After 3 more years of experience...

(Draft: the following brain fart may be incoherent)

After 3 more years of experience* in various companies and industries, I've come to realize that the amount of money you make depends on how well you bullshit. :)

No, seriously: the best leaders, whether CEO or salesmen, have to be extremely strong at selling themselves -- their ideas, their style, their way of doing things. One can succeed as a silent, but competent worker only up to a certain level**. But beyond that level, one battles for the top with one's communication skills, a.k.a. bullshit.

What does it take to learn to bullshit?

First, not anyone can learn to bullshit. Communication skills are often misunderstood as skills that can be simply picked up, like learning to ride a bike or use a spreadsheet. This is not true. Turning from a bad communicator into a good communicator involves throwing away shyness, fidgeting, and impatience, and adding in humor and style. One has to change into a different person if one wants to learn to communicate. Rather than 'learning to communicate', the phrase 'learning to bullshit' seems to capture the deeper essence.

Also, conversational skills are *completely different* from written skills. Both might use the same language as a medium, but while writing (this includes speech writing) involves organizing ideas and developing an individual flow, conversation means being able to merge one's own flow with another, and take turns leading and following until both sides grasp the subject (whether or not they agree is another matter). This is why a person who writes excellent satire may turn out to be a poor conversationalist; it takes exposure and experience to develop one's ability to bullshit.

Finally, one needs to know the importance of patience. Simply put, being impatient makes one look like an idiot. Being a good communicator involves being able to patiently listen and wait for the right time to add the right amount of bullshit. Prematurely making judgment based on weak assumptions would make one lose credibility. A skilled bullshitter would place assumptions into context, making them appear much more justified (whether or not proven to be correct in the future). On a more sincere note, many misunderstandings can be resolved by both sides being patient enough to listen to and understand each other's assumption.

[To be continued/reviewed]

**One can succeed as a silent, but competent worker only up to a certain level. I guess one could go silently all the way to the top by being a genius techie and a shrewd investor, but this would discount the social factor, by which a not-so-genius but well-connected and well-informed person would actually outperform the geniuses.

*After 3 more years of experience... Which reminds me, I marked my 10th year in the corporate world a few months ago. Come to think of it, my immediate boss actually got me a raise from the stingy management (which is what management is supposed to do -- minimize costs, maximize profits; I am listed down as a cost in their books). My raise was measly (corresponding to my lack of ability to bullshit). I'll have to put my insights into practice to be able to improve my career.

Apology to politicians

I made a mistake in my previous post, about politicians having 'nothing but ambition.' Ambition is indeed a major requirement for politics, but a politician is actually a specialization of a salesman! Sales in itself is a formidable skill and forms the core of capitalism, and selling your image is the key to success in a democracy. Democracy and capitalism have an interesting relationship, don't you agree?

Now, back to washing the dishes...

Disclaimer: I have no formal training in economics, business and political theory. Please post a comment if you would like to correct me!

Why do some people make more money than others?

I tried coming up with an answer to this using two orthogonal traits: talent and ambition. Note that in this article, I mean 'talent' to be 'effective talent', hence a talented but lazy person is classified as having effectively 'no talent'.

So here is the trait-scenario table I came up with to analyze various types of people:

Traits		Possible outcome
No talent, No ambition		Bum
Talent, No ambition		Overworked, underpaid
Talent, Ambition		Executive, Top specialist, Rock star
No talent, Ambition		Politician

Trait-Scenario Table No. 1: Talent and Ambition

Well, no offense to politicians, but most political systems require no other criterion for office, except ambition. Also, the table entries are in a 'P implies Q' relationship: it doesn't necessarily mean that politicians have nothing except ambition, but one can be a politician armed only with ambition and nothing else.

And bums do have tough luck. Because my notion of talent means 'effective talent', people who have have potential but have been unable to develop it are also inadvertently classified as having 'no talent'.

Furthermore, there are a lot of people with neither talent nor ambition who are well off; the above table does little to explain the world's distribution of wealth. So I decided to factor in the luck column for a somewhat better picture:

Traits	Tough luck		Lucky!
No talent, No ambition	Bum		ala Paris Hilton
Talent, No ambition	Overworked, underpaid		Paid enough, content
Talent, Ambition	'Almost' executive, 'almost' rock star, but never there		Executive, Top specialist, Rock star
No talent, Ambition	ala Al Gore		ala Bush

Trait-Scenario table No. 2: Talent, Ambition and Luck

Conventional wisdom would state that talent that fulfills our needs is rewarded. However, after looking at my trait-scenario tables, I have come under the impression that:

Talent is what the world needs, but luck and ambition are what the world rewards.

So sad.
Maybe I should come up with a less depressing model.
Or find happier thoughts about the current model.