Self-censoring is bad for your career and the economy

This is Part 2 of a two-part series; Part 1 is Control freaks, creativity, and your career.

Imagine if Steve Jobs were twice as creative and applied for a job at Apple with a different name and appearance; would he be hired?

Not likely. Freada Klein conducted a similar experiment. Her husband, Mitch Kapor, founded Lotus Development Corporation and designed Lotus 1-2-3, “the ‘killer application’ which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s” along with other accomplishments that made him a pioneer of the personal computing industry.

Who wouldn’t want to hire a pioneering genius? Lotus—his own company. Freada submitted résumés of the first 40 Lotus employees, altering their names, and “not one of [them], including Kapor, was invited for a job interview. … Lotus had become a place where its founders were misfits.”

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said Apple would never hire him or Steve Jobs today, so close-minded companies potentially miss out “on finding the next person to come along with a world-changing idea.”

Would Microsoft hire Bill Gates with a different name but the same brilliance and behavior? Also not likely: googling him would reveal allegations (including from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen) that he would scream at people and verbally abuse them. Although he now seems to have mellowed into a good man, the Internet Manufactured Outrage Machine fed by Google that never forgets leads to rehashing the past instead of moving on and granting clemency for it.

We increasingly live in a world that values genius and talent less than inside-the-box conformity without rough edges. Job applications may as well include a checkbox: “Are you a robot? If not, can you at least pretend you are?”

“Steve Jobs had to work the night shift at Atari because his poor hygiene and petulant manner made the other employees complain.” — John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen in The Self-made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value

Bill Gates called Steve “Jobs "fundamentally odd" and "weirdly flawed" as a person.” Jobs was abrasive and cruelly brushed aside people, including valuable co-workers and his own daughter. He was a legendary jerk, but did things most people can only dream about. Whatever his flaws and quirks were, none of them repelled customers; Jobs was a rock star.

Thomas Edison was a conniving, unprincipled man who electrocuted dogs as a publicity stunt, but even the most fervent animal lovers don’t live in the dark because of that. When you want hot food in a jiffy, do you really care who invented the microwave oven or made yours?

“ Some of the best projects to ever come out of Atari … were from high school dropouts, college dropouts. One guy had been in jail.” — Nolan [Atari] Bushnell, the first person to hire Steve Jobs and author of Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent

Ben Franklin and Aristotle were jerks. Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Einstein, and Nikola Tesla were oddballs, but only fools wouldn’t hire them. If they were occupationally blacklisted after being judged by today's “one strike and you're out” standards, they would be replaced with mindless corporate clones. Subtract all the innovation by imperfect geniuses and we’d be back in the Stone Age.

The fact that Steve Jobs built the most valuable corporation in history despite what he did to his daughter and others should prove to companies that customers care about products and services, period, not whether those who made them were always angelic robots.

Not understanding this, LinkedIn influencers posted a spate of articles making readers afraid of their shadows, thinking they’re doomed if they are not always plastic-perfect, cautioning them to watch what they say on Facebook and elsewhere. But fear of letting your hair down has drawbacks. Making people more robotic makes them less creative. The world needs big ideas much more than good reputations that often are just fake veneers concealing common flaws. As I mentioned in Control freaks, creativity, and your career:

“… our culture … makes our filters work overtime 24/7/365 censoring everything we say and do lest we offend someone, violate an ever-increasing number of rules for political correctness, or give a potential employer reason to think we’re not a cookie-cutter-perfect robotic clone every minute of every day. One of the remarkable things about the brain is that if you do something a lot, you become better at it. If you’re frequently watching what you say, your filters become increasingly better at filtering …”

And filter they do, censoring not only bloopers but also creative ideas. That helps explain why as the world has become more controlling we see less exceptional creativity. Music from the 1960s, 70s and 80s is head-and-shoulders superior to songs from the past two decades, and the big ideas that once made lives so much better—where are they?

“The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old: only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury.” — Peter Thiel in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

There’s comfort in being good. In fact, being good—or at least having others think we are—is such a comfort zone to most people they begin coasting in neutral the minute they reach it.

Take me, for example. I graduated in the top 1% of my class in medical school, my residency director said I was the smartest resident they ever had, and one of my former bosses told me I was the smartest doctor he ever met. So what did I do? I coasted in neutral for years, hating clinical medicine and dreaming of leaving it, but too darned comfortable to get serious about inventing. I had potential to create moonshots (as you’ll see after they are commercialized), but I didn’t know how to tap my potential. So I wasted it for many years—not very smart, eh?

