Overwhelmed: the Etymology

I'm feeling utterly overwhelmed right now. I feel washed over by a wave of chores and emotions and work and life. Which is funny because then I find out that this is what the origins of the word are:

overwhelm

early 14c., "to turn upside down, to overthrow," from over + M.E. whelmen "to turn upside down" (see whelm). Meaning "to submerge completely" is mid-15c. Perhaps the connecting notion is a boat, etc., washed over, and overset, by a big wave. Figurative sense of "to bring to ruin" is attested from 1520s. Related:Overwhelming; overwhelmingly.

Falsehoods

Friend of thongcharm, who I like to think of as the wild anthropologist, recently pointed out the merits of the Steve Wilkos show. I am rarely available at 11am to watch extremely bad television, but was on an airplane recently and tuned in (God Bless JetBlue, despite this week of horrific technical difficulties). Steve was the most charismatic of the Jerry Springer bodyguards, who routinely broke up fights with a certain panache. He was given his own program with much the same format as Jerry, but with a few simplifying edits:

a) Hitters can't be Sitters. If you punched anyone, you don't get a chair. 

b) Everything is determined by lie detector test.

This makes truth and falsehood fairly straightforward. Take a test. Come on the show. Rant like a madman. Hear the results. Done.

The episode I watched involved a man accusing his wife of being a sideline prostitute to support her coke habit. His evidence was that she often had a runny nose. Further, he said that she brought these Johns into their home after he fell asleep, and that she had drugged him through his food to ensure he wouldn't wake up during the night. He had placed water on the floor in the entryway, and woke up (apparently with well-timed sleeping potions) first to check for footprints, which he had seen. Allegedly. 

His wife, for her side, said that this man was basically a paranoid insane person. And that she was getting sick of it. For whatever it's worth, she did not strike me as a coke addict. What was clear was that stress (or coke) apparently shrank her badonkadonk, much to his chagrin.

It was classic. I didn't get to see the end, which almost makes it better. The lie detector was meant to resolve the truth of the matter. 

From what I understand, lie detectors function by creating a baseline of key indicators like skin temperature, heart rate, etc, and then asking you to speak truths and lies. Lies are meant to deviate from the baseline, because they cause people to have elevated heart rate, skin reactions, and so on. We can debate whether these tests are foolproof and whether they can be beat. But, I'm willing to bet that for the majority of people in the majority of cases, they provide a reasonable indicator.

Having said that, there is one glaring challenge. What if you don't think you're lying?  When asked "have you had an extramarital affair?" most people either have or have not, and editing an entire romp in the hay out of your memory requires some serious amnesia. But, what if I were asked to say "I will become a runway model next year."  If I truly believed that, I would not be lying. If I'm not lying, I wont exhibit the physical signs of lying. 

We tend to pride ourselves, as a collective, on being able to determine if someone is lying to us. But, it is very hard to tell when someone is telling you a truth they believe, which happens to be false. With some people's almost infinite ability to be optimistic, have "happy eyes and ears," or see what they want to see, it's very hard to call their statements a bald-face lie. Rather, they are misinterpreting reality. 

Maybe we should be less concerned with identifying liars, and more concerned with identifying people whose interpretations of reality are very distinct from our own.

Intrinsic Value

I've been spending a lot of time dealing with the value of things this week. The value of different homes. The value of different options. The value of laptops. The value of companies. I wish I could be more forthright in this blog, but suffice it to say that my entire job for the next month is around extracting tangible dollars from what is effectively intangible value. 

This is a new challenge. I welcome a challenge. Actually, I welcome a margarita, but a challenge is not far down the list.

Here's the thing about assets: you aren't a good judge of their value. My apartment freakin' rocks, so I think it should be worth more than the market rate per sq. foot, for example. I love it. I think it has lots of "intangible benefits" like the fact that it can comfortably seat 12 people for passover dinner, or the fact that the moldings are ridiculously lovely. Of course, I also love it because it was my first home purchase, and like a childhood teddy bear, it has a lot of emotion for me. Putting a number on that apartment was hard. Necessary, but hard. I was glad I wasn't talked down from that number (knock on wood, ftoo ftoo) too much. 

But the lesson is learned. I can come up with dozens of reasons for a higher price tag, some of which may be valuable to someone else (location, awesome moldings) and some which might not (who invites 12 people to dinner?). And no one cares how much pride I felt when I first moved in, or how perfect the wall color is in the bedroom. No one cares. So, I really can't be the one to accurately price the apartment.

The truth is, only the market prices these fluffy assets. If 12 people thought it rocked, the price would go up. If none did, the price would go down. Like any TV show on auctions or pawn shops will tell you, the group of people in the audience determine the value - and if you have a group that doesn't care about moldings, you might get screwed. If the group is over-weighted towards moldings, you could luck out. But, you can't really argue with the valuation of the group - since that is the market, at that point in time. Of course, when it is your baby, that can really hurt.

I'm selling another one of my babies this month. Not literally, of course - I'm not an evil person. But, I'm putting a price tag and negotiating an outcome for something else which has tremendous emotional weight, sweat and tears associated with it. It's even harder to price than an apartment in Boston, and even harder to hold an open house. Right now I'm inventorying the crown molding, the hardwood floors and the well-selected paint color on the bedroom wall, wondering whether those things matter to the single guy who might be buying the place. Do you even point them out to someone who cares only about square footage and distance to the subway? Can you resist pointing them out, because you value them so much? How much will it hurt when you hear them say "I'd paint the room green...to match my futon"? 

We'll see... 

Personality Type #458: the Authentically Inauthentic Leader

This is one of the most confounding personality types.

