Alternatives Randomness In Life

It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising sight.
-Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner


Our lives might be seen a series of intersecting and parallel learning curves. Sometimes new curves replace earlier ones; others go on simultaneously, though rising and cresting at different rates. You may be speaking as a student while embarking to lose energy as a trial lawyer just as you mentoring curve is getting hot; or in the rapturous phase both of learning tennis and learning to be alone.

We also can think of inner and outer learning curves, and how they relate. In successful people, the outer curve of public identity rises faster and peaks sooner than the internal one of personal discovery.

Learning curves are not a pat formula but a way of seeing your progress through life that points up the importance of constant renewal. Self-renewal is usually not matter of jumping neatly off the end of one career curve onto a new one - through some do this by dint of intense self-knowledge, decisive action, and good fortune. Sometimes renewal requires a bold leap to a new primary endeavor in work, but just as often it means that you need to explore an inner learning curve or develop an avocation that parallels and complements your job.

People with a high level of self-awareness and risk acceptance may pursue a deliberate pattern of changing jobs when the excitement of each learning curve diminishes. Author and statesman John Gardner is a good example. He regularly reports himself, as he puts it, to avoid getting stale. His intersecting learning cures are clear and distinct; he regards them rather like assignments to which he brings his gifts of intellect and management. Each contributes information and experience that are useful in the next phase. Throughout his varied life he has maintained a passion for self-understanding and a fascination with the challenges of leadership.

A more conservative approach is to begin working on a new learning curve while still actively engaged in your present one. More flexible work schedules often permit new career development to proceed parallel with an earlier track; for example, a woman who is moving from banking to medicine, starting with part-time training as a paramedic. Others can ease into new field by doing some consulting in their existing field while learning their new work.

Another renewal strategy, used by those who are committed to a primary career or way of life, is to develop important, renewing avocations. Winston Churchill took his outside interests very seriously and derived immeasurable benefit from them. He was proud of his skill as bricklayer and kept up his union card. He had long-term vision of his estate, Chartwell, as a self-sufficient farm, and built elaborate fish ponds and gardens in furtherance of this vision. He authored fifty-six books, many of them while holding major posts in government service, including his years as Englands Prime Minister.

Another way of fighting entropy involves flattening the top of the curve through a sustained effort to deepen your mastery of an endeavor. Extended, the peak of the curve becomes a plateau a term that has gotten bad press in the working world in recent years. Many middle managers have been plateaued stalled at a lower career level than they expected to attain because of the economic downturn and intense competition for fewer top spots in the corporate world.

As long as you are learning-whether it is on fresh turf or in the dark recesses of your personal shadow, digging up demons you need to face the results are the same: staleness, entropy, and hubris are defeated for another day. Most of us will need to use all these strategies at some point in our lives: letting go of an old learning curve, searching out new ones, fighting entropy on the plateau.

The real juice of life, whether it be sweet or bitter, is found much less in the product of our efforts than in the process of living itself, in how it feels to be alive.

To face problem, I assume by making to simple it by sarcastic chart. (problem solving chart
in http://www.scribd.com/doc/2021101/MANAGEMENT-in-BRIEFLY)

***

I start with the platitude that one cannot judge a performance in any given field (war politics, medicine, investments) by results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e., if history played out in a different way). Such substitute courses of events are called alternative histories. Clearly, the quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome, but such a point seems to be voiced only by people who fail (those who succeed attribute their success to the quality of their decision). Such opinion that I followed the best course is what politicians on their way out of office keep telling those members of the press who still listen to them-eliciting the customary commiserating yes, we know that makes the sting even worse. And like many platitudes, this one while being too obvious, is not easy to carry out in practice.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work-whereas economics represents how it actually dose work. Economics is above all a science of measurement. It comprises an extraordinarily powerful and flexible set of tools that can reliably asses a thicket of information to determine the effect of any factor, or even the whole effect. Thats what the economy is, after all: a thicket of information about jobs and real estate and banking and investment. But the tools of economics can be just as easily applied to subjects that are more-well, more interesting

In philosophy, there has been considerable work on the subject starting with Leibniz idea of possible worlds. For Leibniz, Gods mind included an infinity of possible worlds, of which he selected just one. These non-selected worlds are worlds are worlds of possibilities, and the one in which I m breathing and writing thee lines is just one of them that happened to have been executed. Philosophers also have a branch of logic that specializes in the matter: whether some property holds across all possible worlds or if it holds across a single world-with ramifications into the philosophy of language called possible worlds semantics with such authors as Saul Kripke.

