Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.
You. Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells
and this is the Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast,
episode number 59, with,
of course, our co-host today, Tom Libby. How you doing,
Tom? Doing awesome. Happy to be here again.
And we're going to be covering today as
we go into the merry month of May. We're going to be covering today
a book that is a meditation on
the nature of decorum, which we don't often talk about in our culture anymore.
Politeness, appropriate conduct, and the misleading
and ever-changing nature of that ever-deceptive human
heart. Jane Austin's Sense and
Sensibility. Now, the version that I
have that you can see on the video recording of this podcast
was published by Arc Tourists Publishing
and Arc Tourist Holdings Limited in 2022.
So it's a little bit of a little bit of an updated
version of this book well, not updated version, but an updated edition of
this book with a little bit of a different cover.
It does clock in, since its sensibility does clock in at
365 pages. So it's
definitely a mid level read. It'll take if you're reading it through,
take about a month if you're really clopping through to
cover it. And, of course, our podcast today
acts as an accompaniment to the podcast
that we did where we covered Jane Austen last year and we
talked about Dave Shepard's The Annotated Persuasion.
So I'm going to open from Sense and Sensibility,
chapter one. I'm going to start right at the beginning and get
right into it. The family of Dashwood
had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their
residence was at Norland Park, in the center of their property,
where for many generations they had lived in so respectable a manner
as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.
The late owner of this estate was a single man who lived to a very
advanced age and who for many years of his life, had a constant companion and
a housekeeper in his sister. But her death,
which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home.
For to supply her loss, he invited and received it to his house the family
of his nephew, Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor
of the Norland estate and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it
in the society of his nephew and niece and their children.
The old gentleman's days were comfortably spent. His attachment to
them all increased. The constant attention of Mr. And Mrs.
Henry Dashwood to his wishes, which proceeded not merely from
interest, but from goodness of heart, gave him every degree of solid comfort
which his age could receive. And the cheerfulness of
the children added a relish to his existence by
a former marriage. Mr. Henry Dashwood had one son by his present lady three
daughters. The son, a steady, respectable young man,
was amply provided for by the fortune of his mother, which had been
large and half of which devolved on him on his coming of age by
his own marriage likewise, which happened soon afterwards, he added to his wealth.
To him, therefore, the succession to the Norland estate was not so really
important as to his sisters. For their fortune, independent of
what might arise to them from their fathers inheriting that property could
be but small. Their mother had
nothing and their father only 7000 pounds in
his own disposal. For the remaining moiety of his first wife's fortune
was also secured to her first child and he had only a
life interest in it. The old gentleman
died. His will was read and like almost every other
will, gave as much disappointment as pleasure.
He was neither so unjust nor so ungrateful as to leave his
estate from his nephew. But he left it to him on such terms as
destroyed half the value of the bequest. Mr. Dashwood had wished
for it more for the sake of his wife and daughters than for himself or
his son. But to his son, and his son's son, a child of four years
old it was secured in such a way as to leave to himself no power
of providing for those who were most dear to him and who most
needed a provision by any change
on the estate or by any sale of its valuable woods.
The whole was tied up for the benefit of this child, who, in occasional visits
with his father and mother in Norland, had so far gained on the affections of
his uncle by such attractions as are by no
means unusual in children of two or three years old. An imperfect
articulation and earnest desire of having his own way many cunning
tricks and a great deal of noise as to outweigh all the value of
all the attention which for years he had received from his niece and her
daughters. He meant not to be unkind, however and
as a mark of his affection for the three girls he left them
1000 pounds apiece. Mr.
Dashwood's disappointment was at first severe but his temper was cheerful and sanguine and
he might reasonably hope to live many years and by living economically lay by
a considerable sum from the produce of an estate already large and capable of almost
immediate improvement. But the fortune which had been so
tardy and coming was his only 112 month.
He survived his uncle no longer and 10,000 pounds,
including the late legacies, was all that remained for his widow
and daughters. His son was sent for
as soon as his danger was known and to him Mr. Dashwood recommended with all
the strength and urgency which illness could command the interest of his mother in law
and sisters. Mr.
John Dashwood had not the strong feelings of the rest of the family but he
was affected by a recommendation of such a nature at such a time and he
promised to do everything in his power to make them comfortable. His father was rendered
easy by such an assurance, and Mr. John Dashwood had then leisure to consider how
much there might prudently be in his power to do for them.
He was not an ill disposed young man, unless to be rather
cold hearted and rather selfish is to be ill disposed. But he was in
general well respected, for he conducted himself with propriety and the discharge
of his ordinary duties. Had he married a more amiable woman,
he might have been made still more respectable than he was.
He might even have been made amiable himself, for he
was very young when he married and very fond of his wife.
But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself,
more narrow minded and selfish.
There's an awful lot there right at the opening of Sense and Sensibility,
but it does lay the foundation for where we are going.
It lays the foundation for the politeness and the decorum of the novel.
And it is important to discuss inheritance and though
twists and turns, because this sets the stage for future
drama. We live in a time where
we don't really think too much about inheritance, but it does float
around underneath our perceptions of
fairness, justice, and what one generation owes
another. When thinking about
Sense and Sensibility, we of course, have to think about the literary life of Jane
Austin. And well, if you go and visit the Wikipedia article
about Sense and Sensibility, you will see, and I
quote that Sense of Sensibility tells the story of the Dashwood
sisters, Eleanor, age 19, and Mary Ann, age 16 and a
half. As they come of age. They have an older half brother, John, and a
younger sister, Margaret, age 13.
Senses Sensibility has been adapted to film, radio, television, and it's
never really been out of print ever since its first print run of, get this,
750 copies in the middle of 1813.
It was Jane Austin's first novel, and she was born
in 1775 and died in July of 1817.
And she had modest success as
an author during her time. We mentioned this on our episode around
Persuasion, but little fame
during her lifetime, however posthumously,
when Persuasion was published. She has launched in a J curve up,
as they say, in startup culture and to the right. And she's
never really been out of print and never really been out of discussion, not amongst
her feminist critics, not amongst folks looking for
insight into 18th century
class mores, and even the relationships
between men and women in premodern English
era. Senses Sensibility is written in an
epistolary form, which I didn't know what this meant, but apparently novels
used to be written as if they were or modeled on
the writing of letters right to each other.
It's almost as if the
primary form of the novel in
the 19th century and in the 18th century,
that primary form, if it were updated to today,
would be as if we would be writing a novel based on the types of
emails or, dare I say,
tweets we send to messages or text messages
we send to each other. And by the way, Tom inserted
text messages there. We are starting to see novels that do have a bit of
that and that is starting to show up in movies and in film.
And it's less jarring than it was potentially back in the 1990s,
early 2000s, when it first started showing up. But this
epistolary form, the style of writing in which
all of the action, dialogue and character interactions are
reflected through letters sent from one or more of the characters
to each other, is really the grounding. It's really the basis of sense
and sensibility. And so the chapters are short. They're no more than four pages
and they do move quite quickly.
Austen overcame that form and began to
cobble together the modern novel.
So we're going to talk about that today along with several other areas with,
like I said before, our co host today, our regular co host, Tom Libby.
So the first question that I have or the opener for today after
my long Rample there is,
Tom, why don't we
write letters anymore? And by the way, I was writing this script. It's really
weird. I was writing the script while my daughter in the other room down
the hall around the corner is is clanking out. She found an
old Corona typewriter somewhere in my house and is clanking out something
on an old Corona typewriter. I tremble to ask white she's
doing, but I do hear the clickety, clickety, clickety,
clicky, click. So why is it that
no one sends letters anymore?
It's so weird. Like when I saw your
outline for this podcast and I saw that question, my first instinct
was, how in God's green earth would I know?
And then I thought to myself, well, why don't I write letters anymore?
Am I common enough of a thinker to think that
if I have a reason behind this, that there'd be enough people?
Anyway, I overthink a lot, everyone, just to let
you know. So what happened to writing letter?
It's interesting that you asked that because my
kids and I my children and I joke a lot about the fact that I
actually remember the day that they announced
the invention of the at sign for the emails.
Right? Yes. Tom Libby t Libby,
blah, blah, blah@whatever.com. Right. And I remember this going,
who cares? No one's going to do anything with
this. This is going to be stupid. Right. Little that I know. And that's probably
why I'm not a millionaire with the stock market right now either.
That's right. But I think
the simplest answer to this question honestly is because we have so
many avenues to communicate at this point.
And most of the avenues that we currently have to communicate are
very quick and very quick to respond. Right.
Like we were just joking about the text messages in the dialogue
and books and whatnot. Right. So I can send you,
Hasana, a text message of a very simple question or
that you can respond to almost immediately. Right. So there's literally seconds between
responses. If I have something more in depth, I can write
an email. Technically, if you want to
use that as a form of a letter, sure. But it's not truly
a letter anymore.
I think our mindset has started to change of what
is personal and what is impersonal. Right?
Like, for example, if I I could I could send my
mom a letter, a word. Coming up on Mother's Day my
mother lives in Missouri. I can send my mother a
letter saying, hey Mom, I was thinking about you. Happy Mother's Day. Blah, blah,
blah. And she could look at this and go, why wouldn't
you just send me a text? Or Why wouldn't you just call me?
Right. Because calling her on the phone
and actually speaking to her is more personal than writing
a letter. I don't
know. I think your mindset is changing to that direction, I guess, is my point.
I don't know. I handwrote a letter to my mother during
COVID about something I can't remember.
But I mean, I even wrote in the letter.
It's been years since I actually did this. I don't even think I know how
to do cursive writing anymore, which I
had beautiful penmanship, and it
was very important that I have beautiful penmanship. I won't get into why,
but it was very important that I have beautiful readable penmanship
and penmanship writing
letters. I loved how you talked about the seconds between responses.
I think that's very important.
We did a shorts episode that everybody should go back
and listen to before they listen to this episode. Episode number 78,
I think of the shorts episodes anyway, it doesn't matter, but I talk about
and it kind of relates to what you're saying here. When you lose the small
things, then the larger things aren't far behind.
And maybe it's not losing the small things. Maybe it's redefining what
the small things are.
Yes, but where I was going with this, by the way, is I think that
mindset because I also think and I thought where you were going to
go down, what path you were going to go down was that
if I were to write a letter to an acquaintance, I'm not talking about my
mom. I'm just somebody that I just know, I haven't heard from in a long
time. I'm not connected to them on Facebook or social media, whatever.
Right. I wrote a letter because I had their old address sometimes,
and this actually applies to me, too, sometimes when I get a
letter in the mail, it's almost like a wow factor now.