When billionaire Peter Thiel interviews someone for a job, he likes to ask: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

Most people think that being a scaredy-cat afraid to say what they really think—whether on Facebook or to their boss—is good for their careers and somehow the world, but those fake veneers just create comfort zones maintained by having brain filters work overtime. More filtering → fewer big ideas … that’s good? And even the apparent upside: reputations based on fakery—that’s also good? Better than, umm, say, reality?

We’d actually be better off with less filtering. That would directly enhance creativity and indirectly foster it by getting people in high gear, motivated way out of their comfort zones. I suspected that and later found evidence that social rejection can fuel motivation and maximize achievement.

In 1918, a magazine commissioned sociologist Thorstein Veblen to expound on how the “intellectual productivity” of Jews would flourish if they had a homeland. But Veblen thought that the marginalization of Jews didn't hinder them; instead, it fueled their scientific achievements. Persecution didn't hold them back; it pushed them forward by filling them with “skeptical animus” that enabled them to question everything.

Veblen sagaciously realized the advantages to being perpetual outsiders, but most people spend their lives bending over backwards to conform to cultural norms. Fitting in makes people comfortable but it doesn't catalyze the great achievements we see as proof of genius.

The world needs brilliant ideas that solve problems much more than it needs comfortable people coasting through life, such as some of my friends who married successful men and frittered away their 150 IQs. What a waste: with such brains in short supply, those given such gifts should not squander their potential to help others.

The ultimate occupational motivation for concealing our flaws and opinions that might rub someone the wrong way is a fear they may hurt business. That turns out not to be true. Think of the worst that can happen: the dirt, whatever it is, comes to light and leads to a scandal. According to University of Sussex research, “scandals involving bosses of major firms have no long-term negative impact on share prices and can even lead to better performance” (since that applies to chief executives, it likely also applies to less visible employees on those rare occasions when they make it into the limelight).

Even though that research included criminal behavior such as fraud and insider trading as well as personal scandals, such problems “can act as a catalyst to implement changes that benefit investors … [translating] into improved operating performance, often outstripping that of scandal-free rivals.”

Why? Despite all the rah-rah lip service about giving a 100% effort, most people—from interns to CEOs—are more nestled into their comfort zones than in top gear. Social rejection manifesting as scandals kick-starts motivation and hence maximizes achievement. More achievement → better products and services → more money. Better world, too: more problems solved; fewer ones bugging you.

“Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.” — Peter Thiel in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

In Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent, Nolan “Atari” Bushnell advised hiring people who thrive on being different and hence might not fit in. If they think for themselves and hence don't slavishly obey all cultural norms, who cares? Rarely do customers know who makes the stuff they buy, and if they did, Apple would have floundered under Steve Jobs who denied paternity for his daughter Lisa (the Apple Lisa was named after her) and reportedly refused to support her so her mother ended up “on welfare and clean[ed] houses to earn money.”

Although that is just the tip of his bad-boy iceberg, Jobs was still such a remarkably talented person anyone who refused to hire him would have to not be tuned into reality.

We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater; we should embrace good ideas even if they (as they so often do) come from people who don’t quite fit it or are less than perfect. The world is brimming with nice people but not great ideas. Anyone with them should have a role to play; the world is a very big place.

If we were all judged by our worst behavior or mistakes, with just one or two slip-ups trashing our reputations and dooming us to spend eternity in Hell, we'd regret the harsh, unforgiving criteria. People who expect perfection expect too much.

Tolerance for normal human imperfections is healthy and adaptive, while intolerance is unhealthy and often a sign of mental illness or flawed character, individually or collectively. For example, the rampant kookiness in Nazi Germany wasn't confined to their hatred of Jewish people, but even their own, if they were somehow imperfect or alleged to be so. A German woman alleged to be a prostitute was detained for two weeks, then released with a 7 PM curfew that she always met, except for one evening when she came in 15 minutes late. A neighbor turned her in, and she was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, where she was executed.

Consumers don't buy reputations; they purchase products and services, so they want the best ones, regardless of where they came from. No one wants to see how sausage is made. Similarly, great ideas and great products may come from unpalatable people. Companies should come to grips with the fact that some of the most creative people in history were hardly perfect.

“No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.” — Aristotle

In Yes Men? No Thanks!, Richard Branson celebrated mavericks “who don't quite fit in.” He stressed that businesses need “the occasional difficult, oblique, awkward creative person in the mix. Without a little sand in the oyster precious things never get made.” Indeed.