In physics, there is the many-world interpretation in quantum mechanics (associated with the works of Hugh Everett in 1957) which considers that the universe branches out treelike at each juncture; what we are living now is only one of these many worlds. Taken at more extreme level, whenever numerous viable possibilities exist, the world splits into many worlds, one world for each different possibility-causing the proliferation of parallel universes. I am an academician in one of the parallel universes, plain dust in another.

Finally, in economics: Economists studied (perhaps unwittingly) some of Leibnizian ides with the possible states of nature pioneered by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu. This analytical approach to the study of economic uncertainty is called the state space method-it happens to be the cornerstone of neoclassical economic theory and mathematical finance. A simplified version is called scenario analysis, the series of what-ifs used in, say, the forecasting of sales for a fertilizer plant under different world conditions and demands for the (smelly) product.

Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good. Smart people have been asking questions for quite a few centuries now, so many of the questions that havent been asked are bound to yield uninteresting answer.


1. Challenge-PEPSI : Alternative or Confussion
In the early 1980s, the Coca Cola Company was profoundly nervous about its future. Once, Coke had been far and away the dominant soft drink in the world. But Pepsi had been steadily chipping away at Cokes lead. In 1972, 18% of soft drink users said they drank Coke exclusively, compared with 4% who called themselves exclusive Pepsi drinkers. By the early 1980s, Coke had dropped to 12% and Pepsi had risen to 11%-and this despite the fact that Coke was much more widely available than Pepsi and spending at least $100 million more on advertising per year.

In the midst of this upheaval, Pepsi began running television commercials around the country, pitting Coke head-to-head with Pepsi in what they called the Pepsi Challenge. Dedicated Coke drinkers were asked to take a sip from two glasses, one marked Q and one marked M. Which did they prefer? Invariably, they would say M, and, lo and behold, M would be revealed as Pepsi. Cokes initial reaction to the Pepsi Challenge was to dispute its findings. But when they privately conducted blind head-to-head taste tests of their own, they found the same thing: when asked to choose between Coke and Pepsi, the majority of tasters-57%-preferred Pepsi. A 57 to 43 percent edge is a lot, particularly in a world where millions of dollars hang on a tenth of a percentage point, and it is not hard to imagine how devastating thing news was to Coca-Cola management. The Coca-Cola mystique had always been based on it famous secret formula, unchanged since the earliest days of company. But here was seemingly incontrovertible evidence that time had passed Coke by.

Coca-Cola executives next did a flurry of additional market research projects. The news seemed t get worse. Maybe the principal characteristics that made Coke distinctive, like its bite, consumers now describe as harsh, the companys head of American operations, Brian Dyson, said at the time. And when you mention words like rounded and smooth, they say Pepsi. Maybe the way we assuage our thirst has changed. The head of Cokes consumer marketing research department in those year was a man named Roy Stout, and Stout become one of the leading advocates in the company for taking the results of vending machines, have more shelf space, spend more on advertising, and are competitively priced, why are we losing (market) share? he asked Cokes top management. You look at the Pepsi Challenge, and you have to begin asking about taste.