Right. So we don't use it for day to day
communication anymore because we have this instant.
So it's not that people aren't writing letters. They're only writing
them to get a different visceral response
versus just a quick response or
like an answer to a question. Whereas in Jane Austin's
error, you had to write a letter to get an answer to a question.
Like, you had to send them a letter, then write the letter back and send
it back. You could have a whole conversation that would take you a year.
Right. It took them.
So I think about the Revolutionary War and how the Revolutionary War
was not won but run, how the operation
of that war went, right? Sure. And for
sure. Gutenberg printing press, I mean, whatever, 300 years
of printing press already, everybody kind of knew what that was.
It's what's going to be 300 years into the Internet. Like, we're at the beginning
of the Internet right now, 300 years now. Who the heck knows how
they'll be running the war with the Internet? Okay?
But at that time, if you wanted to get orders from
England about troop
movements or things that needed to happen,
you had to get a letter across the ocean, and it might not make it.
The Atlantic is a big lake, and if it
did make it, then you had to take get it on horseback to the actual
battleground. And so you
didn't deliver military instructions
via mail. You deliver
them via horseback. You deliver via runner in the
theater of battle. But the guys back in England,
the politicians back there, they were arguing about things that had already occurred
six months ago. Yeah, right, exactly. And so you
had a lot of freedom in the field because there wasn't that seconds
between responses and that's in a military
context, in a social context. And Sense and Sensibility
addresses some of this. Like, there's a character in here, Edward,
which we'll talk about some of the characters in here, but the character, Edward,
he just leaves and then magically shows up.
Well, not magically, but shows up later on.
And he's like, yeah, I was riding around.
This is the side. I pop in for
a little cuppa, little cup of tea.
Or you got another character in here who receives a letter,
doesn't explain to anybody what's in the letter and
then just busts out, just pieces out.
I don't think we're going to cover that portion of the podcast today, but that
is seen as such rudeness that he wouldn't
tell them what was in the letter.
So they're making up all these stories, and they're king up all this gossip in
their heads. And of course, they're doing what people do basically now,
human beings, right. And they're building these monuments
in their heads. And it turns out, of course, there's something else later on in
the novel, but it is funny because he holds
that letter so close, and it is and you
can see it in your head. It's the 19th century handwritten letter,
the whole script, whatever. And then he just pieces out and leaves.
We have a version of that today, Hasan. We have a version of that.
It's called the screen lock. So if you don't let anybody own what your screen
lock is, they can't read your text message.
So, in other words, nothing has changed in 200 years.
No, nothing's changed in human communication at all. Very little has changed
all the same thing.
Well, this gets to sort of our second idea here, which we'll cover here in
a little bit, which sort of prefaces a little bit.
So in a letter,
you have to be politeness because you actually have to think about the words
that you're writing and how those words are going to impact somebody else.
Because the paper is permanent, the ink is permanent. There's a
feeling of permanency that goes along with that thing. And this is why I like
the novel, because there's a feeling of permanency. That's why I love books,
even though no one reads anymore. But there's this feeling of permanent
feeling of permanency with a book, whereas with a text or
a tweet or an email, if I lose my Google
Workspace account, that's like 50,000 emails, they're just by
gone, and Google will just google is not going to get them back for me.
Google doesn't care. There's no, like 1800 number for me
to call to get those emails back.
That sense of impermanency.
And I love how you talk about the visceral nature of getting a letter and
the visceral emotion that's attached to that. Yeah. The reaction.
Do you think that that's because of that impermanency? Like we're so familiar with
the impermanency now?
Yeah, absolutely. Because again,
one of the things I find myself doing lately well, I shouldn't
say lately, I've been doing it all along, but it's been
on the forefront of my mind lately is saving that stuff,
right? My mom will send me a birthday
card, and I now save that. Whereas 25,
30 years ago, I would have probably not saved it. I would have been like,
oh, it's just a card, whatever, right? Because I'll get another one next year.
And now it's like that handwritten note inside the card
from my mom. That's what I want to remember when I have Alzheimer's and
I can't remember my own name. I want to be able to open that up
and go, oh my God, I remember how much I loved her, or whatever,
right? So now I got a box. I got a box that I have birthday
cards, Father's Day cards, Christmas cards from all the
people who are important in my life. And I do it because it's
and I have them almost in sequential order, like timeline order, so to speak,
because I fear I got to tell you, out of all the things I fear
in my life, I don't fear death. I have no fear of death.
I don't fear failing. As a matter of fact, I encourage
failing because that's how you learn probably the most life lessons I lear Alzheimer's
being able to be trapped in your own mind and not
being able to know, understand or identify
what's going on around you, but still physically be okay.
petrifies me. One of the ways you can combat this
is doing what I'm doing and having things I'm
not certain I'm going to remember how to use a computer. So saving emails
or saving text messages probably not going to matter.
But saving tangible holdable cards,
letters, it's going to matter. It's going to matter when I get to that age.
Knock on wood. Hopefully I don't ever get truly Alzheimer's,
but hopefully that stuff matters. And to your .1
of the things I spent a lot of time in senior health care, by the
way. So that's why this stuff scares the crap out of me. But one of
the things they talk about all the time is when people do have Alzheimer's or
dementia, especially severe dementia, it's not about what
they think or what they know. It's about how they feel when somebody
walks into a room and they don't recognize them, but they know they feel
good when they see them. That's what's important to
them. So I worry about that stuff. And to your point, the value of this
stuff, the value of the handwritten, whatever it is, whether it's a letter,
a birthday card, Christmas card, whatever, I find that they're going
to become more and more valuable as we go along,
not less and less. Yeah, I think you're right.
It goes to this idea of not how
do you want to be remembered, but how do you want to
remember, which is fundamental,
right? And I know we're a leadership podcast, and we'll get
to the leadership elements here that are in Sense and Sensibility, because there
are leadership elements in Sense and Sensibility here,
particularly around politeness and decorum. I think those are critical
things that don't very often get talked about, and this is where Austen really shines.
But this idea of the epistolary form
as a novel and then taking that form and turning it into something that's more
permanent in order to attach meaning to it, and now,
well over 200 years later, we're at a point where impermanence
is everywhere. And so how do you hold on to that? I think
that's I think that's a critical that's a critical thing because
we built these weird digital towers to ourselves
online, and yet we
also have this fear inside of us that no one's going to care
in 200 years.
Just like 1000 years ago, no one really
cared about the medieval guy who was struggling on
the farm in Europe or hunting
in Africa or riding
a horse along the steps in Asia. Those people are died
unrecorded with their voices unheard.
And that's been the massive tip that's
the normal thing in human nature is
for human beings or not even human nature, but in human existence, the normal
thing is to be forgotten. And the people who remember you are the people in
your community, the people in your family, the people in your tribe.
And by the way, those are the people that you remember.
Those are the people that you remember.
I think you're onto something here.
I should probably save more of my Christmas cards because normally I do
normally I just throw that stuff away or I'll like,
yeah, I don't think I would have to rethink that now.
You're welcome.
Maybe we all get insights on this podcast. It's good for everybody.
All right, back to the book. Back to
Sense and Sensibility. So we're going to move ahead
a little bit. And Sir John Dashwood
has now moved his family into Norland estate.
And Mrs. Dashwood, the widow of Sir John's
father there,
has now been moved to another estate named
Barton Park. So we're going to pick
up with Mrs. Dashwood King
there in Barton Park. And so Mrs. Dashwood's daughters are
the three that we mentioned,
eleanor, Mary, Ann and Margaret.
Okay. And so they're living in Barton Park. They're just moving in,
and we're going to pick them up here because there's a point
that I want to make about, well, about politeness,
about the small things. So back to sense and sensibility.
The arrival of a new family in the country was always a matter of joy
to him. By the way, the hymn is Sir John,
the owner of Barton. So the arrival of a new family in the
country was always a matter of joy to him. And in every point of view,
he was charmed with the inhabitants he had now procured for his cottage
at Barton. The Ms. Dashwoods were young,
pretty and unaffected. It was enough to secure his good
opinion, for to be unaffected was all that a pretty girl could want, to make
her mind as captivating as her person.
The friendliness of his disposition made him happy in accommodating
those whose situation might be considered in comparison with the past as
unfortunate. In shooing kindness to his cousins, therefore,
he had the real satisfaction of a good heart, and in settling a family of
females only in his cottage, he had all the satisfaction
of a sportsman. For a sportsman, though he esteems only those of his
sex who are sportsmen, likewise is not often desirous of
encouraging their taste by admitting them to a residence within his own manner.
Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters were met at the door of the house by Sir
John, who welcomed them to Barton Park with unaffected sincerity.
And as he attended them to the drawing room, repeated to
the young ladies the concern which the same subject had drawn from him the day
before at being unable to get any smart young men to meet
them. They would see, he said, only one gentleman there
beside himself, a particular friend who was staying at the park, but who was
neither very young nor very gay. He hoped they would all
excuse the smallness of the party and could assure them it should never happen so
again. He had been to several families that morning in hopes
of procuring some addition to their number, but it was moonlighting.
It was moonlight, and everybody was full of engagements.
Luckily Lady Middleton's mother had arrived at Barton within the last
hour and as she was a very cheerful, agreeable woman, he hoped the young ladies
would not find it so very dull as they might imagine. The young
ladies, as well as their mother, were perfectly satisfied with having two entire strangers
of the party and wished for no more.
Mrs. Jennings, lady Middleton's mother, was a good humored,
merry, fat, elderly woman, who talked a great deal,
seemed very happy and rather vulgar.
She was full of jokes and laughter, and for dinner was over had said many
witty things on a subject of lovers and husbands hoped they had not left their
hearts behind them in Sussex, and pretended to see them blush,
whether they did or not. Mary Anne was vexed at
it for her sister's sake, and turned her eyes towards Eleanor to see how she
bore these attacks with an earnestness which gave Eleanor far more pain
than could arise from such commonplace raillery as Mrs.
Jennings. Colonel Brandon, the friend of Sir John,
seemed no more adapted by resemblance of any manner to be his friend than Lady
Middleton was to be his wife or Mrs. Jennings to be Lady Middleton's
mother. He was silent and grave. His appearance,
however, was not unpleasing, in spite of his being, in the opinion of Marianne and
Margaret, an absolute old bachelor for he was on the wrong side
of five and thirding. But though his face was not handsome,
his countenance was sensible, and his address was particularly gentleman
like. There was nothing in any of the party which
could recommend them as companions to the Dashwoods. But the cold insipidity of
Lady Middleton was so particularly repulsive, that in comparison
of it to the gravity of Colonel Brandon and even the boisterous
mirth of Sir John and his mother in law, was interesting. Lady Middleton
seemed to be roused to enjoyment only by the entrance of her four noisy children
after dinner, who pulled her about, tore her clothes and put an end
to every kind of discourse except what related to themselves.
