Category: Individual

Credo

Everyone should have a credo. Consciously-developed beliefs, understood and articulated so that they can guide individual actions.

So what is my credo?

I believe many things, and, like any credo worth its salt, all of those things have implications for action.

First, I believe we all have equal human value, even as we are unequal in what we can contribute to the collective at any one time. No one is inherently better or worse – or worth more or less – than another because of their specific talents. The value to our community of those talents may ebb and flow, but fundamentally we are all worth the same, and as such we deserve the same basic communal benefits.

I also believe that every dog will have its day.

Meaning that we will eventually need those folks whose talents and skills and experiences are out-of-season today. We don’t know when, but their days will come, and we want them healthy and committed when they do. So we must provide to each other food and shelter and education and basic healthcare, all of those things that ensure survival and growth, regardless of what each of us contributes to our immediate needs.

I believe that people should be rewarded for their efforts and the positive outcomes that result (positive outcomes are those that improve collective utility). Every dog will have its day, but the dog that hunts today rather than tomorrow must get some benefit, lest that dog withhold its talents.

Why would a dog withhold its talents? And why wouldn’t we insist that it make its contribution to our collective benefit?

Because I believe in full agency. In fact, I might believe in full agency as my foundational truth.

Until our decisions and our actions hurt someone else, we must be allowed the widest discretion to choose our own paths. Each of us is uniquely human, a complex stew of ambitions and experiences, influences and knowledge, skills and blind spots, and we exist in a complex and dynamic environment. I cannot know what’s best for anyone else. I’m not sure I can know what’s best for me, given how much everything changes both within and around me. And since I cannot know what’s best for you, I cannot tell you what to do. I can suggest action, I can provide data so I feel like you’re better informed, I can share what choice I would make, but I cannot force you or even manipulate you into a decision. You must be free to choose your way, just as I must be free to choose mine.

I believe people are communal. We form tribes. Even introverts like me relish other people’s company (at least sometimes!). A shared laugh is so much more fulfilling, so much more robust than a solitary chuckle. We find meaning in community. We find purpose in working with others towards common ends. We want to belong with other people.

When someone holds themselves outside our community, it’s possible they’re just an antisocial asshole. But I believe it’s far, far more likely that they just feel rejected by the rest of us. They feel unappreciated or vilified or ignored. They feel like they’ve been treated unfairly. So when we see someone isolated, instead of asking what’s wrong with them, we should ask ourselves whether we’ve made that person feel welcome. Or, looking forward rather than backwards, let’s ask how we might help them feel welcome, so that they will join our community and strengthen it. Regardless, people must freely choose to join community, not have it forced upon them.

(If Gallup Strengthfinders is to be believed, Includer is my greatest strength, and it likely comes from this part of this fledgling credo – helping others feel like they can be part of our team. I see value in others, and I want to bring people together in a way that makes each individual feel valued.)

I believe we all strive to matter. We want to make a difference in the world around us. We want other people to know that we are here. So we strive to achieve. We create. We don’t need other people in order to achieve or to create, but other people add dimension and perspective to our accomplishments. And they allow us to achieve even greater things, more complicated things, more intimidating things when we band together with them. Many hands make light work, after all.

We can accomplish more when we work together. Not only do we have more capacity for work, we also have more creativity, more imagination, and more energy to call on. We have countless examples of individual genius, but we have many more examples of teams that accomplished amazing things because they combined the knowledge, wisdom, skills, experiences, energy, and creativity of many minds and bodies.

So put it together, and my credo is that we make community to accomplish things that benefit us collectively while recognizing the value that each of us contributes, knowing that those contributions will be uneven, always favoring some of us over others. We need to recognize those who contribute more, but we need to care for everyone so that they are ready when their turn comes and we need them. And all of it has to be chosen freely, individually, by each member of our community.

That’s my credo. Or at least the start of it. I’m sure more elements will occur to me as time marches on.