This was the genesis of what came to be known as New Coke. Cokes scientists went back and tinkered with the fabled secret formula to make it a little lighter and sweeter-more like Pepsi. Immediately Cokes market researchers noticed an improvement. In blind tastes of some of the early prototypes, Coke pulled even with Pepsi. They tinkered some more. In September 1984, they went back out and tested what would end up as the final version of New Coke. They rounded up not just thousands but hundreds of thousands o consumers all across North America, and in head-to-head blind taste tests, New Coke beat Pepsi by 6 to 8 percent points. Coca-Cola executives were elated. The new drink was given the green light. In the press conference announcing the launch of new coke, the companys CEO, Roberto C. Goizueta, called the new product the surest move the companys ever made, and there seemed little reason to doubt what he said. Consumers, in the simplest and most direct manner imaginable, had been asked for their reaction, and hey had said they didnt much like the old Coke but they are very much liked the new Coke. How could New Coke fail?

But it did. It was disaster. Coke drinkers rose up outrage against New Coke. There were protests around the country. Coke was plunged into crisis, and just a few months later, the company was forced to bring back the original formula as Classic Coke-at which point, sales of New Coke virtually disappeared. The predicted success of New Coke never materialized. But there was an even bigger surprise. The seemingly inexorable rise of Pepsi-which had also been so clearly signaled by market research-never materialized either. For the last twenty years, Coke has gone head-to-head wit Pepsi with a product that taste tests say is inferior, and Coke is still the number one soft drink in the world. The story of New Coke, I other words, is a really good illustration how complicated it is to find out what people really think as randomness.


2. Russian Roulette: Randomness or Alternatives
One can illustrate the strange concept of alternative histories as follows. Imagine an eccentric (and bored) tycoon offering you $10 million to play Russian roulette, i.e., to put a revolver containing 1 bullet in the 6 available chambers to your head and pull the trigger. Each realization would count as one history, for a total of six possible histories of equal probabilities. Five out of these six histories would lead to enrichment; one would lead to a statistic, that is, an obituary with an embarrassing (but certainly original) cause of death. The problem is that only one of the histories is observed in reality; and the winner of $10 million would elicit the admiration and praise of some fatuous journalist (the very same ones who unconditionally admire the Forbes 500 billionaires). Like almost every executive as what I have encountered during an fifteen-year career on manufacturing, business and financial management & portfolio (the role of such executives in my view being no more than a judge of results delivered in random manner), the public observes the external signs of wealth without even having a glimpse at the source (we call such source the generator). Consider the possibility that Russian roulette winner would be used a role model by his family, friends, and neighbors.

While the remaining five histories are not observable, the wise and thoughtful person would easily make a guess as to their attributes. It requires some thoughtfulness and personal courage. In addition, in time, if the roulette-being fool keeps playing the game, the bad histories will tend to catch up with him. Thus, if a twenty-five-year-old played Russian roulette, say, there would be a very slim possibility of his surviving until his fiftieth birthday-but, if there are enough players, say thousands of twenty-five year-old players, we can expect to see a handful of (extremely rich) survivors (and very large cemetery). Here I have to admit that the example of Russian roulette is more than intellectual to me. I have a friend that lost a pacar untuk jadi istri to her game during the Jakarta Riots on 1998 where she insisted herself to stay in Jakarta whereas her family rush for flight off), when we were in our romancing age. But there is more. I discovered that I had more than a shallow interest in literature thank to the effect of Graham Greenes account of his flirt with such a game; it bore a stronger effect on me than the actual events I had recently witnessed. Greene claimed that he once tried to soothe the dullness of his childhood by pulling the trigger on a revolver-making me shiver at the thought that I had at least a one in six probability of having been without his novels.

The reader can see my unusual notion of alternative accounting: $10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of medical & surgeon doctors. They are the same, can buy the same goods, except that ones dependence on randomness is greater than the other. To an accountant, though, they would be identical; to your next-door neighbor too. Yet, deep down, I cannot help but consider them as qualitatively different. The notion of such alternative accounting has interesting intellectual extensions and lends itself to mathematical formulation. In other words, one need not actually compute he alternative histories so much as assess their attributes. Mathematics is not just a number game, it is a way of thinking.


