Several of my recent blogposts have offered examples of behaviors, particularly among bosses, that are considerably less-than admirable. Now, I am a firm believer that one should acknowledge, own, correct, and learn from one’s mistakes as a matter of course. Doing so requires strength of character and mind. In contrast, dodging mistakes is a mark of cowardice and fecklessness. Still, it is not enough to learn just from one’s own mistakes. There is another rich vein of error to mine for lessons: the mistakes of others, particularly those that manifest debilitating habits of mind or reveal adverse patterns of action.

​Chronic error can be a great teacher.

It stands to reason, then, if positive paradigms do not always simply transfer one-to-one from person to person, then learning from and applying negative paradigms will not necessarily be a matter of just doing their opposite. Just because x is wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that negative x is correct. Life is way more complex and much more fun than that.

You can make a similar analogy about raising and neglecting a child, writing and deleting a poem, staying healthy and succumbing to illness, climbing and falling off a ladder, establishing the truth and spreading lies, or any manner of acts of creation, wellness, integrity, or progress versus its annihilation.

By contemplating the relative strength of good and bad, I am not trying to pick a theological fight here about the nature of evil and of virtue, and I am no Manichaean. There are many nuances I will not consider here, nor will I define “good” and “bad.” Instead, at the risk of being overly reductive, I will simply attempt to demonstrate that on a pragmatic, daily basis, bad is stronger. ​

To be bad is to be primarily a destroyer, a destroyer of hope, of progress, of success, of order, of minds, of lives, etc. To be good is to be primarily a maker who generates and reinforces those things. Good requires one to be ever vigilant and to stand up to the destroyers. Since being bad is so easy, it is also enticing. Destruction, close up, can masquerade as progress—at least you’re getting something done--and because being bad is enticing, it tends to attract many adherents. Most of us are only occasionally bad, but a critical mass are dedicated to it. Consider the insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Because there was relative ease of access, insurrectionists readily breached the building and wreaked mayhem in short order. Securing and cleansing the building in the aftermath requires far more effort and time. Securing and cleansing our democracy will demand more still. To be good means eschewing the allure of easy acts of destruction, which by itself is an exertion that requires much energy. Worse still, one can be tricked into being bad while it is exceedingly unlikely one could be tricked into being good. Notice I wrote "being," not "doing."

It is easier to break than fix, to stain than wash, to kill than grow, to forget than learn, and to deny than own the truth.

You may conceive some counter examples of when destroying is actually an act of good. For instance, tearing down a dangerously dilapidated warehouse may be a great benefit to a community. Nevertheless determining the goodness of an act is a weighing of the means and the ends. If the end is inherently good (removing a hazardous eyesore), then the act (tearing down a dilapidated warehouse) must be considered with that end in mind. Destroying in such a case may do no harm, so it is likely an act of good. Still, it is not enough to mean well, and it is rarely if ever acceptable to do bad in order to achieve a positive.

Being bad is easier than being good in part because there are many ways to be bad while there are far fewer options to do good. Let’s consider the global pandemic. We know that taking certain precautions, such as wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding gatherings, and even closing workspaces are, until full deployment of the vaccines, the only tools we have to slow this plague from sweeping over us. Some, though, have said all along that we should just let the disease take its course since it kills a mere 1% or 2% of its victims. I am not talking about Covid-deniers here but those who advocate doing nothing so that we will develop “herd immunity.” Given the math of allowing even 1% of the country’s 327,000,000 people die (a fun arithmetic problem for the kiddies, by the way) and the fact that many still live with persistent and even disabling symptoms long after recovering from the infection, why do so many find the inherent evil of mass death and disability so enticing? Sweden tried just letting the disease run its course, by the way, with disastrous results. Nonetheless, in the moment, it is just so much easier to do nothing, to pretend that this invisible scourge will not affect us much and will eventually go away, to deny that all those deaths and all that suffering are not too high a cost. So, strip off your mask, attend a large indoor gathering, risk getting Covid, and endanger others. It is easier in the short run to roll the dice and deny the potential consequences than to face reality and take personal responsibility.

In past crises, such as World War II, Americans reportedly came together and made many sacrifices in the spirit of unity. One could argue that America’s collective resolve and the defeat of the Nazis and their allies was worth the horror of war. I won’t argue otherwise. But if it were not for the defeat-of-Nazism part, would all that accord alone have been worth the casualties? Of course not. The Second World War is an extreme example, though, as is the movie Failsafe. We rarely encounter such starkly fraught choices. Even so, with Covid, as we surpass the number killed in the Great War, I can detect no similar universal self-denial for the common good, far from it. Some sacrifice much while others carry on as usual, unwilling to so much as wear a mask in public. Indeed, the disease has, in many ways and in convergence with other factors, brought out the worst in people. Similarly, while I will be forever grateful that the U. S. and its allies stood up to and defeated European fascism and Japanese imperialism, I would be lying if I did not see the subsequent harm that also arose from the means of global war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, such as the spread of totalitarian communism, the rise of the military industrial complex, the paranoia of the Cold War, and other evils, some of which plague us to this day. 

"So, what about head to head, toe to toe, mano a mano? Which is stronger, good or bad? Since we are speculating about essential qualities and not beings, it is impossible to have them contest directly one-on-one. Good and bad can only confront one another through actual entities, proxies that are never essentially good or bad themselves, so it is difficult to ascertain. Nonetheless, logic dictates that bad has all the advantages. Even psychologically bad wins. If ten people compliment you and one offers a minor criticism, which do you remember? College professors lament amongst themselves that no matter how many positive reviews they receive from students, a single negative one will be all they can focus on. Sometimes, one negative review will stick in a professor’s craw for years despite otherwise universal support from students. Our brains are wired to favor the bad.