Brilliance, Unlimited?

I surprised both my friends and myself during an argument over coffee the other day. My very good friend Tom is a fan of iconoclastic businesspeople, people who dream big and dare bigger – people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I had an unusually visceral response when he complimented Musk, and I was particularly inarticulate about my thoughts.

I am a free-market guy mostly, but I also believe in vigorous oversight, because far too many businesspeople will push boundaries and take advantage.

It’s a logical outcome of the widely-held view that a businessperson’s main goal is to maximize returns to shareholders. Behaviors like price fixing, price gouging, withholding new products that will cannibalize existing products, adopting rosy economic-growth forecasts when funding benefit-defined retirement programs all reward shareholders at the expense of collective utility, which is – or at least should be – the goal of any economy. In other words, businesspeople will most often choose narrow benefits over broader benefits because their goals, performance assessments, and compensation are aligned with narrow company-specific performance rather than wider economic performance.

And that’s cool. Try to reward a CEO on a broad economic performance metric on which they will have very little impact and you’ll very quickly have an unmotivated CEO. Or need to search for a new one.

But without a vigorous counterpoint (i.e., public regulation) to enforce collective utility, we end up with society as a whole bearing externalities, costs that are created by individual entities but paid for by the collective. Which leads to income disparities (shareholders get all the rewards while non-shareholders get zero rewards but have to cover part of the costs), which further frays our community.

But back to Elon Musk. I have two views of him, and there is some nuance in them.

Musk is brilliant. Tesla will change our world at least as dramatically as Amazon restructured retail shopping – and I’m all in on that change. Moving our transportation economy to sustainable fueling is seismically positive. It will reorder our world, but that huge disruption will leave us in a far better place than we are now.

He is also highly skilled at building companies. Counting PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company he’s had a significant role in creating four companies that are thriving, which is a great indicator of the appeal their products and services have to people.

But.

His Twitter acquisition shows hubris. He fancies himself an expert in social media and public conversation with no evidence of his expertise. He hasn’t grown up in social media companies, learning the essential issues, understanding the wants or needs of the broader markets, differentiating among the various markets and market segments. He’s extrapolating his personal experience, assuming his experience is the same as everyone else’s, which it certainly isn’t.

People have followed him on Twitter because of his brilliance in engineering and creating companies, not because of his opinions on other topics. Like many other users, he’s using that platform to opine about stuff in which he has little to no expertise. And as long as he’s just one user spouting nonsense, then I have no issue. Free speech and all. But when he uses advantages gained elsewhere to buy influence where he hasn’t earned it, then I do have an issue with it.

The best analogy I can come up with on the fly is Microsoft buying its way into search with Internet Explorer by bundling it with Windows. Windows won its dominant position in the marketplace by its features and its marketing and its sales to personal-computer manufacturers. IE had not earned a market-leading position by its performance. So to force IE into that leadership position by power earned elsewhere undermines collective utility.

Similarly, I think, Musk views himself an expert on speech and social media. He’s transferred the appeal he has because of his engineering and company leadership into social media, but the jury is still out on the latter. He hasn’t earned a leadership position in that area.

To me this whole discussion gets into Ayn Rand territory, where she believed there exists a small number of supermen, disproportionately gifted and superior to everyone else, who need to be allowed to exercise their genius so the rest of the world can benefit from it.

But.

Those people don’t exist. There are geniuses among us, but they have no emotional or moral superiority to the rest of us. They are no less petty and no more aware about our community, its needs, and how we interact than those less blessed with brainpower or technical insights. That their genius manifests in commercial success makes them no better – and no worse – than the rest of us. I don’t begrudge these titans of industry their hard-earned rewards – and to have outsized commercial success you have to work hard – yet many of these self-same titans seem to believe that brilliance in one space equals brilliance everywhere. Musk himself seems to believe that his own brilliance knows no limits.

I respectfully disagree.