In the evening Marianne was discovered to be musical. She was
invited to play. The instrument was unlocked, everybody prepared to be charmed.
And Marianne, who sang very well at their request, went through the chief of the
songs which Lady Middleton had brought into the family on her marriage,
and which perhaps had lain ever since in the same position on the
piano fort. For her ladyship had celebrated that event by
giving up music, although by her mother's account she had
played extremely well and by her. Own was very
fond of it.
A lot of dynamics going on in that
little section, that little piece that's only like two pages of
Sense and Sensibility. Lot of dynamics in there.
There's dynamics of interpersonal politeness, there's dynamics
of decorum. What does it mean to
tell the truth to people? Should they have called out
Lady Middleton as being an insipid boar? Or should they have just
let her go? And would that have changed anything?
Anyway, in our modern era,
white, we like to speak truth to power where the personal is political.
We believe that politeness represents oppression
or not living out your quote unquote full self, whatever the
hell that may mean, right? I've also recently
heard, or maybe I've read it on Twitter from people
who are pushing certain agendas
very hard and ideological positions very hard. They're going,
as we used to say back in street ball, hard to the hoop on
this one. But I've heard that politeness is part
of the structure of white supremacy.
Okay, this is nonsense,
though. Once decorum and politeness
is abandoned, we see the creeping specter of tyrannical behavior.
But it's tyrannical behavior at its lowest level, right? It's tyrannical behavior.
It's tyrannical posture in places where
it shouldn't be. Family, friends, relationships. I mean,
how many articles do you read every Thanksgiving
when people are written for people to be able
to talk about politics around the Thanksgiving table so we
won't be so polarized. Look,
politeness and decorum, the way that it's framed in
Sense and Sensibility may to our ears sound as though it is
full of constraints and not allowing people to be their full self.
But that king of constraint from 200 years ago
is in exact opposition to the idea that the personal is political.
Some things are too private, too personal, or even too
beyond the boundaries of decorum to discuss and
should probably be left in that box of the
private and the unspoken. But as we have expanded
the franchise and as the unspoken things now won't shut
the hell up, well, we've gotten
ourselves in a little bit of trouble.
This is a challenge for leaders, right? How do you set up the terms of
the team? How do you set up the environment when everybody
wants to talk about everything, including, well, the three main
things you once never talked about sex, religion and
money. Everybody. And by the way, we replace religion with politics now.
So sex, politics and money, right?
How can leaders replace politeness? How can they come get back to politeness
and decorum. How do we get back to there from here?
Well, it's funny do you
say that because that white supremacy
comment, I'm dead.
I am not kidding you. I see it on Twitter.
I've never really thought about that. Politeness as a
I forget how you worded it. Honestly. Politeness. Politeness as a politeness
as a structural act of white supremacy. White supremacy.
So let me get this straight.
I'm dumbfounded by this one. I got to be honest. So people
are in their brain thinking that somebody who's being
polite to you,
that's part of the system of racism. That's the systematic
just being polite. You'd rather me be rude? I'm sorry.
I want to make sure I understand this. Oh, no,
here's the framing. I can go into these
people's heads. So let me go into these people's heads and walk around for a
little bit here for you, just for a. Second, because I want to get back
to the question. Yeah. So politeness
and decorum by these people's. Framing is
seen as a method of oppression. And all oppression
by the feminist sum
of the feminist theorizing of oppression. All oppression
is structurally based on power. And so when you are
oppressing people from talking about things that are core
to their identity, you are engaged in a position of labeling
and a position of power. And usually that position
of power is patriarchal. And usually the dominant group,
which is from again, they're framing the white
male Christian dominant group. They are framing
that lack of conversation in an attempt to
engage in a power, to engage in hierarchical power
games, which we're going to talk about hierarchy in a minute, but in hierarchical power
games that oppress everybody
who is outside of those dominant power structures from living their full self. That was
a way longer explanation, but that's where they're coming from.
But at the risk of sounding like I'm validating,
which I'm not, I kind
of get it now the way that you framed it. I'm just saying I at
least understand. You can understand.
I'm not saying I agree with it, but okay. At least now I get
a little bit of the insights of it now. And just to remind the viewers
who are looking at this video, please do not let the skin color
fool you. I am of Native American descent, so when Hasan
talks about white supremacy and stuff like that, I'm not taking offense to it.
I just want to be clear on this.
Those of you who are listening to the audio, clear diction
is not a symbol of white supremacy. Yes, I want to be
very clear on this. Clear diction is a sign that you have the skill of
speaking a particular language. I would want clear addiction
if I was speaking Swahili. I would want clear diction if I were speaking Japanese.
I would want clear diction if I were speaking Spanish. Clear diction
is a sign of education. It is a sign of respect,
honestly, for the language and decorum. But anyway, moving on.
How do leaders reclaim politeness in decorum? Listen, it takes
no effort to be polite to somebody. I mean, I've been in
I've been in environments where I'm firing five people,
and when they walk out the room, they're smiling and not
happy that they got fired. But you do
not have to be rude crude or miserable
to get your point across, and you certainly don't. This one kind
of stood out to me, too, when you sent me the outline of the podcast
today, because I'm like, how can leaders reclaim? What is there to reclaim? You should
have been doing it from day one and ongoing.
Well, I think we wind up in a space of polar.
This is that whole Marshall McLuhan the personal is political thing taking all
the way to the bottom level of, like, a thimble full of water.
Well,
this is the kinds of conversations you actually wind up having to have
when political topics are discussed in a
leadership context in the workplace. Yeah. And listen,
sometimes it's not even what you say. It's the manner in which you say
it. Right. I can look at you and I think I might have mentioned that
you and I might have had a discussion like this at some point in
the near past, but sometimes it has nothing to
do with the words that are coming out of your mouth. It has more to
do in the way and the manner in which you hold yourself when you say
them. For example, I'll just give the listeners and the viewers a good example.
I can look at you and go, hey, son, you suck.
Right? And then I could look at you a different day, be like, My God.
I'm like, hey, son, you suck, man. It's the same words.
But I'm guaranteeing you, you react differently to the way that I say
it. Right.
If I tell you that I love you, that's a totally different
thing than when I tell my wife I love her. Yes,
exactly. And by the way, if I told it to you the way that I
tell it to my wife, that would. Your wife would have a problem with that?
Yes, that's correct.
My wife would have an issue. Right. But again, in fairness,
I think this question is not so much about reclaiming.
It's more so much about mindfulness and understanding
who you're talking to and how you're talking to people.
I don't think I've ever been considered let
me rephrase this. I'm sure I have. I was going to say,
like, in certain environments, being impolite or having no decorum,
I've never been accused of that in the professional
environments. I have definitely been accused of that in my personal
life. Sometimes I just don't care what my family thinks. I'll just say whatever I
want to say. Okay, well, that's the thing that just don't care thing.
Okay. We are now in a leadership environment, and we have
been for a while now, I would say probably at the last ten years.
And the leadership environment of the last ten years is an environment where,
again, I need to make a space for everyone.
As a leader, I am required to make a space for everyone to show up
with their true selves.
Okay? But here's the pushback on this, and I've
always pushed back on this. Number one, work level
relationships are always what's what we call an anthropology. Second level
relationships. They're not first level relationships. And it
doesn't matter how much of your work is your identity. There is still that separation.
And I don't care if you're working remotely, working from home,
working in a hybrid situation, or working on site. I don't care where
your team is, right? There's a separation that
we create psychologically. And by the way,
we've been doing this ever since we were pushing ever since
people were pushing donkeys behind or
cracking on a donkey to get it to pull a plow, right?
Like, you go out in the field,
right? Or you leave the home to go foraging
or to go hunt, right? Or you go to another
center place in the village to weave the
cotton, right? You talked about being a Native American in Native American
tribal environments, people left the teepee to go do stuff and
then came back. Is that correct? Or left whatever the housing situation was,
right? Am I correct in this? Yeah. Okay. Now,
sometimes they did some stuff, don't get me wrong. They did some stuff in the
home. Everybody did. But for the most part, you left and then come back.
There's something that's important about human beings
physically leaving a space and going into another space. That creates
a barrier. It creates a barrier
separation of place. But now it's a mental mindframe. You change,
right? But now we have all this collapsing of categories that's
happened, happening for the last ten years. And inside
of that collapsing of categories,
some people not everybody, some people are demanding of leaders.
You have to make a space for me to bring my true self, because all
my categories have to collapse here in this space.
And I don't know how you maintain that. I'll be honest. I don't
know how you maintain that. I don't think you can. I had a conversation
again, most all of my kids are adults at this point. I had a conversation
with one of my kids about their job in the past, and they were like,
well, they were complaining about this or that, and I go, well, then get a
new job. Well, I shouldn't have to. They should just no, if you
don't like it, go get a new job. They shouldn't have to fit you
into their it should be a puzzle
piece that fits with everybody. Not everyone's going to fit with everybody,
and you need to make sure that the cogs in the wheel all mesh,
right?
If your current job is not making, as you
put it, making your space for you, then go find one that
will. You should go work where you're wanted and honored
and respected and whatever, and if you are trying to make
an employer forcibly mold into
that, it's not going to happen. At least not
well. But there's a long history but
there was a wait a minute, wait a minute. On the opposite side of that.
There's a long history in the United States of
not even cultural, political institutions having pressure
put on them and changing now,
they're not changing hearts. Let's be real. Okay.
They're just changing the systemic use
a social justice term, the systemic structures of how the system operates.
Right. So the 1964
Civil Rights Act, right, that was evidence
of people putting some external pressure
on not
really systematized racism, but okay, we'll just use that framing for the moment,
systematized racism and creating new laws
that allowed access for African Americans
to places where they had not had access before. Okay, so there's some
evidence, and you can't take this away from this idea from folks,
that if you just put pressure on the structure and don't leave,
the structure will change. There's precedent for that. Sure, yeah.
In the people's minds. They don't separate the government from work.
It's all these larger structures that are outside of themselves that they have no control
over. So why
wouldn't they just hang around with the employer in protest? Why not hold
on now, though. Because here's the difference, the major difference here,
when you're talking about the system, governmental systems and
things like that, then I'd say Rage Against the Machine
because you can make changes. A company is a
little different. If they see that one person, if you are standing alone and
they fire you, you're done. Right? It's completely different.
