Harder Than It Looks, Not As Fun as It Seems
Harder Than It Looks, Not As Fun as It Seems
Jun 17, 2021 by Morgan Housel
There’s a saying – I don’t know whose – that an expert is always from out of town. It’s similar to the Bible quote that no man is a prophet in his own country. That one has deeper meaning, but they both get across an important point: Everyone’s human, everyone’s flawed, nobody knows everything. So it’s easiest to convince people that you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you’re not.
Keep that in mind when comparing your career, business, and life to others.
Good advice that took me a while to learn is that everything is sales. Everything is sales. It’s usually framed as career advice – no matter what your role in a company is, your ultimate job is to help sales. But it applies to so many things.
Everything is sales also means that everyone is trying to craft an image of who they are. The image helps them sell themselves to others. Some are more aggressive than others, but everyone plays the image game, even if it’s subconscious. Since they’re crafting the image, it’s not a complete view. There’s a filter. Skills are advertised, flaws are hidden.
A friend recently complained about how inefficient his employer is. Processes are poor, communication is bad. He then said a competitor company had its act together. I asked him how he knew that – he’s never worked there and has never been inside the company. Fair, he said. It just seems that way from the outside.
But almost everything looks better from the outside. I guarantee workers at the competitor find flaws in the way their company operates, because they know about their company what my friend knows about his: how the sausage is made. All the messy personalities and difficult decisions that you only see when you’re inside, in the trenches. “All businesses are loosely functioning disasters” Brent Beshore says. But it’s like an iceberg, only a fraction is visible.
It’s the same for people. Instagram is full of beach vacation photos, not flight delay photos. Resumes highlight career wins but are silent on doubt and worry. Investing gurus are easy to elevate to mythical status because you don’t know them well enough to witness times when their decision-making process was ordinary, if not awful.
Of course there’s a spectrum. Some companies operate better than others, some people are more insightful than average. A few are extraordinary.
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