Physically, it is the same thing. While aging has some positives (I hope), most individuals long to escape the inevitability of decrepitude in order to retain the vigor of youth. As time progresses, everything deteriorates and everything passes. Assuming robust existence is good and decay and destruction are bad, we can see how bad will always conquer. But, there is renewal, you say. For every loss there is a gain. Every winter leads to spring. Yes, perhaps, for now, but not over the long haul. Eventually, the sun explodes. Besides, if you are suffering and dying, the fact that someone else somewhere else is being born may be cold comfort.

Versions of the axiom that “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice” have been attributed to many, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I disagree with this sentiment. Not that any of us will be around to find out, but I don’t see how justice prevails on a cosmological scale. Justice is a human construct, an artificial concept that has no natural manifestation in the world, which is why we struggle with it so much. For the record, this has not always been my position. I long believed that the fight for justice could succeed once and for all, and that perhaps I would see evidence of that even in my lifetime. It gave me hope. Over many years, though, as I viewed the world through the lens of justice, I came to conclude that justice is primarily a human comfort. In fact, the only longterm outcome I can discern with any certainty is that the arc of the universe bends toward entropy. Four out of five physicists will agree.

Again, I am not making a theological argument here but a pragmatic one. And do not get me wrong. Although I profoundly believe that bad is stronger than good, that injustice is more powerful than justice, I am not callously advocating for giving into bad or tolerating or perpetrating injustice. Quite the opposite. Because bad is so mighty and because justice is so vulnerable, we must be ever vigilant in the fight for good. Each individual’s contribution to the cause for good will require strength, sacrifice, and perseverance, and collectively we can prevail if only for a while. Justice will not simply happen because it is supposed to. Justice, like good, is a concept that must be applied, reexamined, revamped, and reapplied constantly, for it is as flawed as the species that invented it.

No, this essay is not a call for us to be bad because bad is easier and because bad will likely triumph in the end. Nor is it a claim that bad is better because it is stronger. Adherents to the belief that stronger is inherently better generally also subscribe to the notion of a zero-sum game, which posits that there can only be one winner in any contest and no virtue in sharing success. As a philosophical or ethical stance, the narrow outlook of the zero-sum game warrants ruthless behavior and is conceivably a mark of inherent badness itself. 

The television drama Mr. Robot requires one to follow plot threads and characters that have been filtered through the mind of Elliot Alderson, played by Rami Malek, a man who is, on his best day, wildly delusional. The plot consists of misdirection, hallucinations, time jumps, multiple identities, and deception, so I naturally find it extremely engaging and compelling. It is just my sort of narrative. In addition, the dialogue frequently drops shards of wisdom, for instance when season-two character, Ray, played by Craig Robinson, lays this insight on Elliot: "Control is about as real as a one-legged unicorn taking a leak at the end of a double rainbow." 

Truth.

What is it about control? I suppose it is only natural that we want control in our lives. Otherwise, our existence would spin into chaos. But moment-to-moment, day-to-day, week-to-week control is enticingly ever-elusive. It is a bar of wet soap in your hand. The harder you squeeze the more likely the bar will shoot away. Yet, many of us persist in seeking to maximize control over every aspect of our lives and the lives of others. In the workplace, many bosses assume that it is their sacred duty to control every employee and every aspect of the job. If you have ever worked for one of these control-freak bosses, you know what a miserable disaster that can be. Most often their behavior takes the form of micromanagement or perfectionism. Whatever the case, the controlling boss eventually finds it maddening as full control slips out of grasp over and over, and, all too often, instead of adjusting to failure and choosing a different strategy, the boss tries to squeeze each bar of soap all the harder with the predictable outcome. If you have a boss who regularly says something along the lines of “we should do the same thing but just more of it,” you know you are in deep trouble.

Every day, we confront situations that challenge our sense of self and imperil our complacency.  What if, and stay with me here, what if those challenges are not threats? What if they are opportunities for self-discovery and growth.
​
I readily acknowledge that these challenges could very well result in the destruction of our sense of self-satisfaction and self-confidence. But if so, wouldn't that suggest that these self-assurances were unwarranted to begin with or fundamentally flawed? A more beneficial outcome would be to treat such challenges as a chance to stress-test our sense of identity and make adjustments to strengthen it through self-assessment and build resilience.

The challenges I speak of are too myriad and varied to list or describe, but they are common. Most often, they arrive in the form of of questions or criticism from other people or they occur within as self-doubt.

Always, though, how we receive them is entirely within our control.

Yup. I wrote that, and I can hardly believe it either. Frankly, I hate when people say things like "Oh, so and so is criticizing you? So what? Don't let it bother you. You're just giving them power." The reason such so-called advice is so annoying is because it shifts the burden to the victim and makes nonreactivity seem easy, within reach, and we all know how hard it is not to become defensive in the face of challenges to the self, which is only natural and, to a point, appropriate. And let's face it, other people can do horrible things to us. When I review just my past year, I can quickly compile a litany of grievances born of injustices, so I get it. But I also know, when I am being honest, that those grievances are all inside me. In fact, a little candid reflection reveals to me that the very people who committed injustices against me in the past year likely all congratulate themselves for having done some great service to the world in taking me on, for they, like me, are the heroes in their own stories. And knowing that fact makes the injustice sting all the worse. My ire rises, and my ego, beaten and battered, swells like like a welt on a bruise on an abrasion. Let it go? How can I?