If people are not free to say what they think, freedom of speech no longer exists; we lost one of our most fundamental freedoms. But the Stepford World isn't a better one; bigotry, racism, hate, intolerance, and offensiveness are still rife. We're zipping our lips for what?

Freedom of speech should exist in reality, not just in the Constitution, and not just in whispers at home.

“The greatest problem in the world today is intolerance. Everyone is so intolerant of each other.” — Princess Diana

Consumers buy products, not friends

Influencer James Altucher wrote, “The buyer has to like you and want to be your friend. People pay for friendship.”

Only fools pay for friendship. Everyone else knows that salespeople feign friendliness, so if you pay for it, you're buying a fake bond, which is worse than none at all. Secondly, I don't know or care who makes 99.999% of what I buy. I’ll take a down-to-earth salty curmudgeon any day instead of a slick salesperson—or waitress, or whatever—putting on an act.

Where does pretending to be an angel fit into this equation? It doesn’t. Of the millions of patented products that define the modern world, the average consumer doesn’t know who invented any of those things—not even the incandescent light, which wasn’t conceived by Thomas Edison.

When asked, “What is the next issue to undergo a sea change in social acceptance?,” Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen responded, “Far more generalized acceptance of widespread variations in human behavior. All of us who were raised pre-Internet were taught that there is something called ‘normal,’ and I think that whole concept might go right out the window.”

That’s one more reason why companies shouldn’t put applicants’ personal lives under the microscope: because the common conception of “normal” is a fantasy, so in seeking it, they’re more apt to end up with workers adept at hiding things thanks to mental filters so good at screening they also filter out creative ideas.

“Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The 'smart' people don't.” — Burt Rutan, innovative aerospace engineer

Wise employers don’t care what you do in your personal life as long as you’re not breaking the law; they care about your performance and especially your ideas that could enable them to leapfrog the competition. They want the brightest ideas to generate the greatest profits ultimately attained by doing the most for more customers, who vote with their wallets for the best ideas.

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the Chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” — Sam Walton, founder, Walmart and Sam's Club

The advice to always watch what you say would be more palatable if those dispensing it specified it was intended for dime-a-dozen easily replaceable people, not those with unique skills, but even fungible people may generate breakthroughs. As Richard Branson wrote, “You never know where the next game-changing idea will come from.”

Employers are not better off with robotic workers who camouflage their opinions and fear going outside the norm so much they cannot creatively solve problems, thus enfeebling their corporations and our economy. The world desperately needs more creativity, not more fake veneers of being plastic-perfect to impress bosses who are no better than you are. Living as free individuals is more than just paying our bills and trembling with fear, worrying that bosses might overlook their imperfections and hyperfocus on ours.

Imagine if people were judged and hired—or not—based on their worst. Heck, why imagine that when we can do it? So let’s put two real people under the microscope:

Googling Person A reveals him discussing alcohol and drug problems that evidently dominated his life to the point where he “didn't really apply [himself] a lot.” You also found him trying to be funny at the expense of physically challenged people.

Person B sometimes used the N-word, told “coon jokes,” and did nothing to stop the killing of black men protesting for equal pay.

The above evidence on Persons A and B is indisputable but only some of the dirt you could find as a manager screening those applicants; if you dug a bit deeper, you’d also find more scuttlebutt: some factual, some alleged but unproven yet so scandalous you as a hiring manager would surely not hire them, right? After all, who would?

Most voters, who elected each man President of the United States—twice.

Person B is Abraham Lincoln. Besides using the N-word and telling “coon jokes,” he thought blacks were inferior to whites. He was Commander-in-Chief of the Army when it hung some black men who protested how blacks were paid only half as much as the lowest paid white soldiers.

As President and Commander-in-Chief, Lincoln was ultimately responsible for this perversion of justice, which made a mockery of the constitutional guarantee of free speech and the promise that “all men are created equal.”

Lincoln even objected to the presence of blacks when he told a group of them:

“You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this be admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated. It is better for both, therefore, to be separated.”

The racist condescension in the above quotation is more apparent when you know that it was prefaced by a command that those blacks, the first visitors to the White House, were there to listen, not speak.

Person A is Barack Obama: highly intelligent, highly educated, and surrounded by other bright and polished people who work overtime helping him say just the right things. He is about as politically correct as an Ivy League graduate can be, yet he is still human and hence prone to occasional gaffes.