3. Information : Alternatives or Discrimination
It would be nave to suppose that people abuse information only when they are acting as experts or as agents of commerce. After all, agents and expert are people too-which suggests that we are likely to abuse information in our personal lives as well, whether by withholding true information or editing the information we choose to put forth. Think about how you describe yourself during a job interview versus how you might be describe yourself on a first date. (For even more fun, compare that first-date conversation to conversation with the same person during your tenth year of marriage). Even if you are a private citizen, you surely wouldnt want to seem bigoted while appearing in public. Might here be a away to test for discrimination in a public setting?

In a given year, some forty million Americans swap intimate truths about themselves with complete strangers. It all happens on Internet dating sites. Some of them, like Match.com, eHarmony.com, and many more, even Yahoo! Personals, appeal to broad audience.

Each site operates a bit differently, but the gist is this: You compose a personal ad about yourself that typically includes a photo, vital statistics, your income range, level of education, likes and dislikes, and so on. If the ad catches someones fancy, that someone will e-mail you and perhaps arrange a date. On many sites, you also specify your dating aims: long-term relationship, a casual lover, or just looking. (in one of Indonesian newspaper on Sunday edition therere kolom jodoh even clearly said: serius untuk menikah!, janda, pegawai negeri mencari bujangan/duda, anak tidak masalah, sarjana, pekerjaan mapan!!!)

So there are massive layers of data to be mined here: the information that people include in their ads and level of response gleaned by any particular ad. Each layer of data can be asked its own question. In the case of the ads, how forthright (and honest) are people when it comes to sharing their personal information? And in the case of the responses, what kind of information in personal ads is considered the most (and least) desirable?

Two economists and a psychologists recently banded together to address these questions. Gnter J. Hitsch, Ali Hotasu, and Dan Ariely analyzed the data from one of the mainstream dating sites, focusing on more than 20,000 active users, half in Boston and Half in San Diego. Fifty-six percent of the users were men!, and the median age range for all users was twenty-one to thirty-five. Although they represented an adequate racial mix to reach some conclusions about race, they were predominantly white.

They were also a lot richer, taller, skinnier, and better-looking than average. That, at least, is what they wrote about themselves. More than 4% of the online daters claimed to earn more than $ 200,000 a year, whereas fewer than 1% of typical Internet users actually earn that much, suggesting that three of the four big earners were exaggerating. Male and female users typically reported that they are about an inch taller than national average. As for weight, the men were in line with the national average, but the women typically said they weighed about twenty pounds less than the national average.

Most impressively, fully 72% of the women claimed above average looks, including 24% claiming very good looks. The online men too were gorgeous: 68% called themselves above average, including 19% with very good looks. This leaves only about 30% of the users with average looks, including a paltry 1% with less than average looks-which suggests that the typical online dater is either a fabulist, a narcissist, or simply resistant to the meaning of average. (Or perhaps they are all just pragmatists: as any real-estate agent knows, the typical house isnt charming or fantastic, but unless you say it is, no one will even bother to take a look). Twenty-eight percent of the women on the site said they were blond, a number far beyond the national average, which indicates a lot of dyeing, or lying, or both.

Some users, meanwhile, wee bracingly honest. Seven percent of the men conceded that they were married, with a significant minority of these men reporting that they were happily married. But the fact that they were honest doesnt mean they were rash. Of the 243 happily married men in the sample, only 12 choose to post picture of themselves. The reward of gaining a mistress was evidently outweighed by the risk of having your wife discover your personal ad. (And what were you doing on that websites? the husband might bluster, undoubtedly to little avail).

Of the many ways to fail on dating website, not posting a photo of yourself is perhaps he most certain. (Not that the photo necessarily is a photo of yourself; it may well become some better-looking stranger, but such deception would obviously backfire in time.) A man who does not include his photo gets only 60% of the volume of email response of a man who does; a woman who doesnt include the photo gets only 24% as much. A low-income, poorly educated, unhappily employed, not very attractive, slightly overweight, and balding man who posts his photos stands a better chance of gleaning some e-mails than a man who says he makes $ 200,000 and is deadly handsome but doesnt post a photo. There are plenty of reasons someone might not post a photo - hes technically challenged or is ashamed of being spotted by friends or is just plain unattractive - but as in the case of a brand-new car with a For Sale sign, prospective customers will assume hes got something seriously wrong under the hood.