​A short while back I wrote about the power of decency, but what about the superpower of decency?

Dr. Nichols' patient was struggling to breathe and begging the doctor to save his life. When his shirt was removed for treatment, the medical team, which Nichols described as "a Jewish physician, a Black nurse, and an Asian respiratory therapist," could see that his body was defaced with Nazi symbols, including a swastika tattooed prominently on his chest. As they set about treating the patient, Nichols reflected that a man with such emblems of hatred inked on his skin had likely devoted himself to devaluing, or worse, the lives of the very people working to save his. Nonetheless, the team prepared to intubate their patient, a procedure that would expose them to considerable risk of contagion in this age of COVID.

The scene Nichols paints deserves further rumination.

Think about it. Here we see a patient whose naked flesh proclaims his raw hatred for these individuals who risk their own health and lives to preserve his life even as they know their success would free him to continue to promote his noxious views and threaten their wellbeing and that of their families and loved ones.. 

Nazi tattoos are not some deplorable cosplay fad. They indicate a commitment to white supremacy and to classifying specific groups of people as subhuman or not quite human and decidedly intolerable. His Jewish doctor even recognized one tattoo as the insignia of the SS, who were responsible for designing and executing the "Final Solution," otherwise known as the Holocaust. Perhaps, you may argue, this patient had an explanation for the repugnant tattoos, such as he got them in prison because he needed the protection of a gang, or some such thing. Perhaps he had or would come to regret them. But why so many? And why keep them? 

Reasserting the Human in Humanist

Nichols describes himself as a humanist in his Twitter profile, which can indicate a number of things. Based on his story, I would guess that he means that he derives his morality from serving humanity rather than from the doctrine and mores of an established religion, dogma, or code. If I am right, Nichols' humble commitment to the service to others is a stellar example of humanist morality in action. Clearly, the point of his thread is not to garner praise for himself and his colleagues for doing their jobs. Indeed, the narrative culminates in a moment of crisis when, exhausted by months of battling COVID in the face of those who deny its existence and reflecting on the hatred this particular patient expresses via his body markings, Nichols hesitates. 

Again, the story is about Nichols' moral dilemma in the fog of his exhaustion. 

​It is a story of human decency decently told in 280-character bites. It even starts in medias res. For Nichols and his colleagues, this nightmarish scenario is just the quotidian, the day-to-day routine. Worn down as he must be, he still constantly does the right thing, the decent thing, no matter his feelings. His story is a companion to that of Jodi Doering, a nurse in South Dakota who told her tale of moral outrage in the midst of gruesomeness on Twitter and CNN at around the same time. She spoke of patients who deny the existence of COVID and call her names even as they are dying of the disease. Like Nichols and his team, she continues to care for them in the face of their hateful contempt. Her Twitter profile, which now apparently lists her name as Jodi Orth (@jodiorth), has a banner that reads "Be a Good Human," sadly an increasingly radical stance. In fairness, I must note that her testimonial has been disputed as exaggerated. Whatever the case, as Nichols observed, simply continuing to treat patients in the midst of COVID denial and hostility to medical personnel from a wide swath of the population is demoralizing in the extreme, and even more so in a place like South Dakota where the governor herself has abetted the spread of the disease and openly contributed to the widespread denial and consequent contempt for medical professionals.

These tales of frontline medical professionals, but two samples standing in for an untold number of told and untold stories, are more extreme than what most of us will ever experience. Still, they are clear instances of the power of decency, of remaining "a good human," in the face of horror.

I would go even further. For those of us in other walks of life, it is hard to imagine having to face anger, unreason, resentment, and hatred every day from the very people you are committed to serving, be they patients on a gurney or governors in the statehouse. Practitioners in other professions may confront similar dilemmas, (law enforcement officers, teachers, and, yes, even lawyers come to mind), but not perhaps in such stark terms and under such constant duress.

​In this way, maintaining basic human decency, being a good human, is not just a power, but it is a superpower. It takes an extraordinary amount of fortitude to assert decency day in and day out even without the onslaught of abuse and offense that medical professionals, these human beings, face. Maintaining decency along with its attendant virtues of integrity and compassion is simple but not easy, for it is not enough to declare "I am an honorable person, a good human" or to merely intend to be a virtuous person. Decency demands constant vigilance, vigilance that itself is enervating, which is partially why Nichols flagged for a moment before proceeding to work on his patient.

Human decency, being a good person in the face of it all, is indeed a superpower. It is an act of heroism that may just save us all. While it is not as cool and fanciful as the ability to fly or turn invisible or punch through brick walls, it remains the only superpower that challenges our humanity and thereby the only one that can help make us fully human.

​As much as the acolytes and guardians of baseball superstition may want the answer to be A or B, logic dictates that the answer is E, but how do we know? After all, even if you are not superstitious, isn't it within the realm of possibility that there is such a thing in this universe as jinxing? Can you prove there is no such thing? By the same reasoning, can you prove that there was no tremor? Or no collusion?

While such assertions constitute the logical fallacy called argument from ignorance, it remains impossible to prove a negative to an absolute. The possibility of a jinx or of an undetected tremor or of criminal collusion or of extraterrestrial influence or of a magic whammy executed by the opposing team's official sorcerer or of any number of reasons you can imagine all remain in the category of the possible, not the probable or even the serious. Simply put, because you can conceive such scenarios, they are, by definition, not inconceivable, however illogical. After all, the human mind is a meaning-making machine well oiled by a lubricious (in every sense) imagination, and our ability to speculate is, frankly, awesome.

