All You Need Is Not Enough

Whenever I explain my "two essentials" theory of success it generates vociferous denial.

The two essentials are Status and Confidence. There are people with status who lack confidence, and confident people who lack status; neither type will become achievers. Both characteristics are essential to gaining success. And the two characteristics are sufficient, needing nothing else. (I'll be coming back to this last point later, so save your outrage.)

Bear in mind that I'm describing qualities as perceived. Status and Confidence can each be faked, and both together. If they are perceived by others as true, the faker will have success with the gullible.

But true Status and true Confidence certainly exist, and sometimes in the same person.

True Status means a social standing certified by some impressive institution that represents a summary approval of a person's quality. They have been evaluated and found qualified, and the rest of us can trust that judgment without conducting our own evaluation. Professionals have status, the rich have status, PhDs have status until they blow it. Teachers today in the US have little status, and lawyers are always under suspicion.

True Confidence means a self assurance that obstacles will be overcome even if they cannot be fully foreseen. A confident person says to herself or himself, I know I can do this even though I've never done it before, I have faith in my abilities to perceive, assess and respond because I'm ever striving to do my best, and although I have always a wall of doubt to scale, I have always been able to climb over that doubt and deliver good results.

A faker in each of these two qualities simply believes the lie he tells himself, which enables all lies to others.

There are fakers who have true Status and Confidence—as fakers. They are widely acknowledged as being really good at telling the lie that others want to hear. Some of them are politicians and some are motivational speakers.

Whether faked or true, perceived Status and Confidence are essential to success. But they are no guarantee of quality. This fact explains most of the mediocrity in life.

For what happens is this: People with perceived Status and Confidence are often given opportunities on the strength of perception alone, with no due diligence whether they can actually deliver desired results. Con men build penny stock empires that invite their own collapse, blue ribbon panels of prestigious people issue clueless reports, managers who have successfully job hopped to a high level position demonstrate they have no talent for running an operation, having never run anything but their own career advancement.

Thus, much of what we reflexively attribute to the Peter Principle is the fault of the people who promoted candidates of perceived Status and Confidence to their level of incompetence.

Now, back to what is not on the list of necessary characteristics for success: Talent, authentic, enviable talent. Its products are worth stealing, its mysterious wellspring quite frightening to those who have little talent of their own. Talent is like being born a magical person, someone who can make things happen. And magical people are considered threatening, they need control. Talent is not necessary for success because talented people can be appropriated.

To many creative people, talent is a curse. People of perceived Status and Confidence confiscate the golden eggs and give the creative person the goose. Snarky critics demean the talented person, attempting to deny them Status and to shake their Confidence. Talent brings out the quiet mean streak in mainstream hypocrisy.

This truth is pretty widely acknowledged, and it does not offend. My hypothesis receives vociferous denial not so much because it does not make talent essential, but because it does not acknowledge the commonly believed fount of success: Dedicated Ambition. 

If you believe that wishing hard and working hard trump all else, you are in the mainstream. If you realize that wishful thinking and unproductive effort is delusional, you are a heretic. I am a heretic, and this makes people angry, as if I were refuting the only path they see for themselves to success.

There is a relationship between talent and hard work. People with basic talent can greatly improve their skills. But Dedicated Ambition is something apart from the effort, drill, study, training, and self discipline that hones talent to its sharpest edge. Dedicated Ambition is an occult potion for those without talent. It gives one powers that are not natural gifts. It is not exclusive like talent, it is available to all.

The quotidian essence of Dedicated Ambition fits it well into the American Zeitgeist. We as a people have always believed to our marrow that with enough hard work and pure determination, anyone can achieve anything they want, you just have to want it hard enough. 

This belief is demonstrably untrue and at the same time, impossible to falsify. For every gold metal winner there are silver and bronze "losers" who just didn't want it hard enough, and countless also-rans, a vast majority, for the sole victor to leave in the dust. The true statistics of competition are easily dismissed by the culture of winning. Such denial is overwhelmingly powerful, built into the American psyche. We don't fault ourselves for not being good enough, we fault ourselves for not trying hard enough.

Notice that in the bootstrap mentality of Dedicated Ambition there is no special place for talent. You don't need it starting out, you just have to want it hard enough, and you will acquire it through belief in yourself. In this way, talent becomes a product of Dedicated Ambition. With enough desire, even a pig can fly.