Getting a date is hard enough as it is. Fifty-six percent of the men who post ads dont receive even one e-mail; 21% of the women dont get a single response. The traits that do draw a big response, meanwhile, will not be a big surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the sexes. In fact, the preferences expressed by online daters fit snugly with the most common stereotypes about men and women.

For instance, men who say they want a long-term relationship do much better than men looking for an occasional lover. But women looking for an occasional lover do great. For men, a womans looks are of paramount importance. For women, a mans income is terribly important. The richer a man is, the more e-mails he receives. But a womans income capital appeal is bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off. Woman are eager to date military men, policemen, and firemen (possibly the result of a 9/11 Effect), along with lawyers and doctors; they generally avoid men with manufacturing jobs. For men, being short is a big disadvantage (which is probably why so many lie about it), but weight doesnt matter. For women, being overweight is deadly (which is probably why they lie). For a man, having red hair or curly hair is a downer, as is bald with a fringe- but a shave head is okay. For a woman, salt-and-pepper hair is bad, while blonde hair is, not surprisingly, very good.

In addition to all the information about income, education, and looks, men and women on the dating site listed their race. They were also asked to indicate a preference regarding the race of their potential dates. The two preferences were the same as mine or it doesnt matter. Like the Weakest Link contestants, the websites users were now publicly declaring how they felt about people who didnt look like them. They would reveal their actual preferences later in confidential e-mails to the people they wanted to date.

Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80% of the white men declared that race didnt mater to them. But the response data tell a different story. The white men who said that race didnt matter sent 90% of their e-mail queries to white woman. The white women who said race didnt matter sent about 97% of their e-mail queries to white men. This means that an Asian man who is good-looking, rich, and well educated will receive fewer than 25% as many e-mails from white women as a white man with the same qualifications would receive; similarly, Black and Latino men receive about half as many e-mails from white women as they would if they were white.

Is it possible that race really didnt mater for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a nonwhite date that interested them? Or, more likely, did they say that race didnt mater because they wanted to come across-especially to potential mates of their own races-as open-minded?

In simply, I figure it by the joke.
See : http://www.scribd.com/doc/934630/How-Are-Peoples-Different-Seeing-What-The-Things


4. Morality: (Nobody Smoke in Church ?) Alternative or Randomness to Condition
The degree of resistance to randomness in ones life is an abstract idea, part of its logic counterintuitive, and, to confuse matters, its realization non-observable. Clearly my way judging matters is probabilistic in nature; it relies on the notion of what could have probably happened, and requires a certain mental attitude with respect to ones observations. I do not recommend engaging an accountant in a discussion about such probabilistic considerations. For accountant a number is number. If he interested in probability he would have gotten involved I more introspective professions- and would be include to make a costly mistake on your tax return.

If morality represents the way we would like the world to work and economics represents how it actually work, then the story of Felmans bagel business lies at the very intersection of morality and economics.

There is a tale, The Rings of Gyges, that Feldman sometimes tells his economist friends:

When he started his business, he expected a 95% payment rate, based on the experience at his own office. But just a crime tends to be low on a street where a police car is parked, the 95% rate was artificially high: Feldmans presence had deterred theft. Not only that, but those bagel eaters knew the provider and had feelings (presumably good ones) about him. A broad swath of psychological and economic research has shown that people will pay different amounts for the same item depending on who is providing it. The economist Richard Thaler, in his 1985 Beer on the Beach study, showed that a thirsty sunbather would pay $2.65 for a beer delivered from a resort hotel but only $1.50 for the same beer if it came from a shabby grocery store.