Every day and in many situations we face the dilemma of determining what is most likely true and what is merely possible on an infinitely diminishing scale. Whether large or small, distant or local, we must make sense of these dilemmas in order to successfully navigate our world. A disciplined, rational mind can do so with relative aplomb. Rationality does not yield perfection, but it does operate with a high degree of accuracy, much more so than irrational imaginings.

Nonetheless, without getting political, I am sure that anyone bothering to read this piece can readily think of current circumstances in which vast swaths of the population deny verified facts and basic logic to come to all manner of wild conclusions with profound and dangerous consequences for individuals and society. A perfect example of the futility of rebutting arguments from ignorance is the persistence of challenges to the 2020 presidential election results, which morph from moment to moment always with the assumption that each new objection must be real because it is imaginable. Be they election truthers, flat-Earthers, Holocaust deniers, COVID deniers, or Qanon, the ascendancy and sway of such nonsensical and often self-contradictory theories have led some to speculate that we are coming to the end of the influence of the Enlightenment.

​The Enlightenment or Age of Reason is a roughly eighteenth-century epistemological shift that, for better or worse, helped dissolve Europe's adherence to superstition and magical thinking and brought about a new era marked by the dominance of logic and rationality. And, yes, I am aware how problematic this narrative I have just sketched is for a variety or reasons, not the least of which being its inherent Eurocentrism and the fact that pathologically illogical evils still thrived, such as the concurrent rise of chattel slavery. Nonetheless, that period's movement away from Medieval metaphysics has allowed Americans to enjoy a long, inequitable, and imperfect period of ascendant rationality, which now shows some signs of coming to a close. So, how can we dependably cut through rising irrational speculation and unwarranted belief and get to the heart of truth? In order to reliably do so, we would need a pretty sharp implement.

​Which brings us to good old Occam.
​
Well before the Enlightenment, William of Ockham, commonly Occam, a fourteenth-century friar and philosopher, formulated a beautifully elegant heuristic, which has come to be known as Occam's razor. Occam's razor is often rendered as something like, "when faced with a problem, the simplest answer is usually the correct one." This formulation is a bit misleading, but it is serviceable for most daily situations. In actuality, though, Occam merely suggested that in solving problems, we should not add anything and thereby keep speculation down to a minimum. In other words, try to solve problems and dilemmas using only the evidence available. So, in the case of our disappointed baseball pitcher, in the absence of evidence of an earthquake, a nefarious gambling scheme, or a wondrous cosmic influence that bizarrely and confoundingly seems entirely localized on baseball diamonds, Occam's razor or plain reason, if you will, dictates that the pitcher just ran out of energy and thereby blew a perfect game.

While Occam’s razor is remarkably and almost universally useful, there are two dangers I can think of in utilizing it. The first is that Occam's razor is not and was never intended to be an absolute. For instance, there may very well be evidence that you are not aware of when you deploy the razor, so try to be thorough in your search for evidence and keep an open mind when applying Occam. Which leads us to the other, greater, danger, which is the human inclination to relentlessly search for evidence in a desire to reach a particular outcome or to overturn accepted wisdom. In this scenario, the problem-solver may overlook or dismiss evidence that does not support the foregone conclusion in favor of evidence that does. This tendency, known as confirmation bias, can lead to conspiracy thinking and other discredited belief systems, which Occam's razor, when properly applied, happens to be superb at slicing to shreds.

Despite these concerns, Occam's razor remains an indispensable tool for reaching conclusions, solving problems, and resolving dilemmas. It relies on a simple principle that what you see is what you get, that the evidence that exists is all you need to reach a logical end and the truth of a matter. Wielded wisely, Occam's razor can cut through poor habits of mind and help avoid wild and magical beliefs. It can shave away confirmation bias and group think. It is a tool as equally wonderful for everyday household use as for solving global conundrums. It is capable of slashing through lies, superstition, wild-eyed conspiracy theories, urban legends, and standard BS.

​As miraculous as it may sound, though, it is not magic at all. It is just a razor.

To be sure, humor can be a risky thing in the workplace. A leader who is not confident in his or her ability to crack a joke should not try, but that does not preclude allowing others to trip the light comedic. For those who fear they are humor challenged, I recommend conducting a simple "humor audit," which will help gauge your inclination to laugh. 

Of course, certain rules of decorum and decency must never be compromised. Humor too often leads, intentionally or unintentionally, to sharp divisions between insiders and outsiders, so humor in the workplace is best if inclusive. And humor should land within the parameters that are generally accepted in your specific workplace's culture or in the culture at large, which means that a budding jokester needs to have a good idea what those shared parameters are. Some workplaces may be more tolerant of lighthearted irreverence, for instance. Others, may demand a certain decorum with strict attention paid to the niceties of proper respect, the hierarchical strictures of subordination, and the astringent mores of Victorian stoicism. In other words, some places will be lively and fun and others deadly dull. 

And the humor should never be demeaning to individuals or groups, including individuals and groups not represented at the meeting or in that workplace. Cracking a joke about a colleague who is participating in a meeting or about an identity group represented during the meeting can be rude, alienating, and at least borderline bullying. Cracking a joke about someone not in the meeting or an identity group not represented is almost certainly crude, cowardly, and unduly cruel. Whatever the case, such attempts at humor are potentially discriminatory. If the moral imperative toward decency is not enough to maintain order, everyone should be painfully conscious that inappropriate humor is not only offensive, but it is often legally actionable as well.