Where so don't rage against the corporate machine
I don't think that really works with Rage. I don't think Rage really put that
on their last album. I think that one kind of wound up there. I don't
think one made it down the mountain. No, but you know what I'm saying,
right. Unless you are organizing and structured,
you need to have some real support
behind you in the corporate environment. You need to have a certain percentage of the
company that is behind you or it doesn't change. I don't
know whether it's 5%, 10%, 50%.
I'm assuming the company is going to be different. Like that number is
going to change with the company. The size, the structure of the company,
whatever. Government's different with one voice. You can make a
difference if you are stern enough, strong enough, and want to stand firm enough with
one voice because people will eventually start following you.
And you can build it in a corporate environment. You can't build it. You make
that Lear too early, they just fire you.
Okay, is that because and there's been also a lot of lamenting
over the last, I would say 35 years of the
decline of private sector unions.
Oh, definitely, yes.
Because white unions did for the majority well, not even the majority
for at least 30 years of the back half of the 20th
century. What they did was they set up a
system, the unions basically acted
as that structure of negotiated
power against the corporate structure,
right, with government kind of just hanging out over there and
maybe jumping in if they needed to. So you had four major structures, right?
You had family and community, you had government,
you had unions and you had the corporations. Big, small, little,
didn't matter. Now, all of those organizations,
all four of those systems,
if I were more of a social justice warrior, I would say conspired or colluded.
I'm more of a realist. So I'm just going to say made
decisions and then all the other systems made other decisions.
When you have four masses, they're just going to play off of each other.
It's just kind of the human I don't see evil behind that,
but okay, there could be. But I'm just saying, sure there could be.
Your mileage may vary on what you see. I believe in my own
conspiracy theories that I make up. Okay,
so you've got those four systems, right? And the individual inside
of those four systems at least had, from their
perspective, at least had the unions to
be able to go and counterbalance all of those other structures. Now you get on
the other side of globalization. You get on the other side of the 1970s,
and now we're into a different dynamic where you're right, it is
one person alone negotiating with the system.
But to your point, you are right with the unions that one person had a
voice and they weren't fearful of being fired because of their opinion with
that union structure. So now this follows through to the next question,
which is, were things more polite when it was only those
four mass structures, family, community, government,
unions, and and the corporate structure?
I don't know. Honestly, I've never belonged to a unions, so I
couldn't speak to that if there was some advantage to that.
But I've spent a lot of time in the corporate world.
Well, I will say that unions did a really awesome job of
people talk a lot about the top 1% and sort of how
corporate CEOs make too much money and DA DA DA.
What the unions did was they flattened all of that.
So it wasn't that a CEO in the 1950s and
1960s, it wasn't that they were making less
per capita than their comparable
compatriots. 50 years later or 60 years later or 70
years later, they actually were making pretty much the same. Like corporate CEO
salaries are pretty much the same.
But what happened was the compensation structures outside
of salaries became more robust because what the
unions did was they basically forced wage
inflation at the CEO level downward.
And so the compensation then had to shift
into other areas. So for instance, the CEO
of Ford got paid per capita,
pretty much what the CEO of Ford gets paid now.
But their compensation package of stock options,
a private car, a mistress,
whiskey and bourbon in the bottle. Oh, yeah, I said it.
All of that. For those of you who are listening
on the audio, tom is now turning red, laughing when I said mistress as part
of the compensation package. That whole compensation package
is now underwritten in a
different kind of way and has become more robust, particularly because of stock options.
Has become more robust. Whereas back in the day, the unions compressed all of
that. Yeah, I think if I were
to have to answer it just with one word, like yes or no, I would
have to say yes. Right. I think part of
what you're talking about too, is the family
and the union units were almost like on your side
and the corporate and the government was on the other side. And it was even
they had to be polite when the power is even,
right. They had no choice because you couldn't be doing what you're
doing today. Meaning, oh, that guy's a squeaky wheel in the cog, let's fire
him. Right. That didn't happen like that back then. So if
I had to answer a simple answer, I would say then yes.
But again,
we talked a lot about some
of the things that we were hoping took
over for those unions as they dissipated were things like
minimum wage going up at a reasonable rate, the government
getting rid of the time
and a half was now instituted by the government, things like
that. We're all starting to be governed now. So the unions started to kind of
go away. But to your point, I think that
power started to kind of lopside back the other way.
Well, the other dynamic that almost no one ever considers and
this is a business podcast, as well as being a literature podcast, we do have
to mention this dynamic. They kind of tap danced around it. But the other thing
the union does, and no one ever talks about this, but the other thing the
union did was it kept out women and minorities.
Yeah, it did a really awesome job of doing that.
And so if you are a minority male in this country,
I would say you couldn't it was really hard to get
a union job. Yeah, for sure. Like really hard.
Like stupidly hard. And if you were a woman, oh, forget it,
get out of town. You're not going to get a union job. You're going
to be the wife of a person who has a union job. And that's about
where it stops. Now, as unions decline, the franchise, as my lawyer
buddy would say, the franchise expands. Right. So you
have more people in the pool, which from
a corporation's perspective, that's good because now what you
can do is you can spread out the cost of labor across
all of these other demographic areas.
And you can also, because you're the only power in town now, only governments
counterbalancing you. So now you can depress wages.
White also expanding the franchise, which is why every single
time Amazon workers vote for a union,
it fails every single time. I don't know what's happening
with Starbucks, but I do definitely see
a shift happening. But it's going to happen not because
of cultural means of politeness. It's going to happen because of political
issues that are translated into cultural mores.
I can see people unionizing because they
want to use a particular bathroom.
Yeah, but to get back to your original
reclaim politeness in the core, what started this
whole debacle of conversation was,
can leaders reclaim politeness in decorum? I still
stand to my guns here. I think the fact of the matter is we shouldn't
be reclaiming anything. It should have never left in the first place.
You do not need to be told to
treat people with a little bit of dignity and respect.
You shouldn't be told.
I think the other thing in the decorum thing, I think this
could be a podcast all by itself, because I think we are losing grip
on how we present ourselves in certain environments.
I just think it brings me back to the
old Brady Bunch. Put on your Sunday best, kids. We're going to see hers.
Right. People dressed a certain way to go to certain
functions. People dressed a certain way. They held themselves in a
certain way when they're in certain environments, whether it
be weddings or funerals or bridal showers,
corporate parties, corporate functions, things like and
now all of a sudden, it just seems like I can dress in a T
shirt, in shorts. I don't care that I'm going to a wedding.
It just blows my mind how we have deteriorated, how we
present ourselves in a manner like this and back then,
in Jane Austin's time, would have never happened.
Well, this is where we look at the thing that happened in Jane Austin's
time. We look at it through this postmodern lens and we go,
they were repressed. We're just so much freer because we know more.
No, not really.
We talked about this a little bit off the air before we started recording,
but I think it's worthwhile to say here, when the little things go,
the big things aren't far behind. Right? And so people
have been complaining leaders have been complaining about
the casual nature of dress, particularly in
the workplace, for, at minimum, since,
gosh, the early 90s, when I can remember first hearing
that lament. I think
that if leaders
want a tactical thing to take out of this, all this entire conversation in
mishmash around Jane Austin, the tactical thing to take out of this
is you can set the clothing standard.
Yes. Now, you may not have people who want to work with
you, but to Tom's point,
if we really are in a free market of labor
and capital and labor can go wherever the heck it
wants, you set the standard as
the leader. And if labor doesn't agree with it, labor can go pound
sand. There's another job across the street,
right? We dress in top hat and tails here. Well, I don't want to dress
in top hat and tails. There's another job right across the street.
As Alec Baldwin said, infamously in The Departed, the world always these were bartenders
when you go be one over there. And this all stems from
the Steve Jobs era, right? When he came out on that stage as the CEO
of Apple in a turtleneck. Turtleneck, yeah,
right? No shirt and tie, no suit coat. And all
of a sudden, everybody went, well, if he can do it and he's the top
producing, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever, then everybody should be able to
do it because we learn from the top down, right?
Like, we model from the top down. And I was told as a
kid, don't dress for the job you want. Dress for the job you have.
So now I'm a sales guy back then wearing a suit every day.
And I'm like, well, if I want his job, I have to wear a turtleneck
to work tomorrow. My boss was like, no,
if you want this job, you're wearing a suit tomorrow.
I see these turtlenecks walk through this door, we're going to have a problem.
All right, I guess I'm wearing a suit tomorrow. I don't really want Steve Jobs
job.
Maybe I'm ringing the bell on something that doesn't need to be rung. I do
think that in this is the last thing I'll say about polite is it a
core, but we're going to turn the corner a little bit here. Moving on.
We'll move on. But one last thing that
I think bears stating.
I think in family, in small
businesses, we do have a lot of folks who run small businesses who listen to
our podcast.
Civic government, particularly at the state
level, going all the way down there is still an
understanding that decorum,
politeness, dress,
posture, speech, these are
more than just performative check marks.
These are standards of maintaining
well, no, I'll frame it even more, even more bluntly than this.
They are a thumb in the dam or in
the dike against the crashing
water of chaos that is behind that. And that's all
the civilization is.
Civilization is
the battle to create boundaries around chaos, right?
And to contain it and to hold it down, right?
My youngest son likes to listen to,
and I'm going to give a shout out to this author, john R. R.
Erickson and Hank the Cow Dog. And it's
a whole series of these Western themed books that are about
a cow dog, and it's written from the perspective of the dog, right, and the
dog's adventures and all that. And one episode,
he's basically yelling at another dog for eating too loudly out of a
hubcap. Oh, it's hilarious.
I laugh every time I hear it on the audio recording that my kid has.
And he sort of sort of memorized this. But one of the things that the
dog says, that Hank the dog says to the other dog,
drover is eating
loudly is basically a lack of decorum, is what he's saying.
Eating loudly, having bad manners means that you're behaving like
a hog. But no one expects hogs to have civilization. But we're
dogs. We're supposed to hold back the chaos and
be the representatives of civilization. And the other dog, of course,
is the comedic straight man and kind of goes, what? I didn't hear that
the colonels were hard. Like not holding
back chaos is hard. The colonels were hard. And I crack up every time I
hear it. But it's going down to the five year old set, right?
Still the same, though. We're still doing this. This is what I'm saying.
