You know, deep down I’ve always wanted to be an optimist. It must be a warm, happy lifestyle, bound to attract a whole gaggle of wonderful people and life situations. Get up every morning with a smile on your face, heading out to enjoy another day full of sunshine and rainbow wishes, never once to be soiled by the merest unkempt sensibility.
Unfortunately, fate conspired to make me an archcynic instead. Goes way back, probably as far back as elementary school - whenever something was going horribly wrong, there usually was an optimist at the center of it all, blithely making dumb decisions and refusing to look at unpleasant things. I learned very early on not to trust optimists or the games they play. A pessimist may be a pain in the ass, but optimists get people killed.
Probably, that’s one reason that I ultimately became a consultant.
I’ll tell you something. Nothing in my life has cemented my cynicism quite like working as a consultant. It’s true, what the Demotivator “Consulting” slogan says: “If you’re not a part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”
Put another way, a great JMS quote from his sci-fi TV show, “Crusade”:
“Has it ever occurred to you.. that in all our travels together we have found no shortage of dead worlds, dead planets, dead moons, dead colonies, dead cities? Has you ever wondered why there are so many dead worlds out there? Let me tell you why.
“It’s because, despite the best advice of people who know what they are talking about, other people insist on doing the most massively stupid things.”
No kidding.
Casey Serin is a perfect example. He’s now out of houses, having lost FIVE to foreclosure - he’s out of money, out of options. At this point he’s literally flirting with homelessness. An army of people in the last six months have told him to get a job, any job, get his ass to a temp agency and take whatever work they have, just goddammit get some regular income coming in. That he’d go down hard. Casey’s consistently ignored all that advice, insisting that buried somewhere in his email is the sweet deal that will solve all his problems.
His story is just about over. Without those houses, he’s no longer the poster boy for the foreclosure crisis - just not a hot media property anymore. Like many human pseudo-events (to use Boorstin’s term), he thinks his fleeting 15 minutes is a permanent condition, when in reality he simply failed to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Now it’s just a long pathetic denouement about deadbeat kid in major debt, soon to be living out of his car, desperate for ongoing distraction-validation.
People warned him all along. And he insisted on doing the most massively stupid things.
Casey’s an optimist.
(Just to give you an idea of how deluded this kid is, just this week he’s begun offering a “membership” of sorts on his blog. For ten bucks - and if you follow his rules - he’ll let you leave comments instantly, rather than having to wait for him to moderate them. Over six months without it, and he waits until after all the houses are gone before even trying it. He’s now literally trying to sell tickets to the play at the very end of the third act.)
It’s not just Casey. It’s everywhere. Global warming. Energy crisis. Traffic. Crime. Real estate bubbles. Corporate waste and fraud. Government incompetence. It’s the same pattern everywhere - optimists who refuse to listen to cynics who know what they’re talking about, and who insist on blundering forward into massive stupidity.
That’s where consultants come in. And yes, I’m as guilty as the next one.
No matter what field you consult in, you start out with the idealistic vision of just wanting to help your clients. Give them good advice and see that advice lead to good things. And when occasionally that actually happens, even the cynic has a happy day. But 95% of the time it’s a very different story, and after a while you learn to simply concede to the inevitability of human nature. It’s the only way to pay the bills as a consultant and stay sane.
My business card, website, phone message, and client script all say that I’m a business consultant. In reality, I’m an arms dealer. If you use what I provide intelligently, it can significantly further your goals. But ultimately, I don’t really care who you point the gun at - if you ask me whether blowing a largish hole through your left foot is a good idea, I’ll advise against it. But if you insist, it’s not my problem. Happy landings.
In fact, I’ll sell you the bullets! And I’ll charge you hourly to show you how to stand, how to point the gun, how to hold it steady, how to accurately find your left foot, and where the nearest emergency rooms are. Again, I’ll advise against pulling the trigger.. but beyond that, I really don’t care whether you do or not.
Because I know that most of the time, advice will fall on deaf ears and, as an optimist, you’ll go ahead and do the most massively stupid things.
You might not think so. You may be reading this and thinking, “Damn, I’d know better than to shoot my own damned foot off. And hell.. I’m paying this guy for advice, and paying him well, so I’d be an idiot not to listen to him.”
I agree. But hard experience tells me that - almost certainly - you won’t listen. And that, once again, you’ll end up on the floor tourniqueting your bloody stump and giving me this stupid look that says, “Holy fuck this hurts, what did we do WRONG?”
We didn’t do anything wrong. You shot your damned foot. Told you.
Want some help finding your other one?
Oh, and here’s the bill. I take Visa and Mastercard. Have a nice day.
Same way, all the world over. Optimists and consultants and plastic money, round and round in endless pursuit of the bloody stump. Because if you’re not a part of the solution, there’s money to be made in prolonging the problem.
Bang!