In the real world, Feldman learned to settle for less than 95%. He came to consider a company honest if its payment rate was above 90%. He considered a rate between 80 and 90% annoying but tolerable. If a company habitually paid below 80%, Feldman might post a hectoring note, like this one:

The cost of bagels has gone up dramatically since the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, the number of bagels that disappear without being paid for has also gone up. Dont let that continue. I dont imagine that you would teach your children to cheat, so why do it yourselves?

In the beginning, Feldman left behind an open basket for the cash, but too often the money vanished. Then he tried a coffee can with a money slot in its plastic lid, which also proved too tempting. In the end, he resorted to making small plywood boxes with a slot cut into the top. The wooden box has worked well. Each year he drops off about seven thousand boxes and loses, on average, just one to theft. This is intriguing statistic: the same people who routinely steal more than 10% of his bagels almost never stoop to stealing his money box - a tribute to the nuanced social calculus of theft. From Feldmans perspective, an office worker who eats a bagel without paying is committing a crime; the office worker probably doesnt think so. This distinction probably has less to do with the admittedly small amount of money involved (Feldmans bagels cost one dollar each, cream cheese included) than with the context of the crime. The same office worker who fails to pay for his bagels might also help himself to a long slurp of soda while filling a glass in a self-service restaurant, but he is very unlikely to leave the restaurant without paying.

So what the bagel data have to say? In recent years, there have been two noteworthy trends in the overall payment rate. The first was a long, slow decline that began in 1992. By the summer of 2001, the overall rate had slipped to about 87%. But immediately after September 11 of that year, the rate spiked a full 2% and hasnt slipped much since. (If a 2% gain in payment doesnt sound like much, think of it this way: the nonpayment rate fell from 13 to 11 percent, which amounts to a 15% decline in theft.)

The data also show that smaller offices are more honest than big ones. An office with a few dozen hundred employees generally outpays by 3 to 5 percent an office with a few hundred employees. This may seem counterintuitive. In a bigger office, a bigger crowd is bound to convene around the bagel table, providing more witnesses to make sure you drop your money in the box. But in the big-office/small-office comparison, bagel crime seems to mirror street crime. There is far less street crime per capita rural in cities, in large part because a rural criminal is more likely to be known (and therefore caught). Also, a smaller community tends to exert greater social incentives against crime, the main one being shame.

The bagel data also reflect how much personal mood seems to affect honesty. Weather, for instance is a major factor. Unseasonably pleasant weather inspires people to pay at a higher rate. Unseasonably could weather, meanwhile, makes people cheat prolifically; so do heavy rain and wind. Worst are the holidays. The week of Christmas produces a 2% drop in payment rates again, a 15 % increase in theft, an effect on the same magnitude. Thanksgiving is nearly as bad; the week of Valentines Day is also lousy, as is the week straddling April 15. There are however, several good holidays: the weeks that include the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Columbus Day. The difference in the two sets of holidays? The low-cheating holidays represent little ore than an extra day off from work. The high-cheating holidays are fraught with miscellaneous anxiety and the high expectations of loves one. (In several cites di Indonesia, the accident rate due to criminal activities, i.e. copet, also rising up in Holly Ramadhan whereby peoples actively for spiritual things).

Feldman has reached some of his own conclusions about honesty, based more on his experience than the data. He has com to believe that morale is a big factor that an office is more honest when the employees like their boss and their work. He also believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He got this idea after delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors - an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, services, and administrative employees. (Feldman wondered if perhaps the executives cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didnt consider is that perhaps cheating was how they got to be executives)

Sherlock Holmes once said:
Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically.
-A Study in Scarlet, pt.2, ch.7


5. SPECIAL GIFTS
We are still very close to our ancestors who roamed the savannah. The formation of our beliefs is fraught with superstitions- even today (I might say, especially today), Just as one day some primitive tribesman scratched his nose, saw rain falling, and developed an elaborate method of scratching his nose to bring on the much- needed rain, we link economic prosperity to some rate cut by the Federal Reserved Board, or the success of a company with the appointment of the new president at the helm. Bookstores are full of biographies of successful men and women presenting their specific explanation on how they made it big in life (we have an expression, the right time and the right place, to weaken whatever conclusion can be inferred from them). This confusion strikes people of different persuasions; the literature professor invests a deep meaning into a mere coincidental occurrence of word patterns, while the economist proudly detects regularities and anomalies in data that are plain random.

