Kill Your Idols

Whenever I read about highly successful visionaries, mentors, trailblazers (read: Steve Jobs, et. al.), they’re always described in this nebulous way geniuses are often described: Confident, decisive to a fault, knowledgeable.

They also don’t take shit from anyone.

Those depictions of my professional heros makes me feel, well, inadequate. I’m not that kind of guy. Nothing is black and white to me, and I don’t chalk that up to inexperience or a lack of confidence. It’s just good decision-making.

I think in part, that depiction is due to artistic cherry-picking on the part of the various writers whose purpose in writing is to further lionize their beloved deity for a subject. Pick a few instances where no one knew what was right or wrong, add a dash of hyperbole, and you get a good story about a visionary who defied her/his critics to great success.

Whether those accounts of strong decisions are a result of revisionist history, or truly magnificent leadership, I don’t know. One thing I do know, and have come to grips with, is that I’ll never be that kind of leader. I prefer to play devil’s advocate too much to instantly declare something as “crap,” or “fucking amazing!”.

There’s two sides to a coin, and I’d rather look things over and let them stew before coming down on something. Maybe that looks like waffle-ing, I don’t know, but I think it produces better results. By looking in-depth at a problem, living with it for a short time, and discussing it with someone (anyone, really), I can think through the ramifications of a potential solution.

This kind of approach shouldn’t be news to anyone, really. But it’s helpful to think about the “why” of a decision as much as the decision itself. If you’re snapping to judgement simply to move on the the next thing, and bolstered with a false-confidence gained from countless accounts of tech-luminaries who appear to have done the same, it may be time to rethink things.