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He must be a genius and you must be an idiot: ‘you dont understand what he’s doing and that’s because he’s a genius and you’re an idiot.’
That’s the bull’s-eye of our stupid infatuation with people who are just utterly credentialed and thinking that therefore they must be geniuses.
- Bill Cohan speaking on “SBF Futures,” The Powers that Be podcast, released November 16, 2022.
Elon. SBK. Elon. Crypto collapse. Sam Bankman Fried. Twitter dumpster fire. Yadda Yadda Yadda.
I don’t need to give you the link to an article because this one has been front and center — Google and pick something, it doesn’t really matter. It’s two cases of Master of the Universe collapsing in mess created by their own hubis.
Hero worship is one of our oldest traits as a species. In the Western tradition alone we can bounce from Ramses to King David to Julius Caesar to Charlemange to Francis Drake to Lincoln to Churchill, and hear basically the same story: Great Leader brings country through crisis. Or creates cars or lightbulbs or personal computers.
This story probably goes back to the stories we told in caves. Of course, all of those people had advisors, collaborators, mentors, teachers and more, but they end up as footnotes. The real story is the Hero’s Quest.
Popular press stories of Fried, Musk, Steve Jobs and more follow this same arc. The arc of the brilliant, broke-the-mold, magically gifted Leader into the New. The coverage is breathless, awed, deferential.
Until the charade falls apart, and the Emperor has no clothes.
I’ve heard people say that heroes don’t survive anymore because we are somehow more cynical. But that’s got it all backwards.
The Fusion Era’s near-frictionless information access means that no Leader will be abl to hide their mistakes, to keep up the appearance the way a Thomas Jefferson could, as he kept the drudging associates who actually ran all the experiments in the background. And the accelerating difficulty of managing everything in the face of a VUCA* environment means that the facade of genius is almost guaranteed to fall down at some point — and fall down hard, very hard.
That’s why the era that we are in basically forces us to be transparent — transparent about our limitations, about our mistakes, about what we have done and can do. If we try to live the Hero’s story — no matter our qualifications, the size of our sword, the number of self-promtional interviews we give…
We have almost no chance of maintaining the facade.
Sidenote #1: This is also why it’s so important for us to Crowdsource Wisdom. Given th VUCA-ness of the world around us, we need all the eyes and ears we can get, especially the ones that will see and here from a different perspective than ourselves.
Sidenote #2: If you go back and listen to the podcast that the quote at the top of this piece came from, you’ll hear the speaker list off Fried’s “qualifications:” Stanford law professors for parents, prestigious degree, great (if apochryphal) story of mission, wealthiest under-30 in U.S. That’s in itself another big transition precipitating from that VUCA-ness: conventional qualifications may lose their ability to lend that kind of qualified status. As we get more accustomed to living in that kind of context, I suspect that we will be less willing to assume that any kind of past performance reliably indicates future potential.
*VUCA is a business strategy acronym that I have found particularly useful. It stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. I think that’s a pretty good sum up of what we understand about the near future for most of us.
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You rock. Go get ‘em!
Della