Is It Better To Look Stupid?
Sometimes you're rewarded by being the "idiot"
The Teardown
I’ve written much about vulnerabilities in my younger self. Lots of those vulnerabilities are still with me today. Today’s newsletter is about another component of my personality, and how it manifests in every day life.
I’m also renewing my focus on this newsletter, both in terms of writing regularly and increasing my subscriber base. With that framing in mind, here are couple of topics that are in progress:
Recent product news about alternate world platforms (i.e. the Metaverse) tied to my own experiences with those products
Why a technology product from an Israeli company is one of most fascinating and complex tools used to hack into Apple’s iPhone
While I’ve not blasted this newsletter to all of my contacts and social media relationships, I encourage all of you to forward to other folks you know that might like to read it.
On that note, if you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time and want to read future emails, subscribe using this link.
Is It Better To Look Stupid?
Friday :: February 4th, 2021
Life sometimes feels like a never-ending series of unresolved wants. What used to be a desire to be noticed more in school translates to a desire to be more intriguing to others in adult life. I don't sit around and regularly wonder what I can do to be more intriguing, at least not actively, but it happens subconsciously. For example, presumably, I am more appealing to a group of runners if I can run faster or farther while exerting less effort than them. They might ask: how does he do it? They might say: he's crazy (in a good way). Or maybe I'm more intriguing to a group of friends if I'm the friend that is the CEO of a young company. Forget about whether the company makes any sense. It's just so cool that I am that CEO. Or perhaps I'm running a private equity shop, making millions of dollars, and investing in many exciting companies. Don't you want to know more?
It's easy to get swallowed by the comparison game. You might only be as good as you measure yourself relative to other people. You need to be more intriguing to increase that measurement and thus embark on any number of intrigue-building activities. Travel to more remote countries. Build and sell a business, or maybe three. Drive a car that no one else drives regularly. [around here: you're predictable if that's a Porsche 911]
But this dynamic plays evil games in the most mundane situations: meetings. We probably all sit in meetings. Some of them are packed with value. Some of them aren't but are reasonably easy to survive. And some waste your time entirely and sound excruciating mental and emotional alarm bells. Why did that meeting just happen?
Sometimes, though, you hear what someone else says or asks and think: that person doesn't get it, why not, why are they here? Etc. You listened to what they said, but you didn't really listen because you quickly thought the person was unqualified to speak. But the people doing all the talking? Or answering all the questions? Those people seem to know everything. They're intriguing.
Dan Luu wrote a fascinating post titled Willingness To Look Stupid and started it like this:
People frequently think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I'm stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I'm stupid, e.g., failing interviews where the interviewer very clearly thought I was stupid, I think that, overall, the upsides of being willing to look stupid have greatly outweighed the downsides.
I don't regularly think people think I'm stupid. But I frequently feel that they should. I'll come back to my points about intrigue in a moment. At the heart of my thinking is the concept of bullshit.
We all know it well. Something can be bullshit when it's egregiously illogical. It can be bullshit when the conversation lacks any facts and ties itself to clear fiction. But something can also be bullshit when there isn't a clear dividing line between actually knowing something and actually not knowing something, but talking as if you do.
I think I bullshit all the time. Some of you know me in real life. You can tell me. And I'm really expressing that. Don't be afraid to respond to this newsletter by saying, "yeah, I think you're full of shit, and it's about [x],[y],[z]." I might react incredulously, but there's no doubt in my mind that you will be correct.
I'm pointing to my bullshit because I think it's one of my mechanisms for building intrigue. I'm intriguing when you think I know what I'm talking about, assuming that you possess a base-level interest in the topic. Otherwise, you can move on, discuss something else, or find another conversation partner. But in the corporate world, you can exclude me from a meeting if you think I don't know what I'm talking about or deny a promotion or pay raise.
The article appendix contains a quote from someone else who responded to Dan that summarizes my concluding thoughts well:
On reading a draft of this, Ben Kuhn remarked,
[this post] caused me to realize that I'm actually very bad at this, at least compared to you but perhaps also just bad in general.
I asked myself "why can't Dan just avoid saying things that make him look stupid specifically in interviews," then I started thinking about what the mental processes involved must look like in order for that to be impossible, and realized they must be extremely different from mine. Then tried to think about the last time I did something that made someone think I was stupid and realized I didn't have a readily available example)
That last line hit home. I don't have an excellent example of the last time I realized someone thought I was stupid because I've spent so much time curating my ability to bullshit. It is a sobering realization. People should probably think "you're stupid" more often, even if they're wrong. It would mean that I was giving myself a better shot at genuinely building valuable knowledge, conversation, or connections. But it does feel counterintuitive to say it out loud.
I've concluded that this behavior has existed for a long time. It used to manifest through a classic protection mechanism: being shy. I was shy through many of my school years. My hand didn't go up frequently when teachers asked for class participation. I worried that I would be judged for asking a "stupid" question or giving a "stupid" answer because other kids jump to rapid conclusions about how cool or intelligent you are. Even today, I have to fight through that impulse in meetings and force myself to ask questions or pose ideas when I don't understand a topic or a word.
So, if I could go back in time, I'd tell my 5-year, 12-year, 15-year, or 18-year old selves to ignore the impulse to seem cool, or intelligent, or funny, and do whatever it takes to build knowledge and skills. I'm still doing that today with my 39-year-old mind that has lots of inbuilt bad habits. Telling you about is progress!