In addition, humor in the workplace should not become a stand-up routine with one individual cracking up the room. And, if you are the boss attempting this comedic act, just go ahead and assume that every titter from every person in the room has effectively been coerced, a sure way to sow seeds of discontent. If your position allows no hecklers, why the heck are you on stage? Not convinced? Simply chew on this phrase: "enforced fun and levity on command." Mmm. Delightful.

Whatever your role in the workplace, if you fantasize about standing in front of an exposed brick wall, a spotlight in your eyes and microphone in your hand, you best not test your material during a business meeting. And bosses beware, if only one or two people are cracking wise during meetings, that can be a sign of dysfunctional stress even if everyone is laughing. The fact is that your jokester is just trying to break the tension that your meeting is generating. I know. I have been that lone clown.

Alternately, there are ways to open up the floor for everyone to participate, but doing so will require conscious effort and sharing the spotlight. Even the seemingly humorless can shine in these settings.

​Personally, I have been told that my sense of humor can be a tad dry and, well, sardonic, so I have to read the room carefully. Needless to say, my reading comprehension in such situations can be limited, so recently, I took this cool Humor Typology Test created by the authors of the forthcoming book Humor, Seriously. The test plots your humor style using four categories:

• Magnet
• Sweetheart
• Stand-Up, and
• Sniper.

Despite my own apparent shortcomings in the humor department, I have long embraced the notion that the team that can laugh together can work together. I have witnessed employees file into a dreaded meeting room, heads down with glum looks, anxiously gripping computers and notepads only to see them later emerge upbeat, smiling, and chortling with each other, feeling good about themselves, their colleagues, and the task at hand. What made the difference? Levity and laughter. Laughter combined with basic decency can help cut through the politics and self doubt that plague every organization and individual. 

​And yet, vast numbers of us continue to toil toward perfection, and I get its appeal. Workaday perfection is a great motivator. Since you cannot possibly achieve perfection, then its pursuit keeps you constantly moving upward toward achievement and even overachievement, which is admirable, right? Perfectionism would logically keep us sharp and on the right and righteous path. Since perfection is precise and unforgiving, perfectionism is a precise and unforgiving approach to life. Perfectionism gives you the impetus to eliminate errors in yourself and in others so that you can move closer to your goal, perfection.

Really?

I heard the following saga many years ago, from an administrator at a small university. We shall call her Mary. Mary was named the chief administrator of her new academic unit, and, having moved straight from faculty with no clear rules and few experiences to rely on, she looked for a role model to emulate. She began to closely watch her fellow administrators, who all had considerably more administrative experience than she did.

One in particular drew Mary's attention. He appeared to have a strong sense of self and always seemed to be on the ball due, perhaps, to his long experience in similar positions at that small university. We shall call him John. Mary imagined that, inexperienced as she was, she suffered from imposter syndrome more than most, but John seemed to have no such misgivings. He was always in control and constantly and decisively fixing, poking, and recalibrating every action and every outcome. No 'i' was left undotted. No 't' was left uncrossed. Each move, no matter how slight, was calculated and precise, from the way he drank his coffee to where he sat during a meeting. Nothing was left to chance.

Mary would watch as he burst into every meeting precisely on time to start because he had been working on something critical until the last second. He would leave the meeting the same way. Others might linger to chit-chat or share thoughts, but he would zip right by them on his way to his next crisis. He was a problem-solver to be sure, and he was set on perfecting his practice as an administrator. It was an impressive display, and Mary was duly impressed. In fact, she started emulating John. Not in everything of course. Her coffee, she insists, did not have to be just so, and she has a habit of sitting where she wants. But that restive busyness, that sense that there was always something that needed doing because there was no other way to perfect it, affected her profoundly. Soon, Mary too found herself rushing everywhere, from crucial event to crucial event, and she knew she had become impressive as well. People noticed and would comment on how hard she was working and how meticulous she had become. She dazzled even herself with her own significance and seeming willingness to rise to any occasion. You could always be sure to see Mary flying about campus with barely time to say hello to colleagues and friends. Students, she admits, were out of the question.

Just as John was prone to do, Mary started identifying crises everywhere, large or small. She regularly announced as she rushed out of meetings that she had to go "put out a fire." These crises were real, as real as those her fellow administrator, John, faced every moment. Administrating was hard. She observed John laboring constantly to synchronize every action, always with that elusive perfection just on the horizon line. He produced reports and studies and plans that were epic in their scope and epically captured on prodigious spreadsheets. Mary was impressed and inspired.

John was not altogether well, though. All his work and all his perfectionism took a physical and mental toll. He became gaunt and irritable. Mary realized soon enough that while he had mastered every minute detail, he had no sense of the larger cause they were charged with pursuing. He measured himself in exacting terms and measured everyone around him the same way, but he could not see that his faculty loathed him and loathed their jobs, which they were never able to do well enough for him. Because he was a control freak, John took no risks. He was a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy. He habitually avoided all controversies and made no waves no matter how intolerable the circumstances, particularly when they were intolerable only to faculty or students. He permitted no dissent, not even the slightest criticism, and expected maximum effort from everyone, including himself, at all times. The better faculty members with the means left, and their fresh replacements largely seemed cut from the same cloth as John. They soon too joined in his relentless drive for perfection.