Top-echelon men and women often fall prey to this type of self-delusion. A world-famous concert pianist does have an extraordinary talent, as does a fist-rate architect; a corporate leader heads the pack because she is blessed with a sense of grand-scale strategy. It would be hypocritical to deny such gifts; they are rightfully a source of pride.

But a person who work frustrates his or her genuine talents-for example a frustrated research scientist who finds himself tried to administrative duties-may invent special gifts-fantasies that compensate for loss of job satisfaction and give him an illusory edge over his co-workers and competition. Blind faith in intuition as the basis of decision-making is a common form of believing in special gifts, as is excessive reliance on sheer willpower, instead of judgment and analysis, to make things happen.

A senior editor at a big New York publisher, Jeanie was devoted to books and got the top because she had a canny literary intelligence and finesse in negotiating. Bestsellers seemed to blossom under her cultivation. But as she moved up the ladder in her prestigious firm, she moved away from a hands-on relationship with her books. Her company valued her reputation more than her literary skill; acquisitions became more important than quibbling over commas, as one of her colleagues put it.

Outwardly accepting this situation, Jeanie made the best of it by endowing herself with a magical nose. I can smell a bad manuscript through the envelope, she assured me. Neglecting her talent, however, left her on shaky ground. Privately she knew that her real ego strength came for helping to make good books, not from publishing sorcery.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher boasted, I make up my mind about people in the first ten seconds and I rarely change it. Her arrogance, it is said, caused her own party to vote her out of office. I have heard colleagues judge a new client or associate by a handshake, how they dress, or what kind of car they drive, and in one case by how they seasoned their food.

Carriers of such hubris believe that, like Midas, their mere touch can turn dross into gold. A merchant or designer may justify her outrageously expensive life-cycle to creditors on he basis that she is magical: that her personal presence, her aura, bring in business. In show business, this may be true some extent. But rusting in charisma as a recipe for success is inviting shadows to rise like yeasty dough.
Belief in special gifts may lead us to think that we have all the answers, even outside our area of special competence. If Im this successful, so goes the reasoning, then I am wise in all areas of life.
The media encourage this form of self-inflation, elevating achievers in one or two fields to the role of all-around expert. A writer of historical romances is pressured to comment on international events; a TV personality is expected to offer sage advice on complex social or economic issues.
The notion of magical powers that enable a person to pass judgment on an unread manuscript, let alone on a human being, sounds preposterous to anyone except the person making the claims. The compulsion to invent unreal gift is an expression of irrational impulses from the shadow: fear that we really do not deserve our success; age that we feel trapped and victimized by the goals that we worked so hard to attain. Dependence on illusory gifts weakens our vital critical capacity for perception, analysis, and communication, and promotes a dangerous sense of invulnerability to consequences and immunity to criticism. We may need to believe in magic because for some reason we have been blocked from exercising our innate talents or perhaps because we have lost faith in them. But irrational magical thinking will merely make things worse by further distancing us from the real roots of our success.

By contrast, success sustainers have learned to identify, appreciate, and nurture their true gifts by making sure they have opportunities to use them. They are always alert to the perils of basing decisions on the magical me. If they find themselves thinking: If its not in the first paragraph, I dont need to read it, or, I can glance at balance sheet and tell you what the business is worth, they are crossing the boundary into Hubris Country.



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As what related to this writing, see what Richard Farson about the paradox in:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/906513/IS-EVERYTHING-WE-KNOW-ABOUT-SUCCESS-WRONG
http://www.scribd.com/doc/418866/Management-of-The-Absurd





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About the Author:
Haery Sihombing (iphaery)
Visiting Lecturer-Melaka