only way to live forever is… FAME.
Where you are plucked from obscurity to become a Star. Preferably “overnight”, courtesy Simon Cowell or whoever.
It’s a peasant belief, one that our lords and masters continue to inculcate.
They want you to continue as infants (1) , with the magical thinking of pre-adults.
And when 99.999% don’t make it? Well, that in no way undermines the technique. Constant disappointment is good (for the master) since it re-inforces individuals’ sense of helplessness, making it easier to sell them an external change agent, whether it’s the crucifix or the nike swoosh, mobile phones or whatever.
So, magic transformations do not happen.
Transformations CAN happen. But. Not. By. Magic.
What do you need?
Any vollies for that last one?
Footnotes
(1) I was going to use the term “infantilisation” but I realised that it implies having to push back, to regress – forcibly and forcefully – people who have (almost) achieved adulthood). Actually, it’s about maintaining/prolonging those infant ways. There are very few adults walking around. Where have all the good men gone?
In this life, you are rewarded for not having integrity, compassion, empathy etc.
If you defend your underlings (and the broader population they are supposed to serve – pupils, prisoners etc) against some stupid and damaging scheme that your boss has proposed, then your boss will say (or think) “You are not a ‘team player’ [obedient], and you are giving me problems instead of solutions. I am not going to promote you. Your days here are numbered.” While smiling at you and saying “that’s a very good point.”
So, say you want to get ahead; you swallow your pride/integrity/compassion. You screw people over. And promise yourself it’s a one-off, that you won’t do it again. You get a promotion. You have been rewarded for having cauterised your decency. And what is rewarded is repeated.
You have learnt that it is possible to do shitty things, and the broader organisation will generally protect you in doing them.
And your new boss, who has seen that you are willing to cut corners to “get the job done” etc, gives you a bigger version of the same dilemma – protect your team or yourself. And now you have a new status, and perhaps a new mortgage, to protect. And no-one (not even yourself) expects you to buck the system, because you haven’t thus far. So you say “yes” and you go to your new underlings and tell them they have to implement your boss’s crazy plan. And if they defend their underlings (or the broader population they are supposed to serve) then you will say (or think) “You are not a team player….”
Before anyone has time to blink, there are entire tiers of management made up of the incompetent (see the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle) and the amoral….
See also; Ibn Khaldun, Voigt-Kampff
So, lots of posts brewing, on the nature of hierarchy, bureaucracy etc etc.
In the meantime, via Jon Harris (who will always have a place in my heart for describing U2′s “Vertigo” as ‘pompous rock esperanto’), I came to Velvet Coalmine, and shall be fossicking for nuggets.
One is this –
No wonder your average entrepreneur so loathes meetings.
What was it Dave Berry said – organisations have meetings because they can’t actually masturbate?
Either they are poorly conceived (death by powerpoint, serial-sage-on-the-stage) or else they are adequately conceived and then abysmally executed (“facilitators” who take five minutes to tell you they won’t take up much time, it could all be done in about five sentences [tops]).
If it weren’t so tragic, it would be funny.
Eventually you learn to use the law of two feet, to grab what networking opportunities you can and get out before it all goes horribly wrong.
And so you “succeed” in spite of rather than because of the hosts.
So it goes.
I was sat at a lovely Indian restaurant with a good friend last week.* And we were riffing on how little anyone really knows about their own behaviours, their own motivations and drives.
It occurred to me that the term “blind spot” carries the assumption that mostly your vision is accurate and unhindered but there are, say, thumbnail-sized spots in the sky that you can’t see.
I said that the truth is probably the opposite – what we can see “accurately” is more like the little spots of light you see in the night sky, with – if you’re lucky – a fuzzy area or two (distant galaxies). But mostly inky blackness all around.
This may be an old image, but it was new – and illuminating (har har) – to me that night. And maybe to you today?
O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.
(O would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us.)
Robert Burns, Poem “To a Louse” – verse 8
* And am there tmrw with the wife and two other friends – life is very very sweet. #gratitude
I will not be leaving this cartoon anywhere that it could do me harm.