I think we are still holding on. I just think it's our cultural
elite, maybe our political elite, maybe our
thought elites. This is why I've never styled myself as a thought leader.
I think those folks are operating in a different kind of atmosphere.
But even there, I will bet you if
I leapfrogged into that space, I'm not coming in there with a turtleneck
and saying, as my grandmother would have said back in the day this year,
and that there. It's not happening.
I'm with you. All right, back to the book,
back to Sense and Sensibility. We almost did have a whole entire podcast
on that one thing just by itself.
This is a topic that we're going to revisit because I do believe Austin has
a lot. This is where Austin and Bronte we're
going to cover some of the works of Charlotte Bronte. I think we're going to
be talking about Jane Eyre coming up here fairly soon on the podcast.
When women writers write, particularly women writers
of the 17th and 18th and 19th century, when they white, they are
writing about the things they are observing in the
intimate areas of family,
of community. They're not writing about the large,
sweeping trajectory areas like men tend to write about. They're writing
about the small things. We need both of those. We need the big thing.
We need the big vision, we need the great man idea, but we also need
the great woman idea or the great person idea. If we don't want
to be gendered of people,
behaving in small spheres in ways that invents
leadership, because that is where leadership really begins,
is in those small spheres. Back to the book,
back to Sense and Sensibility. We're going to go move ahead here to
chapter ten, and this
gentleman named Willoughby, who's now going to start showing up.
Willoughby is the gentleman caller, along with Edward,
who is romancing one of
the characters in here,
Mary Ann. And so,
chapter ten, we talk about Willoughby and sort of
his nature of being attracted to Marianne.
And keep in mind, Marianne in this book is
16 and a half, right? And so we're going. To talk a little bit about.
What does it mean? What does it mean to be
past your prime? They speedily
discovered that their enjoyment of dancing and music this is Willoughby and Mary
Ann was mutual, and that it arose from a general conformity
of judgment in all that related to either.
Encouraged by this to a further examination of his opinion, she proceeded
to question him on the subject of books. Her favorite authors were
brought forward and dwelt upon white so rapturous a delight that any young man
of five and 20 must have been insensible indeed, not to become
an immediate convert to the excellence of such works. However disregarded
before, their taste was strikingly
alike. The same books, the same passages, were idolized by each or if any
difference appeared, any objection arose. It lasted no longer
than till the force of her arguments and the brightness of her eyes could be
displayed. He acquiesced in all her decisions, caught all
her enthusiasm, and long before his visit concluded, they conversed with the familiarity
of a long established acquaintance. Well,
Mary Anne, said Eleanor, as soon as he had left them for
one morning, I think you have done pretty well. You have already,
ascertained Mr. Willoughby's opinion, in almost every matter of importance. You know what
he thinks of Cowper and Scott. You are certain of his estimating their beauties as
he ought and you have received every assurance of his admiring pope no more
than his proper. But how is your acquaintance to be long
supported under such extraordinary dispatch of every subject
for discourse? You will soon have exhausted each favorite
topic. Another meeting will suffice to explain his sentiments on picturesque beauty
and second marriages, and then you can have nothing farther to ask.
Eleanor. Cried Mary Ann. Is this fair? Is this just?
Are my ideas so scanty? But I see what you mean.
I have been too much at my ease, too happy, too frank. I have erred
against every commonplace notion of decorum.
I have been open, sincere, where I ought to have been reserved, spiritless dull and
deceitful. Had I talked only of the weather and the roads, and I had
spoken only once in ten minutes, this reproach would have been spared.
My love, said her mother, you must not be offended with Eleanor. She was only
in jest. I should scold her myself if she were capable of wishing
to check the delight of your conversation with our new friend.
Marianne was softened in a moment.
Willoughby, on his side, gave every proof of his pleasure in their acquaintance,
which an evident wish of improving it could offer. He came to them
every day to inquire after. Marianne was at first his excuse,
but the encouragement of his reception, to which every day gave greater kindness, made such
an excuse unnecessary. Before it ceased to be possible by Marianne's
perfect recovery, she was confined for some days to the house,
but never had any confinement been less irksome. Willoughby was a
young man of good abilities, quick imagination, lively spirits and an
open, affectionate manner. He was exactly formed to
engage Marianne's heart. For with all this he joined not only a captivating
person, but a natural ardor of mind which was
now roused and increased by the example of her own, and which
recommended him to her affection beyond everything else. The society
became gradually her most exquisite enjoyment. They read, they talked,
they sang together. His musical talents were considerable and he read with
all the sensibility and spirit which Edward had unfortunately wanted.
In Mrs. Dashwood's estimation, he was as faultless as
in Mary Anne's and in Eleanor. And Eleanor saw nothing to censor in
him but a propensity in which he strongly remember and peculiarly delighted
her sister of saying too much what he thought on every occasion,
without attention to persons or circumstances
in hastily forming. And giving his opinions of other people in sacrificing general
politeness to the enjoyment of the undivided attention where his heart was engaged
and in slighting too easily the forms of worldly propriety he displayed
a want of caution which Eleanor could not approve
in spite of all that he and Mary Anne could say in its support.
I'm going to skip over a few things here, and I'm going to go right
to one point here. Colonel Brandon's partiality
for Marianne, which had so early been discovered by his friends, now first became perceptible
to Eleanor. Now Colonel Brandon is another gentleman who has come along.
He was originally at Barton Park and was considered
to be old by Marianne's standards.
Their attention at wit were drawn off to his more fortunate rival,
that would be Willoughby. And the railery which the other had incurred before any partiality
arose was removed. When his feelings began really to call for the
ridicule so justly annexed to Sensibility,
eleanor was obliged, though unwillingly to believe that the sentiments which
Mrsings. Had assigned to him for her own satisfaction were now
actually excited by her sister and that however a general resemblance of
disposition between the parties might forward the affection of Mr. Willoughby. An equally
striking opposition of character was no hindrance to the regard of Colonel Brandon.
She saw it with concern. For what could a silent man of
five and 30 hope when opposed to a very lively one of
five n 20 and as she could not even wish
him successful, she hardly wished him indifferent. She liked him
in spite of his gravity and reserve. She beheld him an object of interest.
His manners, though serious, were mild and his reserve appeared rather the
result of some oppression of spirits than of any natural gloominess of
temper. Sir John had dropped hints of past injuries and disappointments
which justified her belief of his being an unfortunate man and she
regarded him with respect and
compassion.
35 and 16 and a half. Oh,
and 25 and 16 and a half.
I'm going to let you all white. You're listening kind of wander through that in
your head for a minute. But back in the premodern era,
back in the pre industrial era,
1615, even 14,
that was marriageable age for a woman.
And there were many women who married men
who were considered to be old in their 30s,
even up into their forty s and fifty s. And these women were
barely teenagers, what we would call teenagers these days
themselves. However, that concept of
adolescence didn't exist back in the day. That's something that has
really come about. It really began post World
War I, but really gained speed in America post World War II.
And the reality is that right along
with this concept of adolescence, industrialization cultural changes in
the west and globalization have reduced the number of children that individuals
have had and thus created a reality where we are
now through the looking glass. On the other side, where childhood
and adolescence has been extended out to 25,
in some cases 30 or 35.
And those of you who are listening know exactly what I'm talking
about. You have an adult in your basement.
But then there's biology. And biology doesn't
care about industrialization, and biology doesn't care about cultural more rays.
And biology doesn't care about what is
proper or appropriate. Biology merely cares about itself,
right? And it will not be denied no matter what fancy technology
humans throw at it. And we're doing a really awesome job of throwing a lot
of fancy technology at biology. And it doesn't matter
because here's the reality.
The human species wants to propagate, and what they're
talking about is instant sensibility are the cultural acts what Austin is
talking about, a sense of sensibility are the cultural acts that exist around the propagation
of the species. How do people get together? How do they make babies?
How does the species continue? That's all biology
cares about. And what's interesting in our era
is we've also got 40 under 40 lists and 30 under
30 lists and increasingly weirdly enough, 50 under 50
lists. Tom's looking for an invite to that one,
as am I, by the way.
It has to come soon.
And white quick.
How can leaders embrace their age, right? And by the
way, let's go back to the text a little bit here. What can a man
of five and 30 say to a man of
five and 20 that could possibly be competitive?
Well, it's funny. It is funny how things
kind of change like this. It's so weird,
right? To think the biology of it all. I think,
again, if you go back to Jane Austen's time,
the average lifespan was a hell of a lot shorter than today.
You're talking 50, 55 was a really good
life. I mean, you probably live into your early sixty s and then you're done,
right? If you moved into your early to mid 60s,
you were like ancient. They were thinking you're around when Socrates was
around, you know what I mean? Well, there is interesting image of Socrates.
There is some evidence that Romans, I've been hearing, reading this recently
based on some new DNA stuff and some ways that they've been able to look
at anthropological samples and kind of date those. There is
some evidence that Romans, at the very minimum, anyway,
lived into at least their 70s, sometimes their 80s
right now in pre industrialized
England where the diets were a little bit more funky and
where the genetic,
how can I put it material was kind
of in one little bottle for quite some time.
That probably presented some challenges as well. There's also something to
be said too, and you guys can go research this all you want,
but there is a lot of evidence that shows that the native peoples
of this continent aren't my people, would live into their seventy
s and eighty s on a very regular basis, okay? Our lifestyle
was different. The way that we viewed personal hygiene was
different. There was a lot of differences in that. Anyway,
regardless, my point is it was not uncommon for people to die in
their late 50s, early 60s back then. Today we're looking
at people still working into their seventy s.
I think just even from that perspective, that changes that
entire dynamic. Because if your
life expectancy is that much better, then why
would you want to marry at that age? Why would you want to marry at
that young? There's a lot to be learned about life before you marry if you're
thinking about it from that 16 year old's perspective,
right? But then again so to your
question though, how leaders can embrace their age
when it comes to I think,
look, I'm never going to be one that people are going to accuse of being
wise, right?
I still look to some of my mentors,
people that I've known for years and years that are a significant amount
of years older than me. I constantly go back to them
because even at 55,
65, you are still in a
position to continue learning as you go.
There's so much change that happens that these people are
still learning. And there's something to be said about taking that
new knowledge and battering
ramming it with the older knowledge. And you come out
with wisdom, right? Like you know this, you know that you're going to smash them
together and it creates this ball of wisdom that we can all lear from.