This person is leader. Their leadership is driven by charisma rather than competency. They are the proverbial emperor with no clothes. They have panache and charisma which most people don't, and because of that, they often require their followers to have a personal as well as professional connection, sometimes before it's appropriate to do so. When things go wrong, they assume their charm is greater than it really is, and that they can get away with flattery, manipulation and outright lying as they go down. And I wonder if they believe the people around them are so nerdy and needy that they will do anything to remain within their glorious, charismatic social circle.

There is an odd slippery slope here worth addressing. I don't believe people start out this way. It's an accumulation over time. One gets promoted, they get responsibility, people have to listen to them. Slowly, this person's self worth and self importance grows and as that happens, any self awareness dwindles. All decisions become justifiable for the leader, all criticisms are attacks rather than coaching. You accumulate this over time, and a lack of self awareness leads to cognitively dissonant statements where outwardly someone believes they are perfect, but to the people around them, they are anything but. Worse, the over reliance on the cult of personality makes the person increasingly helpless and incompetent, so that they have to resort to dirty tricks and actions with a lack of integrity to get ahead. You know how we thought the pretty kids at school could just use their prettiness to get ahead? Well that's basically what happens here.

Lack of self awareness is a scary thing. Because you play it forward and further forward, and it descends into an actual belief that charisma can carry you through petty manipulations and deceits and ultimately completely unethical behavior. All becomes all right to achieve your end objective. All is presumably forgiven by the admiring masses.

I ponder this because I always worry what the trigger point is. At what point should I know someone else is this person? At what point should I watch myself? I'll throw out a few guidelines and let you all be the judge:

1st: Write positive and negative feedback down and store it somewhere and don't attach names of who gave it to you. Go back to it periodically and just look at it and think about it. Because the tendency is to discount feedback immediately and chances are it's probably right.

2nd: No human being will follow you to the ends of the earth, unless you're a pharoah or a prophet. So you have to assume that they choose to follow you and that at any time that support can be pulled.

3rd: Self awareness is an awareness of you relative to where you are today. That's where people fall apart. They can be self aware in a vacuum of time and space. But these people are leaders, they rise fast, faster than their emotional maturity can match. So they are still practicing the self awareness of 5 years ago, in a role they have now. It's the President Obama problem; ultimately people need the President to represent something to them, and the self-awareness that someone should have is against that; not against who they were as the Illinois State Senator, etc.

This post has been brewing for a long time, and I've always been baffled by this. As I write it, I see at least 6 people I know in this, and I think it's because it's just that common.

lucky burger, 52nd street

last night i went to a hole in the wall chain burger joint named lucky burger. this is what you need to know:

1. it was 70% gay men. said men were discussing how to ward away ghosts by "burning sage and then putting my black ass to sleep"

2. the interior is entirely yellow, red and orange.

3. the service was good. a far cry from bartley's burgers in massachusetts, a place you should never go

4. rather than feel sick and ill after eating too much heavy salty food, i woke up today perfectly refreshed. a greasy spoon which can accomplish this is genius!

in summary: everyone go! go get yourself to a lucky burger!

Pay it Forward: Enforced

I just read this article about a mysterious (short lived?) cafe in Japan in which you get the order of the person before you - and your order goes to the next person. Sounds fascinating, right? http://www.cabel.name/2009/09/kashiwa-mystery-cafe.html

How would that work here? First, the interesting thing about the cafe seems to be a reasonably limited menu. Drinks and snacks and things. So, let's pretend the same exercise is run at a McDonalds. Anyone going into a McDonalds has a reasonably similar expectation of their meal.

Would you cheap out on someone? Americans would need more rules like "must be a meal" or "must only be a drink." You don't want to come in for lunch and get a soda. But, would it bother me for a stranger to decide between a Big Mac and a Quarter Pounder for me? no. Part of me would be amused. And if they threw in a milkshake, I'd feel downright blessed.  But, would you want to cheap out on the next person? I couldn't live with myself. I would imagine the most median-priced options would be the most commonly bought. And then someone would throw in a treat on occasion. 

Naturally, somewhere here in america, everyone would worry about food allergies and pork aversions and such. But, it would be an amazing social exercise. I bet there's a PhD thesis in this.. What would you do?

And for the record, if I'm going to eat McD... Big Mac meal, with a vanilla milkshake and sweet and sour sauce for the fries.... 

Optimism

I've been thinking a great deal about optimism these days. Clearly, one must be optimistic to lead. A leader must see a path to the future which is not fraught with danger and opportunities for failure. A leader must believe that they, and their team, can succeed. 

On the other hand, a leader must be realistic about the hurdles on the path, and develop plans to address those which are foreseeable, and a cushion to address the remainder. They must be optimistic enough not to be deterred by these hurdles, of course, lest they see these molehills as insurmountable mountains. 

On the third hand, over-optimism can take down a leader. Hurdles do exist. They will require work. Ignoring them is to neglect any preparation that could be done. Ignoring them will all but ensure there is no slack in the system to account for the unforeseen. 

On the fourth hand, too much of a focus on the negative can lead to distress, both among the leader himself/herself and among the troops. Murphy's law is leadership suicide. There has to be an element of faith associated with the optimism. A modicum. A tablespoon. Not a carafe-full.

I've been toying, as well, with the idea that a leader can project a different message and different attitude, to the degree they are capable of it, than they actually hold. They can be cautiously optimistic internally, but enthusiastically optimistic outwardly. Some people can manage that. Others can see right through that behavior. Still, it seems like a viable option. 

I think the hardest part is the cognitive dissonance of being both realistic and optimistic, and holding them in balance, so that neither goes unchecked. No mean feat. It's harder when you try to portray two messages to different audiences - and even harder when you realize that often, there are precious few people who can be privy to this leadership trick.

Don't mind the leader behind the curtain.