Discussing that one, White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton “said the President did not intend to offend … [he] ‘made an off-hand remark making fun of his own bowling that was in no way intended to disparage …’”

Of course he did not intend to offend! He is too smart and savvy for that, and there is no evidence he thinks the awkwardness of physically challenged people is a laughing matter even though there is video of him doing that because what someone blurts out on the Internet or even on TV—fully aware that millions of people are watching—is not necessarily what one believes. Sooner or later, everyone puts his foot in his mouth, especially when trying to be funny or entertaining.

Because almost everything people say in their lives are off-hand remarks, no one lives a fully scripted life, so no one should be judged as if they did. Therefore, occasional mistakes should be given a pass, figuratively in one ear and out the other. You’re imperfect? Me, too.

Those who rush to judge others based on knowing an isolated tidbit or two, ignoring the preponderance of the evidence, are as foolish as investors who jump to buy stock after hearing a rumor about a largely unknown company.

A sordid injustice results when people are assessed solely on the basis of their mistakes, not what makes them shine.

LinkedIn Executive Chairman and co-Founder Reid Hoffman has it right. The first of his 16 Lessons Learned is to evaluate people not by beginning with their weaknesses but what is “uniquely excellent about them,” as his former Chief of Staff Ben Casnocha wrote in 10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: What I Learned.

Unlike wives who sometimes dredge up mistakes made so long ago they’re forgotten by their husbands, Google never forgets. Even if the dirt they have on you never accurately reflected who you really are, or even if you’ve changed for the better, there’s Google acting as a small-minded smear machine.

“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” — Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, quoting someone he termed an “unknown sage” in The Saturday Evening Post article “The World of the Uneducated” (November 28, 1959)

Admiral Rickover wouldn’t think much of Google, which for years has done nothing to make personal assessments made by googling based on current fact, not small minds gossiping about others, perhaps because they are Internet bullies with a screw loose or have a political axe to grind. That’s one reason why the European Union and Argentina enacted right to be forgotten laws.

But when job applicants are rapidly screened, managers usually don’t evince the wisdom of Admiral Rickover or Reid Hoffman; they often make snap judgments based on incomplete evidence that doesn’t tell the true story: the balanced perspective.

If a modern hiring manager assessed Lincoln, why bother giving him a chance to explain? Why consider his redeeming qualities? Why bother considering if the old Lincoln is the same as the new Lincoln? See dirt → knee-jerk reaction → REJECT him.

Had voters rejected Lincoln, slaves would have lost one of the best friends they ever had, preventing him from emancipating them after he grew into a better person.

If Google were around in 1776, Ben Franklin wouldn’t have been arguably the most instrumental Founding Father; he would have been marginalized into oblivion after small minds lapped up how he consorted with a number of women other than his wife and was also no stranger to prostitutes—so many that even he was amazed he never contracted a venereal disease. Small minds would have also buzzed after reading what he wrote about how the bodies of women change as they age—but their vaginas don’t … so said one of the best scientists of all time. Without Franklin’s influence as a statesman, the United States likely would have lost the Revolutionary War.

If other prominent Americans were judged by one-strike-and-you’re-out-forever assessments, we wouldn’t have benefited from what was “uniquely excellent” about Albert Einstein and other eminent physicists such as Richard Feynman, Erwin Schr?dinger, Marie Curie, and Robert Oppenheimer. Also falling victim to the Google chopping block would be Franklin D. Roosevelt along with many other Presidents and a long list of others.

“… the aggregate effect of their carefully curated online personas and seemingly-perfect lives makes us feel like losers.” — Influencer Steve Faktor in The Economics of Happiness

Considering the truism He who has nothing to hide, hides nothing, people adept at hiding make others wonder, “What else are they hiding?”

What makes wise people, companies, and the government nervous was summed up by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

“Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

The United States government routinely contemplates the possibility of what they call Known Unknowns: Unconventional 'Strategic Shocks' including “Black Swan” events. A Black Swan event refers to a difficult-to-predict and rare circumstance beyond the realm of normal expectations that has the potential to substantially affect history, such as the September 11th 2001 attacks.

Thus it is much safer and more comforting to deal with nations and people who are open books, not secretive. When they hide something, you don’t know what the hell they’re hiding, and might be in for a very unpleasant Black Swan surprise.

If you are really so bad you deserve to be permanently unemployed, managers screening applicants don’t need Google to help them make sweeping judgments—especially now that we live in an era in which most people go through their lives censoring themselves and thus creating fake veneers of who they really are, with their online personas often being as real as Disney movies.