I think when you get to a certain age, and I think I might be
coming up on that age, but when you get to a certain age,
you have to recognize that that
old knowledge is now enough
backfilled. That the new knowledge you have to
I don't know how if I'm wording this right, but I feel like I am
getting to that age that the new stuff that I learn has to be
managed with the old stuff that I already know and then relay
that and relay that in a way that someone is going
to learn from it. Right? Because they're coming
up with the new stuff already. They're seeing the new stuff,
and I'm seeing how the new stuff impacts the old stuff.
But I think we have to riddles.
Well, but I think we have to separate. What new stuff are we talking about?
So I separate out. I'll use
a perfect example of this. Substac and medium.
Remember when everybody had medium? Remember when everybody
was like, oh, go look at my Medium account. Go. Look at my medium.
Remember that? Right? Okay. Then substat
came along and people are like, people ran away from Medium and ran right
to Substac. Now, I'm not
a person of wisdom either. I have a few interesting
ideas, but I wouldn't say I'm a person of wisdom yet.
Got a few more years before my cranky old man years kick in. And then
and it'll be really dynamic. I'll still be doing the podcast. It's king to be
awesome.
But I looked at the people moving, the writers
moving from Medium to Substac, and I thought
that's just more of the same. Their model is going to be,
how are you going to get paid differently? Fast forward
seven, six years and guess what
Substac's model is now getting? Getting ready
to get eaten by Twitter community Notes.
Am I going to run to Twitter Community Notes because it's
the new thing? No,
I don't need it now. I think we've got to separate out,
but I think we have to separate that kind of dynamic out from
the other pieces of that. And that's where I
reject like the 40 under 40 list and the 30 under 30 list. I know
things are nonsense. I agree with that. But I
was thinking more in the lines of you're thinking more in the lines of
these physical I can wrap my hands
around this. I was thinking more like when I talk to
young people, like young salespeople again, remind everybody I'm a sales and marketing
consultant, right? I spend my world around sales and marketing software,
sales and marketing processes, blah, blah, blah. So when
I think about learning new things, I'm talking about learning a new
piece of marketing software or learning and trying to
blend that in with some of the marketing,
like some of the things that you learn about sales and marketing at a very
young age. Because here's the thing, especially in sales and marketing,
I tell people all the time, the more things change, the more things stay the
same. Just remember, when you're selling a product or service and
you're looking at a customer,
the interaction is going to be the same whether you're using technology
or not. You're going to talk to that person, you're going to message
that person. When you're talking about a
true enterprise level sales professional,
no matter what technology you throw in there. People still buy from
people that they know, like, and trust. People still buy from brands
that they know, like, and trust.
It has less to do with the newest, greatest,
latest technology that's out there. It has less to
do with that. Now, the way that you drive that information
to them might be different. It's the vehicle might
change, but the thing is the same. Like,
the result is the same, and the words are
the same. It's the vehicle that changes. And who cares about the vehicle?
I don't care what it is. I can change this vehicle 100 times. So this
is the thing we have to separate, I think. I think we have to separate.
I'm a big fan. Talk about mart sales marketing. I have
both of David Ogilvy's books, ogilvy on Advertising and
Confessions of an Ad Man. Brilliant books.
Learned a lot about branding, learned a lot about advertising from reading
David Ogilvy. You know how David Ogilvy, I mean, he was notorious for this,
right? Someone would ask him, how do you come up with all these great ads?
And he would say, I go into a room with a pencil and a bottle
of whiskey, and I come out and there's an ad.
Yeah, you don't need a fancy
phone. You don't need, like, a fancy laptop.
You don't need and by the way, you're in the marketing
tech space a little bit, so my God,
the number of Martech things that just have just exploded in the last 25
years, unbelievably stupid. I'm like, how many more snippets do we
need? Five years. Hasan the last five
years, it's just been ridiculous. It's insane. And so at
a certain point, this is the wisdom part, right? At a certain
point, as a leader, as a sales and marketing person, you got
to go, I just need a bottle of whiskey and a
pencil. Absolutely. Isn't that just good
enough? Yeah, well, again,
that's the mindset for the marketing piece, but on the sales piece,
it's even simpler. I just need a handshake,
right? Let's shake hands and agree,
and we'll go figure out the details later.
It's still a thing. The more hands you shake, the more
deals you do, the more money comes in your pocket.
This seems to be, like, Sales 101, right? And I never took a sales class,
ever. I'm terrible. I don't know anything about sales.
I know nothing about sales. But I do know that you have to shake hands.
I get that concept. And so that part has worked out pretty
well for me, the shaking of the hands part.
Okay, so what
can a band of 35 tell a band of 25, then?
Because it used to you got a. Long way to go.
Well, okay, maybe in the 17th century,
maybe the 18th century. But in fairness,
even today, what a 35 year old tells a 25 year old, in my opinion,
it really is. Don't think you know everything,
right? Leave yourself room to allow yourself to
learn. Because as much as you think, you know, there's always it's
the whole Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan mentality.
The fear of always having somebody better than you is real.
Like, that is a real thing. There's always going to be somebody coming up.
I got a piece of advice. When I was a kid, the very
first management job I ever had, and somebody said to me, listen,
make sure you're nice to them on your way up because you're going to see
them again on your way down. And I still think that holds true.
No matter what industry you're in, you're going to go up. You're going to hit
a peak of some sort. Regardless of where that peak is, whether it's management,
ownership, leadership, it doesn't matter. Wherever that peak is,
you're going to come back down to earth at some point, back down to
entry level, whatever, because that's just what happens. Think about it.
I've seen a person I've known this person most of my life.
I've seen a person own his own business for almost his entire life.
Sold the business, retired, couldn't stand retirement.
Went to work at Walmart as a greeter. This guy
owned a multimillion dollar company. He just wanted something
to do. He was 70 years old. He just wanted to go work. So now
people look at him and they're like, oh, he's just the old guy at Walmart.
And he's like I'm thinking to myself, if you could just tap into 1oz of
what that guy knows, I'd be a millionaire too. I don't understand how people
just walk by these people and not think. Now, again,
culturally speaking, this is a completely different question for me because
culturally speaking, our elders and our ancestors get put on a pedestal.
We will worship the ground they walk on because we know they've been there,
done that. They have something to say. They have knowledge to
teach. They have wisdom. We almost inherently
buy into the fact that our elders have wisdom just because
that's part of our culture. So for me, it's a lot easier than
a lot of other people to look at an older person. I don't know if
anybody there's organizations out there like
Score and things like that where you have these senior level mentors that will go
help you for free. I say, if you're not using situations like that,
you're crazy. Done that, know what they're doing.
You have a resource available to you, and it's free,
and they have no problem giving you advice. Now,
you don't always take it the same thing for me. I've had mentors in my
life where I don't always take what they say. I listen,
I thank them. I might not do what their advice, but I
certainly will have a damn good reason why I'm not going to do what they
suggested I do. And whether the reason is internally for me or
externally for pressures that they don't understand,
whatever. But the reality of it is that I
think that if you are embracing whatever
level you're at, whether it be age or level
in a company, if you are embracing that as a leadership
role, as a wisdom giving role, people will gravitate
toward you. If you're willing and you're open and you're allowing it and you're talking
to people, I do think people will gravitate to it. Now, again, whether they
listen to you or not, I can't say, but I think there will be some
pluses there. Okay. It's interesting you brought up culture because
in some parts not
all, but some parts of African American culture,
black American culture that reverence for
the elderly and the agent is there. I grew up
with my grandmother in my house, right? And so that
is one of the things that, unfortunately, my children
have been not able to experience on
the one hand, but then on the other hand, both of my in laws on
either side, and my wife's parents and my parents have
been able to be independent and work, to your point,
well into their 70s. Okay. So been
able to have those productive lives. I've actually seen that. Right. I know what that
looks like. The millionaire working at Walmart. I'm not shocked about that. That doesn't
surprise me in the least. And even in my own life,
I'm trying to set up structures right now where I can at
least be interested in doing one thing or two things or three things,
all the way up until I can't stop doing them anymore,
until I can't do them anywhere, whenever that will be, which is hopefully when my
mental faculties have mental faculties run out.
The question that occurs to me, though, is and then we're going to
turn the corner and get into our last part here. But the question that
occurs to me, though, as a follow up is this. You talked about elders.
I talked about elders. There's a cultural aspect to that
which is also intention against this larger societal,
cultural, Western society sort of idea,
which is something we talked about again in a shorts episode recently,
I think 77 or 76, this idea of the
cult of youth. Are we at the end
finally are we
finally at the end of the cult of youth? Have we finally
reached the end of that sort of don't
trust anyone under 30 or I'm sorry, don't trust anyone over
30 kind of mentality that really started with the baby boomer generation
in the 1960s and reverberated out,
reverberated out, reverberated out. And now we've got
Sam Bankwood Freed, who's easy to pick on, but Travis Kalanick
or Sam Baked Freed or Elizabeth Holmes, who's running companies into the ground
and are terrible leaders, and they're all under 30. Like, if you're on the Forbes
30 under 30 list or 40 under 40 list, you're probably going
to get sued for fraud and yeah, I know, but the majority
of them don't make it. They're terrible leaders because they don't have wisdom.
Are we at the end of the cult of youth in leadership and
in business? Or do we still have a few more cycles of reverberation
of that to go before we're finally done? I think we have one.
That's just my opinion, but I think we are at the tail end
of it. But I think we have this current generation of 25
year olds. I think they still have a little bit of that mentality.
Okay. But I think
we'll see it come out of the college graduates of the
next year or two, maybe three, that are going to
start again. I have a daughter who's she's
going into her senior year in college and
her thought process is already different than my 25 and 28 year
old. Okay.
Unfortunately, I kind of bubble them in with that group that you're
talking about. And I think that now,
again, my kids grew up in our culture, so I think there is some cultural
differences that they kind of still hold to because
it was just embedded in them from a very young age.
But in the corporate world, I think they fall
right in line with that group that you're talking about that don't trust anybody over
30, whatever. But I think that my daughter's group
and you notice I'm saying group and not generation, right? Because I don't
think this is generational. I think we're talking about differences in like five
years, six year groupage.
I think my daughter's group coming up as they graduate.
I think just in talking to her and her
and her friends, I think she does understand that people in their
thirty s and forty s in the workforce hold
a different kind of value. I think she does understand that,
but I think it's slower than we would have liked,
is all I'm saying. Yeah, well and I think there's probably well,
not I think there's probably there's clearly been a lot of damage along the way.
Absolutely.
Anyway, yeah. Again, we could talk about certain topics. For a
long time.
I know I said one last one other thing,
I think that is worthwhile to point out. In that little section that I read
Eleanor was talking about, one of her critiques of Willoughby was
that he basically opened his mouth and let everything fall out. Right.