Students began to noticeably suffer along with faculty. The goal for John and most of his faculty became less about educating all students and more about educating the best students. The ones who did not make their unforgiving cut but who decided to stay on at the university usually ended up in one of the majors in Mary's academic unit. Mary began to discern that many of them were much happier now and began to excel, but John and some of his faculty were openly contemptuous of them. They suggested that Mary's academic unit was not as rigorous as theirs because of all their "sub-standard students." His unit had the best students. After all, you cannot achieve perfection as an educator if the students are not all nearly perfect already. In education, we call this process "diamonds in, diamonds out."

​Eventually all this perfection took a toll on Mary. Something snapped in her. One day, she was giving a presentation, and, at the end of her part, she apologized for having to leave abruptly with her usual excuse that she had "to put out a fire." The folks in the meeting nodded admiringly as she bolted out the door to her office on the other side of campus She was pleased to note how obviously awed they were by the difficulty of her job and her seriousness of purpose. As she walked across campus, she began to think how cool she was, rushing toward that next fire. It was almost heroic. She knew too that her day would be filled with extinguishing such fires, but she was sure to surmount every mounting crisis and to move that much closer to perfection.

That was when that something inside her snapped. Somewhere between that meeting and her office Mary suddenly broke character and, for whatever reason, questioned herself. "What exactly is this fire I am rushing toward? What is this next crisis in an endless series of crises?"

The answer: Mary had to make a phone call.

That was it. A phone call. And not even a very important one. It was just a blip on her busy calendar, but she had built it up in her own mind so that it would seem as urgent as urgent could be—a fire that, while now small, would soon blaze and threaten to destroy everything she was building and any chance she had at achieving perfection. She must decisively snuff it. With her new realization, that her fire was not even a spark, that the next crisis was not even a minor issue, she burst out laughing. It was mortifying to recognize how much of a spectacle she had been making of herself. Sure, people were amazed by Mary's superhuman focus, and she too was pleased with herself. But it was all a fraud, a show as much for her as for the world. She had spent most of her energy and time spinning an illusion rather than focusing on what was important and the mission of the university.

Mary then started watching her erstwhile role model through a new lens. What John trumpeted as his noble pursuit of perfection, Mary now perceived as mostly meaningless busywork. Those vast, incomprehensible spreadsheets that he produced and all the toil and planning they represented would rarely see any fruition. No one would really bother to read them even if they could. The mammoth, meaningless reports he constantly churned out somehow failed to acknowledge that his academic unit was failing in its most fundamental duty: educating students. In fact, the shedding of "inadequate" students was the tell-tale sign of his own inadequacy, and the fact that those students were finding a home and success in Mary's academic unit as well as success in their future endeavors was even more damning. Mary had discovered that it was John's very pursuit of perfection that augmented his academic unit's failings. 

In perfecting trifling minutia, he had lost sight of anything meaningful. He and his favorite faculty kept doing the same things over and over while expecting different results. In short, Mary came to understand through him that relentless perfectionism is a debilitating illness or even a mania. Yes, his faculty touted the ability to secure a few prestigious grants, but those contributed little to the overall budget and did even less to enhance that small institution's mission, which was to focus on student learning. To Mary's mind now, perfectionism was a gilded toilet with plumbing problems.

And that is part of the problem. Perfectionism is deception—deception of the self and others. It stands to reason that if perfection is an impossible goal, then the self-criticism that attends its relentless pursuit and perpetual disappointment must finally take a toll on one's integrity. It becomes the easier choice to look down on others in order to bolster the ever-failing self, and doing so requires self-aggrandizement and judgmentalism. Perfectionism breeds unwarranted arrogance. In short, perfectionism establishes a classic inferiority complex.

After her revelation, Mary formulated an ethos to offset the mad pursuit of perfection. First, she tweaked her vocabulary and urged those around her to do the same. There were no fires to put out, ever. And, while Mary did not totally ban the word "crisis," she treated it cynically. If she or anyone else used it carelessly, they would rigorously critique its appropriateness, starting with simple questions like, "What crisis?" "Isn't this really just a problem, and doesn't every problem have a solution?" Mary and her team found, quickly, that there are few actual actual academic crises. They exist, but they are pretty exotic. They also found that many of the actions they had deemed urgent were utterly unimportant and often not worth even doing. They had confused "urgency," which has to do with time limits, and "importance," which has to do with substance. They practiced applying the Eisenhower Matrix as a matter of course and practiced forgiving themselves when unimportant things just did not get done. No one else much noticed, by the way.

Meanwhile, John, the pure perfectionist, continued to propel himself and his academic unit relentlessly with little thought of what it was they were really achieving. He was so caught up in his daily toil and his time was so limited that from time to time, his faculty members would come to Mary to get advice that should have come from him. He was too busy, they told her. More than once, students from John's academic unit came to Mary for help and support when he was unavailable. John continued to shed faculty, who moved on to healthier environments. In contrast, personnel turnover in Mary's academic unit was near zero, and student retention—the principal measure of year-to-year student success—was quite high. 

There was nothing magical about all this. Mary and her team just started eschewing perfectionism and replaced it with a more rational philosophy, one I heartily endorse: the assertion that there is always a better way. Notice that the emphasis is on the way (process) not the goal (perfection). They asked themselves basic questions before they started any project: Why and so what? Fortified with this approach, they were able to focus on what was important while constantly assessing themselves and adjusting as needed. Oh, and if someone forgot to dot an 'i,' there was usually someone else to catch it. And if they did not catch it, which was rare, no student was ever hurt, no effort failed. Sometimes Mary's boss laced into her for minor errors, but that only reflected poorly on him, as he too had started emulating John's obsession with perfectionism and mastery of the trivial. Mary also noticed that she was putting far fewer hours into her job and yet was able to accomplish all that was required. She also was achieving goals that were most important to her faculty and students. She had become, in fact, more productive.