Notice, too, that a lot of the "impressive institutions" that certify Status also highly value Dedicated Ambition. And why should this matter more than rigorous tests of excellence? I'll answer with another question: Why do some engineers build bridges that fail? Institutions can sometimes be too impressed with themselves and not enough with standards of performance.

Performance is the domain of talent. In some fields, talent prevails. Status and Confidence may gain an audition, but only performance will win the part. When is the last time you applied for a gig that included a performance test? If you are an actor or a musician, even a successful one, you understand and appreciate that auditions are a necessary part of your career. If you are a manager or a professional, you are used to coasting on credentials and recommendations, and would resent having to demonstrate your ability through repeated audition performance.

And that is why All You Need Is Not Enough. Status and Confidence are of little help in the performance arena, where talent emerges and shines.

But talent should never expect success as the reward. Knowing you did good work is often talent's only gain, incentive enough to do more good work with little expectation of reward and no escape from having to audition for your next gig. Talent is a compulsion, not a goal. Talent is who you are and who you must always be, regardless of outcome.

Deep Time and Shallow Clocks

Studying up on paleontology, the vast span of geological time I once thought intimidating doesn't seem so vast anymore. One hundred seventy million years of dinosaurs goes by fast.

Continents move at a quick pace for something as large as a continent. We can now measure contemporary velocities with GPS technology at centimeters per year, a stampede of mountaintops and shorelines. 

Continents moving as fast as fingernails grow seem to me in fairly rapid motion.

The major psychological shift I'm experiencing is that the human life span now feels impossibly brief. Deep time can be plumbed, but the breadth of existence from birth to death is a measure too thin to be useful.

And what a slight proportion of our time is spent transferring knowledge from generation to generation! Perhaps once there was a thing worthy of being called a culture, but nowadays, as we approach the attention span of Drosophila, what mechanism is there for collective learning that transcends the momentary sensation?

Yes, some will claim that the longest lived cultural institutions are the Abrahamic religions, which together span about three thousand years. And I answer that no religion has demonstrated itself to be a learning institution. Religions are stasis institutions, insisting on adherence to abstract timelessness and placeless ideals. They have no clocks and they do not value this world. They have sponsored scholars and universities, but their belief systems do not function as living, collective memories ingesting and processing human experience, constantly revising their conclusions.

For that, one would have to turn to science. Science might seem the only hope for a cultural repository of cumulative investigation, except that science as practiced has become diversified beyond comprehension, an institution of cubbyholes, where specialized experts don't understand each other's work.

And yet, science provides the only wide scope on reality we have beyond immediate sensation. The climate changes we have wrought might remain mostly under the radar of human awareness, save for sensationalist headlines written about scientist's findings. When things happen too slowly for us to notice, we think no change is taking place. The gradient of change is below the threshold of perception. When things happen fast, they usually happen in fits and starts, the jagged chart line of change providing ample excuse for denial.

A cultural learning process would have heuristics substituting for statistical analysis, ways of recognizing shifting envelopes of variability, an instinct for knowing that things are not as they were.

An individual can grasp time before and after one's existence, but a society cannot. Our clocks tick too fast and out of sync. We have no means for gathering and evaluating knowledge that transcends generations, save for a rare "longitudinal" study, and even then, the results are regarded by a public with severe short term memory issues as the curiosity of the moment, quickly forgotten. 

It occurs to me that human affairs should be run by scientists, and only scientists, and that democracy is absurd because it always tries to undo itself with ceaseless battles for dominance swaying between extremes, that make of our collective mind a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic. Taken together, we are a truly psychotic species.

But a world run by technocrats would be just as bad, solving problems through genetic engineering and extermination.

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, has funded a ten thousand year clock. What we need is a society of ten thousand year clock keepers, people who invisibly nudge the course of human affairs toward wisdom.

This needn't be a secret society, as no one would take seriously an organization whose vision looked forward farther than recorded history can look back.

This society would need the endurance of religion and the awareness of science. It would have to pass its mission on through generations even as it adapted to changing circumstances. It would be able to infiltrate every center of power without revealing its methods for guiding human affairs.

Rather sounds like Asimov's Second Foundation, except that mentalism isn't an option.

I would not be disturbed to learn that there is a smart, benign hand guiding an otherwise stupid, self destructive species. Not the hand of a god who thinks nothing of destroying the planet it created, as a broken plaything is to a child, but rather, the hands of the smartest, most humane and empathetic people human genes can produce.

A society of Nelson Mandela types, looking ten thousand millenia hence. As far fetched as that sounds, it is about the only hope we have for lasting as long as the dinosaurs did.