I do think that it is a mark of wisdom, even as a person
who hosts a podcast and makes my living, or has
made my living in the past from running my mouth, quite frankly.
There are times, and I even tell my kids this where everything
doesn't need to be sated, everything doesn't need to be responded to.
And sometimes that in and of itself, that silence in
and of itself is an act of politeness and decorum.
It may not feel like it in the moment.
I know you want to move on, but I have to say this. I have
to go ahead. Exactly what you're talking about. Exactly what
I just said. Here's the difference in the two groups of age groups. My son
will send me a text, I will not reply. He sees me, he says,
you never replied to my text. What the heck? And I go,
you didn't ask me a question. There was nothing to reply to. My daughter sends
me a text, I don't reply, never talks about it again. Like she just realizes
that it didn't require a reply. I didn't have to
say anything back. You sent me a statement of
knowledge that I took and accepted and said thanks, and I
didn't even have to say, Good point, my son,
I have to say thanks. My daughter, nothing.
They both react the same way.
Anyway, back to the book,
sensibility. Remember I said it is the
Arcturus Holdings Limited to 2022 edition,
published by Arcturus Publishing, Limited, 26 27
Bickles Yard, 151 to 153 Bermanzi
Street, London. So go check them out.
I don't know much about Arcturus Holdings Limited, but I do like this
addition of Citizen sensibility. It feels hefty
right, it feels solid. So we're
going to move into this piece here, and it's a very short little piece
that we will talk about. Colonel Brandon receives a
letter and he leaves. Won't get into why
he leaves, but he leaves when he receives a letter, going back to
the point that we were making earlier about the writing of letters.
So Colonel Brandon, that man of 35 now,
has busted out and we open Chapter 14
with the well,
with the results of that leaving from
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. The sudden termination of Colonel Brandon's
visit at the park with his steadiness in concealing its cause
filled the mind and raised the wonder of Mrs. Jennings for two or three days.
She was a great wonderer, as everyone must be, who takes a very lively interest
in all the comings and goings of all their acquaintance.
She wondered, with little intermission what could be the reason of it, was sure there
must be some bad news, and thought over every kind of distress that could have
befallen him, with a fixed determination that he should not escape them
at all. Something very melancholy must be the matter.
I am sure, said she, I could see it in his face, poor man.
I'm afraid his circumstances may be bad. The estate
at Della Ford was never reckoned more than 2000 a year and his brother
left everything sadly involved. I do think he must have been sent
for about money matters. For what else can it be, I wonder whether it
is so. I would give anything to know the truth of it. Perhaps it is
about Ms. Williams. And by the by, I dare say it is
because he looks so conscious when I mentioned her.
Maybe she is. Ill in town. Nothing in the world more likely,
for I have an ocean. She is always rather sickly. I would lay any
wager it is about Ms. Williams. It is not so likely that he should be
distressed in his circumstances now, for he is a very prudent man, and to be
sure, must have cleared the estate by this time. I wonder what it can be.
Maybe his sister is worse at Avignon and has sent for him.
He's setting off in such a hurry. Seems very like it. Well, I wish him
out of all his trouble with all my heart and a good wife into the
bargain. So wondered, so talked Mrs.
Jennings, her opinion varying with every fresh conjecture and
all seemingly equally probable as they arose.
Eleanor, though she felt really interested in the welfare of Cronal Brandon,
could not bestow all the wonder on his going so suddenly away,
which Ms. Jennings was desirous of her feeling. For besides that
the circumstance did not, in her opinion, justify such lasting amazement or
variety of speculation, her wonder was otherwise disposed of it.
It was engrossed by the or extraordinary silence of her sister and Willoughby on the
subject, which they must know to be peculiarly interesting to
them all. As the silence continued every day made it appear more strange and
more incompatible with the disposition of both. Why they should not openly
acknowledge to her mother and herself what their constant behavior to each other
had declared to have taken place, eleanor could not imagine.
She could easily conceive that marriage might not be immediately in
their power for though Willoughby was independent, there was no reason to believe him rich.
His estate had been raided by Sir John at about six or 700 a year
but he lived at an expense to which that income could hardly be equal.
And he himself had often complained of his poverty. For this strange
kind of secrecy maintained by them relative to their engagement, which in fact concealed
nothing at all, she could not account. And it was so wholly contradictory to their
general opinions and practice that a doubt sometimes entered her mind of their
really being engaged. And this doubt was enough to prevent her making
any inquiry of Marianne. Nothing could be
more expressive of attachment to them all than Willoughby's behavior to
Mariana had all the distinguishing tenderness which a lover's heart could give. And to
the rest of the family it was the affectionate attention of a son and a
brother. The cottage seemed to be considered and loved by him
as his home. Many more of his hours were spent there than at Allenham.
And if no general engagement collected them at the park, the exercise of which called
him out in the morning, was almost certain of ending there, where the
rest of the day was spent by himself at the side of Marianne
and by his favorite pointer at her feet.
Why did Colonel Brandon leave what was he rutted up and jumping about?
Oh, my gosh. There's going to be all this speculation. We're going to make up
stories in our head because we couldn't king out from the person
the truth of the matter that we wanted.
Mrs. Jennings stands in as an avatar for
the modern era. Mrs. Jennings would have really liked Facebook and Twitter.
We talk a lot about social media on this platform, but she would have loved
that. Turns out that gossip
is no new thing under the sun. And making up stories in our heads
and then elaborating on them as truth,
particularly objective truth, is not that
new. In that
little clip, we do see some faint beginning parallels
in the first part of Sense and Sensibility to Shakespeare's King
Lear, which we covered in episode number 56.
And if you recall, King Lear is the
story of the King Lear who has three daughters
reagan, Cordelia, and Gonoril. And he divides up the
kingdom among them. Since its incomability is King Lear in reverse
with Mrs. Dasherwood playing would
be cast in the role of King Lear and then, of course, Mary, Anne,
Eleanor and Margaret in the role of the three sisters.
Now, that is a feminist critique of Sense and
Sensibility. But Jane Austen's writing, as we made the
point in Persuasion, and I feel it needs to be made here jane Austen's writing
defies feminism. It defies easy
categorization, easy pigeonholing.
Right? Austin was consumed,
and we've already mentioned this white revealing the tyranny of the small
things, as we saw in that little that little piece there.
Mrs. Jennings running around creating towers
of truth in her head. Eleanor Critiquing Willoughby and his
poverty, and, of course, Willoughby claiming poverty in order
to lure in Marianne, and, of course,
Marianne allowing herself to be lured.
She was also consumed. Austen was with presenting and representing
social hierarchical structures and the nature of the struggle
that the classes were having in England to maintain those structures.
They weren't, as in our modern era, with our elites trying to
pull up the structures. And by the way, the characters in Jane Austin's
novels were very often middle class, what we would call middle class.
They were trying to maintain middle class decorum. They were trying to maintain middle class
structure. They were trying to maintain a middle class way
of civilization, right, in order
to maintain society. There is a weird
modern belief and I heard this recently, that in
transcending the system or if you're not able to transcend
the system that you are in and we talked a little
bit about this just now if you're not able to transcend the system that you
are unfortunately, happy to be born in, then you can rebel against
it and you can destroy it. We have this idea now as moderns,
but the fact of the matter is, and Austin is very, very real about this,
as most genuinely great authors are,
steinbeck, Hemingway, faulkner,
Shakespeare, even the Greeks, the tragedy
of human hierarchies and the tragedy of human systems. And Austin
demonstrates this just in this little clip. It's in its instability. The tragedy of
all this is that you're going to operate in some kind of a system
and that the rules in that system were made for you before you were born.
And you may not like it and you may have a thought about it,
but you're going to serve the system. As Bob
Dylan said back in the day, I don't care whether you're the pope in Rome
or the homeless man on the street in San Francisco. You're going to serve somebody
or something. You might want to choose what
you're going to serve, but you're going to serve.
There's no such thing as floating transcendently above
the system, above the thing. And Austen
tries to ground that idea in
sentence sensibility.
So, Tom, there's this idea and we haven't really talked about on the podcast,
you and I have not this idea of hierarchies, right?
There's the men, there's the women. There's who's getting what money,
there's who's inheriting what, who's poor,
who's rich. It's kind of gauche for
us to talk about that, but we do care very much about
it, and we do care very much about hierarchies. And I always just tell my
kids, I've recently begun
in the last couple of years telling my kids, if you want to move to
the top of a dominance hierarchy, be the big the Venus dog on the block,
basically, that's what you have to be in order to move to the top of
a dominance hierarchy. But very often, people don't get that message,
and leaders really hate to, like, be seen in that
mode. They like to be seen in the sort of Steve Jobs technocratic kind
of Vneck whatever.
Not Vneck, a turtleneck, black turtleneck sort of mode.
But I'm getting a sense there's a shift that's happening in the Zeitgeist. I mean,
for God's sakes, I just saw recently that Mark Zuckerberg was at a Brazilian jiu
jitsu tournament, right?
What's happening with hierarchies? It's not like we're throwing them out, right? So how
do leaders navigate hierarchies? How do they operate in hierarchies
that aren't really made for them? And by the way, this is a challenge for
all of us because we were all born into this world, and we have to
operate inside of the system. Yeah, this was
a good one for me, too, when I started thinking about and as you were
reading the section of the book and thinking about so
there's a little bit of like that.
And we saw this a little bit in the 2008 crash when
there was just a boatload of layoffs, right? People were getting laid
off left and right. And you basically had there
was a huge surge of
people starting their own companies because of it. Right?
In other words, I didn't like the way that
hierarchy treated me, I'm just going to go create my own
I'm just going to make my own hierarchy. But the thing that I
think people forget is exactly what you're talking about.
Even if I start my own company, I own my own company.
I start it, I build it. I'm the top dog in
my hierarchy. There's still a bigger hierarchy out
there that I still feed into that machine,
right? Unless you are
the Forbes 100, when it comes to a corporate sense
or ownership sense of a company, unless you are the
Forbes 100, you are being dictated to by
some sort of something above you, right? In the tech world it's Apple
or Google. In the retail world it's Amazon, whatever, right?
Unless you are one of those top companies,
if you try to look at it from a different like if you try to
separate that out and look at it from a different perspective, even there's hierarchies
even in our own families, right? Like again, we were talking about our elders
and cultural advances to the elders.