I wish I could say that John saw her and her team as a good model. Instead, he continued to look down on them as he puffed up his own mediocrity. He worked and worked, but had little more to show than she did, and his outcomes were sometimes far worse. To be sure, he has since met with more career success, but the ripples of misery that emanate from him and threaten to drown all around him are only overtopped by the absolute anguish that his carping words and deteriorating physical condition betray. He has achieved everything he has ever wanted and more, but he is disconsolate. Meanwhile, Mary, has fallen short of her original professional ambitions, but she has settled into a contentedness that suits her better than meaningless accomplishments embellished by vainglorious titles.

Perfectionism is the philosophy of unexamined failure. It blinds us to what is most important. I agree with Mary. There is always a better way. And the pursuit of that ethos, rather than blind perfectionism, often leads to success along the path we least suspect. 

​My old neighborhood in Baltimore, where I lived for almost 14 years, was known for its many bars and restaurants. Reputedly, we had more liquor licenses in a few blocks than in any other jurisdiction in the state of Maryland. As a neighborhood activist and a founding member of the ineptly-named Liquor Advisory Committee of our neighborhood association, I had an extensive and intimate knowledge of how these establishments operated. We needed to form this Liquor Advisory Committee because, with its concentration of drinking establishments, our neighborhood would transform on weekends into a massive raucous street party with all the attendant mayhem one could imagine, particularly when local colleges were in session.

To be fair, many of the restaurants were perfectly respectable and law-abiding. They were quite wonderful to boot. A critical mass, though, catered to the party crowd and contributed to the distress of residents and other business owners without bestowing much benefit.  The neighborhood association regularly confronted these owners about their illegally serving underaged or overly inebriated customers and unleashing them onto our streets. We would explain that these same illicit customers destroyed our property, disturbed our peace, and committed any number of crimes from public defecation (sorry if you are eating while reading this, but it is true), to vandalism, to street fighting, to sexual assault, to drunk driving. Invariably, then, the owners, who all lived elsewhere, fell back on a tired array of excuses. The most common was that if the owners were to enforce all the onerous rules and regulations that the oppressive government and intolerant neighbors imposed, their businesses would not survive and the community would lose its vibrancy. Keep in mind that there were many establishments that were run by responsible citizens that did not contribute to the general pandemonium but still somehow thrived and were key to the neighborhood's character. 

In short, the recalcitrant business owners honestly believed that the community’s collective torment should subsidize their shoddy business practices and contribute to their financial gain while offering the neighborhood almost nothing in return. Since so many other restaurants did not significantly add to the chaos, I long contended that any business model that required a liquor establishment to break laws or cause undo stress to the surrounding neighborhood was not a particularly good business model. Indeed, such a business was by definition an utter failure, and the recalcitrant owners were in fact bad businessmen (and they were all men). ​

I describe all this as a roundabout lead-in to my reflection on the relationship between bullying and incompetence in the workplace. Richard Osman recently tweeted this profundity that I wholly endorse: "If you can't do your job without bullying people then you can't do your job." In short, just like the feckless bar owners who could not turn a sufficient profit while operating within the parameters of the law and the boundaries of basic human decency, bullies in the workplace are inherently incompetent. 

Perhaps you feel otherwise, that you cannot get ahead except by stepping on others. If so, let's start with the premise that the very essence of your job is to support the flourishing of your organization. Then, how exactly does suppressing others' ability to perform advance your organization? Perhaps you imagine that your competence is best measured by your ability to climb a ladder or to stay in your current position and retain a title. If so, you are demonstrably wrong. After all, how many individuals do you personally know who are obviously inept at their jobs yet are never fired and are sometimes even promoted? You are likely recalling many people at this moment, maybe even your boss, aren't you? Therefore, if you know these outwardly successful people to be categorically incompetent, then you can only conclude that personal success cannot be the measure of competence. Indeed, the meritocracy remains an unfulfilled promise.

So, like the bar owners, if you must break standard rules of decency or break people to do your job and to get ahead, you are not good at your job and do not deserve to advance. If you feel your position requires you to gaslight, manipulate, backstab, bully, or just plain be an asshole, I aver that you are an incompetent. Whether you get the work done is rendered irrelevant by your rancid behavior. (In fairness, such behavior will likely earn you the coveted Niccolò Machiavelli Award for Self-aggrandizement and Overall Post-medieval Behavior. You may collect your trophy over there by that sizable ash heap of the asshats of history.) If, on the other hand, you make an effort to treat people well, (and I mean make an effort. It is not a passive thing) and behave with decency in the workplace, then you have a shot at being competent, but just a shot. There is more to competence, of course, but at least you have not automatically forfeited all claim to competency by being a workplace jerk.