“If men could only know each other, they would never either idolize or hate. … Good people are only half as good, and bad people only half as bad, as other people regard them.” — Elbert Hubbard

While unfettered creativity and expression so vital to it are obviously great for the economy, people often don’t realize why they personally are better off not succumbing to be-a-robot pressure. After all, if you go through life zipping your lip, you’ll never lose a job because of what you say—but you’ll also never receive juicy offers given to people precisely because they do stand out. In the United States, if you write about politics and are good enough to rise above the white noise, about half the people will hate what you say and half will love it. Consequently, if anyone is daffy enough to hire on that basis, you stand about a 50% chance of being hired. And if you don’t stand out? About zero.

“Most people tiptoe through life to make it safely to death.” — Billionaire philanthropist John Paul DeJoria

Most people tiptoe through life, never reaching for the stars—or even their star: their talent that often remains latent, bottled up by brain filters censoring everything that isn’t bland. But playing it safe isn’t playing it smart. You might land a so-so job or even a seemingly good one by pretending to be a perfect robot, but if your great ideas dry up—and they likely will if you give your filters the upper hand—you will likely never conceive ideas enabling you to ditch the 40-hour-per-week rat race.

I haven’t worked a traditional job in so long I have only distant (yet very unpleasant) memories of alarm clocks, work hassles, and shoehorning fun into what little free time I had, with much of that wasted by exhaustion stemming from working odd hours as an ER doctor that gave me perpetual jet lag.

As an ER doc, I made up to $300,000 per year (adjusted for interim inflation in 2014 dollars). Most people would call that a good job, but I’m not one of them. That earned me a big gorgeous home, a small even more gorgeous girlfriend—all part of a fake lifestyle that made me miserable. As if that weren’t bad enough, to dig myself into that hole took about 40,000 hours—equivalent to 20 years of full-time work—training to become a licensed physician. So despite what my residency director or boss said about me being smart, that was just plain stupid.

With work occupying so much of our lives, unless you love your work, you won’t love life—and if you don’t, why bother? Life should offer much more than big homes, fancy cars, and attractive partners: the superficial trinkets enslaving people to work they don’t love to get what they think is love. Whatever floats your boat might not float mine; for me, creativity is what I live for, and what I do best, enabling me to do the most for myself and others.

“Managers sometimes forget that interviews are a two-way street. And at the end of the day, they need great employees like you a lot more than you need them.” — Brian de Haaff in Why Perfect Candidates (Like You) Walk Away

Ditto for investors because there are always more people with money than people with great ideas; most venture capitalists never connect with anyone generating moonshot breakthroughs so they opt for second-rate ideas generating second-rate profits and disappointed consumers, with the smart ones wondering why our world isn’t more advanced, as Peter Thiel observed about our surroundings being strangely old.

“Good ideas are hard to find, and great ideas even harder.” — John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen in The Self-made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value

Conclusion

One of the best ER nurses I knew often made pit stops in the bar after work and was a serial womanizer. He would have been in a heap o’ trouble if nurses were hired on the basis of who is most angelic. If I had a sister, I wouldn’t want him to date her, but I’d be relieved if he treated her in the ER because he never screwed up while other smart, otherwise competent nurses occasionally made dangerous mistakes.

Knowing that it takes just one to end a life—maybe yours—you learn to love what the superstars can do for you without caring if they are boy scouts and girl scouts in their private lives. Speaking of which: you relish your privacy; are they any less entitled to it? One of my relatives aptly noted:

“I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business.” — Chester A. Arthur

References:

Article: How to Hire the Next Steve Jobs: “Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese's, gave the late Apple founder his first job. Here, Bushnell shares his tips on finding (and keeping) brilliant oddballs.”

The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs by Chrisann Brennan, mother of Steve Jobs’s daughter

Why Many Successful Entrepreneurs Come Across Like Jerks

Companies that screen social media accounts alienate job candidates

Social network screening of employees can make organizations unattractive to applicants

Companies look at wrong things when using Facebook for hiring, study shows

Excerpt: “Employers are increasingly using Facebook to screen job applicants and weed out candidates they think have undesirable traits. But a new study from North Carolina State University shows that those companies may have a fundamental misunderstanding of online behavior and, as a result, may be eliminating desirable job candidates.”

Influencer Dave Pell: STFU: The Coming Age of Self Censorship

Scandals not bad for business in the long term, study finds

Hiding true self harms career and sense of belonging