And now in today's world,
you do have family members that feel like they don't
belong in that hierarchy and that they are trying to reinvent
themselves or move themselves out of that firing
line. And they're trying to put themselves in a different firing
line. And I'm trying to be pretty generic
here, but again,
and I've said this on this podcast more than once,
I think the true key here is regardless
of whether you're trying to build your own hierarchy, falling within
the current one moving, manipulate, whatever. It's really
about how
you treat yourself, how you treat
your peers and how you are allowing other people to treat yourself
because it is entirely up to you. You dictate how people treat you.
You dictate how you treat other people. You are the only one
that you have 100% control over, right?
There's a book by Rick Patino called Success Is
a Choice. He talks about how
your decision making process will directly impact
your success. Not somebody else, not the government,
not some big company you work for. You yourself will make
decisions that will impact your own success.
And I'm going to give you an example of something real quick.
As I was reading this book, one of my sons at the
time was about twelve years old
and something that I read the night before really impacted me. So I looked
at him and I were talking about it and I was like,
yeah, do you get this? You're twelve
years old. You have your whole life ahead of you. Every decision you make could
impact your success. You are in control.
And I'm trying to beat this into his head and he goes,
no I'm not. He goes,
I got to go to school today. He's like, I have to go to school?
And I go, no, but that's the brilliance of this.
It's your choice to go to school. He goes, okay, so I can stay home.
I go, yeah, I go, but then you have to deal with the consequences,
like, of me. And he goes, well, then I have to go to school,
because I don't want no, the choice is stay home or go to school.
You choose to go to school because you don't want to deal with the consequences.
But this is a similar kind of argument or not argument. This is a similar
kind of philosophy here. It's still your choice on whether or not
you have to operate within the hierarchy or not.
We choose to because we don't want the consequences
that are outside of that world. We tend to, and I
don't want to say we fall in line because we try to make our own
waves. We try to ripple it. We try. People try.
But like I said, unless you're the Forbes 100, they are the ones
really creating that hierarchy, and then everybody else just kind of falls in a line,
and you could try to disrupt them. And I'm sure the Forbes 100 will
love the fact that somebody new dips into that. Probably not.
I'm just kidding. Because they love having
the 100 be the same for the last ten years or whatever. They thrive
on that because they're the ones dictating those hierarchies in the corporate
world. Outside of the corporate world, I think there's
way too many opportunities, like, to talk about
this is way too much. It's too big of a subject. But I think it
will well, like. I said, I like that you
talked about consequences, right? Because we don't one of the points I've made
on this podcast as well is that we
as leaders sometimes refuse to engage
in consequentialist thinking. We refuse to acknowledge
that there will be a consequence for this thing.
We sort of want to pretend or want to act as if
we can make decisions or take actions or serve hierarchies
in a vacuum. And I wish my
genuine wish for leaders is that they would say to their
followers, we're in this hierarchy. There are consequences
for being in this hierarchy. This is what they are.
Are you in or out? Love it or leave it. Are you in or
out? Right? You don't have to do
it in a direct way that makes everybody feel uncomfortable,
that's confrontational. You can be winsome,
and you can be introverted, and you can do all these okay,
you can do all those things. Deliver it however the hell you want to deliver
it, but deliver that message. Deliver the message that,
listen, this thing
that we're doing here, you talked about a small business that was started in
2008. Okay, let's go with that. This small business that
we started in 2008 has a hierarchy.
I founded it. I stay up late at night thinking about it.
You all collect a salary if you want
to, at a certain point,
start thinking about the things I'm thinking about as the owner of this
business, stop collecting a salary
and walk with me down this path.
That's the honest statement that has to be made.
If I'm a manager, not one of the Forbes 100
but if I'm in a manager in one of the Forbes
10,000 businesses that
serve the Forbes 100, by the way, that are on the supply chain,
if I'm a manager, leader inside of those structures.
My role is to say to those individuals look,
we have all agreed by dint of our
voting with our feet and collecting a paycheck to be here.
We voted with our feet. That is the decision we made. There are consequences
to that decision. There's monetary consequences.
There's financial consequences, there's economic consequences, there's personnel consequences.
These are all of the plethora of consequences that exist for us. If we
want to experience different ones, we have to make different decisions. And by
the way, we have to do this actively and intentionally, which is why my book
is called Intentional Leadership, right? Because if we're not doing that with our brain
on and we're doing it with our brain off, then we're engaged in
we're engaged in story building structure. Like Mrs. Jennings.
We're building structures of stories about reality that may have absolutely nothing
to do with the objective thing that's out there. Right. I wish more leaders
were focused in that kind
of way, because I think then leadership becomes
less tyrannical and it becomes more collaborative, but in a real.
Kind of way, there's a very simple explanation
as to why they're not okay. What's a simple explanation?
Scary.
And with that, they're scared to do it.
You're not wrong. It is scary. Scary to kind of say that, because if you
don't, if you well,
there's consequences to saying that. Right, exactly.
There's consequences to acknowledging the hierarchy. There's consequences to well,
and you know what? Maybe it's a weird thing. So I transitioned
from being in a higher education hierarchy to owning my
own thing to now I'm in a different hierarchy doing something else.
I'm at the bottom of a dominance hierarchy yet again right now on another project.
And so one
of the things that I've become better at
in the course of my career is recognizing where those hierarchical
structures are, really figuring out how the pyramid is working fairly quickly
and making a decision fairly quickly
of, yes, I want to be in, or no, I don't. And the
faster that I can make that decision intuitively,
even before I go and interview for a position
or even before I go and have a meeting, or even before I go right.
And trust me, there's times when I look at a structure and I go and
I've gotten this feedback from people, well, you don't really know everything that's in the
structure. No, I don't. But I also don't know everything that goes on
in a prison. I don't want to go there.
I don't want to know. I don't feel compelled
to have to know everything that goes on inside of a structure to know that
I don't want to be part of it. And if I have multiple choices for
multiple hierarchies that I could be engaged in, why would I pick one
that doesn't work for me, right? Like you talked about, the multimillionaire
who's now the greeter at Walmart.
I have zero interest in being a greeter at Walmart.
Now, I'm not saying that that's not something that if
circumstances or whatever and I had to take it, I wouldn't take it.
Sure, okay. Who knows, right?
And if I had to use an old school word, my druthers,
I'm going to do the scary thing of picking
a hierarchy that matches closer my personality,
and Walmart doesn't match my personality,
then it's a purely utilitarian choice at that point,
and that's scary in its own kind of way. But weirdly enough, it's less scary
than just sort of being transparent and picking the hierarchy intentionally
with your eyes wide open. All right,
well, how do we stay on the path then? Let's wrap this sucker up.
Let's bring this sucker home. How do we stay on the path, Tom?
Well, I think the simplest answer to this
sometimes I think I oversimplify things,
but I think realistically, if you find the path that's right
for you, this question isn't even a question. It just becomes second nature,
right? If the path is right, there's no effort that you
have to use or leverage to stay, quote,
unquote, stay on the path. If you find yourself having to overwork
to really drive, to stay on that same path,
maybe you need to take a closer look at the path. Maybe you need to
actually look and say, am I really on the right path, or am I just
doing am I going through the motions because it's expected of me?
Am I going through the motions because it's financially advantageous,
but not necessarily what I truly want? There's validity behind
you've all heard the statement, if you love what you do, you'll never work a
day in your life. That is really true. I love sales and marketing. I never
think of anything that I do as real work.
Believe me. I flipped burgers as a kid. You know what I mean?
That was work. That was real work.
Tom smelled like grease from the fryer back
in the day. Terrible. I should say.
I spun pizzas. I actually work for pizza places,
but same rule, right? Same thing, right? Yeah.
I wasn't so in love with it that it was so easy to do.
I found the place where I feel like I fit. And for
me to stay on the path is not difficult. There's not a
lot of effort that I have to put into. Now, I just
want to be clear here. Do not mistake that statement for me thinking that I
don't have anything that's difficult to do. I have lots of
tasks that are hard and that I don't always enjoy. There are certain parts and
components that I have to convince myself to get up in the morning for and
blah, blah, blah. There's certain part, but overall,
the huge, overall sprawling
piece of this landscape, I find it fascinating
and fun and intriguing, and I love it. I love
being elbow deep into this stuff. I love solving problems that are
based on sales and marketing. I love it. Even in my personal life,
we were joking around, being on the 50 under 50 or whatever. I turned 49
this month. Okay. I now find myself in a
position in my personal life that I don't feel like I have to put a
lot of effort into being happy. I really don't.
I love being where I am in my personal life.
I finally feel like I'm on that path that doesn't take
a lot of effort to stay on.
And I remember and it's
so funny, too, because I always tell people, if it wasn't for hindsight,
I'd be blind. Right? Because hindsight is always 2020.
That's actually not true. You can look at your past and
still look at it through fogged glasses,
thinking that I would have, shoulda, could have had whatever.
Right. And that's not necessarily the case if you're looking through it
with clear lenses saying, I made that decision because of X and
I did it, and it ended up this way, and I'm now on the right
path, so I'm okay. I'm okay with that decision.
Right. I just
find that staying on the path should not be as much work
as people think it is. I just don't think it. I think if
you're putting in time and effort and hammering yourself
every day and constantly trying to that you might be on the wrong
path. You might want to do some soul searching
here.
That is an excellent point. Yes.
I would add to it, in order to determine if you're on
the right path or not, you want to probably send yourself a personal letter.
Like that old song Back in the day, take a Letter, Maria.
Right. Except that one he was addressing to
his wife about not coming back home. So maybe the lyrics don't really
apply necessarily for leaders, but take time
to write down what you're thinking about the path
you're on. Get real close
to your core values of politeness and decorum.
Heck, sometimes it starts with being polite, even to yourself,
treating yourself as if you are a person who can be who's
worthwhile to be polite, to understand
that all of your experiences bring something to the table.
Whether you're 49 or 39 or 29, your experiences
bring something to the table. They do have some value. They do have some merit.
They have some weight. Don't dismiss that. But also, don't overweigh it.
I've said that on this podcast with you, Hasan. You should
be able to learn from anybody. It doesn't matter what age
they are. They've got something to teach you. They really do. And you should be
able to learn from yourself and your experiences, no matter
what age you're bringing those experiences from.
And then, of course, understand that you live in a world of systems.
I live in a world of systems. There's absolutely zero
way out of it. So choose,
as the knight said in Indiana, jane down there with the Holy Grail
Cup. Choose wisely.
And with that, I'd like to thank Tom Libby
for joining us today on the Leadership Lessons or the Great Books podcast.
You're welcome, my son. And this is
us signing off.