I am not suggesting that you need to be a Boy Scout or Girl Scout, a choirgirl or choirboy, or a passive pushover. Not at all. I am suggesting, though, nay, I am insisting that every time you have witnessed indecent behavior in the workplace, you have witnessed incompetence at work, and I say this while confessing that I myself have not always lived up to my personal standards of integrity. No one is perfect. Still, it matters not what lofty title, inflated salary, or slobbering acclaim you have accrued. It matters not how big your house is, how often people fawn over you, or how important you are convinced you are. If you feel you need to regularly act like a jerk and treat others badly, then you are nothing more than a jerk to your core. If you do not have the intelligence, the tenacity, or the fortitude to do your job with integrity and treat others with dignity, you cannot do your job well at all and discredit your organization. Ultimately, that indecent ineptitude you display is your only legacy. Oh, that and your Machiavelli Award. And if all this is hard to hear because it is a dog-eat-dog world and you need to accrue as much stuff and as much adulation as you can before you slip this mortal coil, then as you have no doubt said to others in some form or other, suck it up.

​My decades in higher education have made me all-too familiar with the imposter syndrome, the niggling notion that one is not worthy and therefore a fraud. While this syndrome infects every profession, I suspect that it is most pervasive in academia in large part due to the meritocracy that is supposed to govern higher education. This meritocracy promises that excellence is the primary criterion for achievement and promotion and that this extraordinariness is demonstrated and measured through accomplishments. Thus, witnessing the abilities that one's peers display can be daunting and lead to feelings of deficiency and worthlessness. For faculty this sense of inferiority can start as early as graduate school.

​That was my own first experience with the imposter syndrome. I would watch as my fellow graduate students performed seemingly effortless feats of intellect both in and out of class while I slogged along barely able to keep up. To make it worse, I even had a good friend who claimed to read two books of densely challenging literary criticism a day, and she was not lying! My eventual discovery that she seemed to have a peculiar ability to comprehend a whole page in a single glance did not lessen my feelings of inadequacy either. She was more brilliant and more productive than anyone I knew in graduate school, and I struggled to stay afloat in the fading vestige of her wake. If she was the real deal, I was certainly an imposter!

I was fortunate, though, to hear about the concept of the imposter syndrome at about the same time, which enabled me to grasp its pervasiveness and its implications. Even so, when finally ensconced as a faculty member (after a time on the academic job market, which can really dent your self-assurance!), I still felt the sting of others' seeming merit, a sting that accompanied me well into my decade as an administrator. After all, when you are surrounded by a bunch of smart overachievers who all answer to "doctor," having impressive letters after your name can seem a bit unspecial. In some ways and for the better, it was that very feeling of incapacity that helped propel me forward into becoming a dean. Nonetheless, eventually I came to realize that neither an administrator nor a faculty member could afford to indulge the imposter syndrome because it is, at its heart, a gross distortion of reality.

Among my peers, some succumbed to the syndrome and faded into a miasma of self-doubt masquerading as crippling humility. Because they were inadequate, they told themselves, they could never be effective as teachers and leaders and therefore need not try. Their conviction that they were forever feckless was the epitome of a fixed mindset. Others took the opposite tack and counterbalanced their sense of unfitness with an overly large dose of self-regard and, too often, arrogance. These folks were the preening peacocks of the faculty who promoted their own brand above all else and even denigrated and intimidated their peers. The worst practiced a sort of disciplinary snobbery and openly defamed other's academic fields, an act of craven anti-intellectualism that has no place in the academy. I had no patience for disciplinary snobs and marveled at how frequently they were among the least effective and most damaging teachers as well as the most inadequate researchers at their institutions.

Among administrators, particularly those with power, such countervailing arrogance had similarly predictable effects. Arrogance and self-regard bred contempt for colleagues and underlings alike. This contempt is a form of corruption that disallows a leader from seeing how their actions or inactions impact those around them. In the worst scenarios, it morphs into or becomes an excuse for an utter lack of empathy combined with a fatuous disregard for introspection, which results inevitably in a propensity to bully. For these administrators, their position or even just their title was the ultimate sign of their great merit. They were impervious to criticism and could only be challenged by those of higher rank, before whom they groveled and toadied.

Those who best managed their imposter syndrome were the ones who, as faculty or administrators, recognized the syndrome as a phantasm, a self-imposed criticism that fraudulently disguised itself as a judgment by others or by academia as a whole. In other words, they knew that the imposter syndrome was itself an imposter. These professionals realized that just about everyone was suffering from it, and the ones who appeared to have dispelled it by bloviating about their own accomplishments and superiority were usually the ones who were most tormented by the syndrome. The more well adjusted still felt like imposters from time to time, but they put those feelings in context and embraced their role as a faculty member or administrator first. Their goal was to do as well as they could without over-striving, bullying, or cowering. This lot was not perfect, but they did not beat themselves up for all their imperfections. Instead, they accepted that perfection is an impossible and unworthy goal (a matter I will discuss in a later post) and chose instead a growth mindset of constant self-review, adjustment, and improvement. Their efforts could be exhausting and certainly humbling, but they did the least harm.

I write here of higher education because it is the field I know best and the one, as I said, that may have the worse epidemic of imposter syndrome. I recognize and understand that not everyone in academia is affected by the syndrome and that it infects professional fields far and wide. I only hope that readers from every discipline can find something useful in this little essay and whatever hard-earned wisdom I can bring to it.

So if you feel inadequate, like you do not deserve what you have earned, remember that you are not alone. Many, perhaps most around you feel like imposters in their own skin. The best response is not to fix your mind on your own inadequacies. Nor is it to double down on your imposterism and pump yourself up beyond reason. The best mindset is one of recognition, acceptance, and growth. Let's face it. We are all imposters. Indeed, I feel like an imposter writing and posting this piece, but here we are. Imposters may rule the world, but we first need to rule ourselves.