As a boy, while friends would bike through Europe during the summers, or hitchhike around the country looking for women and marijuana, I was playing baseball.
I saw the world via the narrow aperture afforded by two white chalk lines that stretched from home (appropriately enough) to the left and right field foul poles. There's not much but confines within the friendly confines.
In my day, we didn't take six years to graduate from a four-year-college. We didn't take a semester in Ulan Bator. We were programmed to want out, quickly, of any place we were in.
Later, I got married young, had kids young, and was financially-stretched young. My wife and I raised kids in the city and scrounged to send them to the city's best private schools. Again, no travel for me.
Finally, when I was doing well in my career, I never much liked the Pytka-derived shooting junkets. While other agency people flew around the world, I avoided those opportunities, preferring to do what I do best. I chose my craft over the craft table.
Today, at 65, and working for myself, I'm still not traveling. I don't get paid when I don't work. And while I'd like to visit Machu Pichu or Prague or St. Petersburg or Jutland, I choose work and pay over play.
However, all is not lost.
I find time--almost like I am a monk--for at least an hour of silent devotion every day. I call it my restorative niche. That's when I travel the world and fly through time and space and various cognitive spheres through the reading I do.
While I have a field or two of moderate expertise, my reading is peripatetic. When I see a review that seems interesting in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist or The Washington Post, I usually make a PDF of it. Then I usually order the book on Amazon. I finally get around to reading about one in five of the books I order. (That isn't wasting money. It's not profligate. You have to try a lot of things to succeed at a few things.)
Last night, for instance, I was in the West African nation of Ghana, following the exploits of one of the great fraudsters of all-time Ackah Blay-Miezah, as he bilked thousands of people through the Oman Ghana Trust Fund. Blay-Miezah makes Elizabeth Holmes or Sam Bankman-Fried look like your Uncle Phil who does magic tricks.
You can order the book here (unlike Rich Siegel, I won't get a cut of the proceeds from Amazon) and read The New York Times' review here.
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It's hard to live in what used to be America and not hear, every fifteen minutes or so, something like "How can people still support Donald Trump," or worse, "How can 55-percent of the country believe this man?"
Those are questions that scare the shit out of the remaining 45-percent of the country.
Last night, reading Anansi's Gold, I tripped upon a mention of a 1956 anthropological study called "When Prophecy Fails." You can buy it here.
In ...When Prophecy Fails, three scholars monitored the members of a cult whose leader had predicted the end of the world— and how they coped when it didn’t happen.
"To the observers’ surprise, the cult members’ belief did not disappear when the apocalypse failed to arrive. Instead their belief became stronger. As one put it: “I’ve had to go a long way. I’ve given up just about everything. I’ve cut every tie: I’ve burned every bridge. I’ve turned my back on the world. I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe. And there isn’t any other truth . . . I can’t afford to doubt. I won’t doubt even if we have to make an announcement to the press tomorrow and admit we were wrong.
"When the day of the apocalypse passed, and the world kept on spinning, the cult members were remarkably insouciant: “Well, all right. Suppose they gave us a wrong date,” one said. “Let’s suppose it happens next year or two years or three or four years from now . . . All I know is that the plan has never gone astray. We have never had a plan changed.”
My point in all this is both simple and two-fold.
One, it explains the belief in shams and charlatans and Trumpism. You're in too deep to say you were an idiot.
And two, it explains to some measure the stupidity of our business. The chasing after of the latest shiny object and the failure to recant when an obvious mistake is made.
The proclamations that are delivered but never verified. "Blank is dead. Blank will change everything." From ChatGPT to programmatic to the Metaverse to Barbie.
No one will ever say they miscalculated when they stopped brand advertising and product differentiation and ran instead thumbnail-sized banner ads that say nothing.
No one will ever say people don't want relationships with brands or to have conversations with brands. And we were wrong about that.
No one will ever say they were wrong when proclaimed Facebook likes were the success calculus of our advertising.
No one will ever say they were wrong when they decided to stop paying older people and thousands of years of experience and their expertise were Stalin-like purged from our industry. And replaced with nothing comparable.
No one will ever say, "the open plan office is a crock of shit. It does nothing but make people not want to come in. It's noisy. Partners can't work together. And it's wholly unproductive. Also, people are twice as often sick and every legitimate study says how dumb this is."
No. As Chico once said, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"
Or,
"I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe. And there isn’t any other truth . . . I can’t afford to doubt. I won’t doubt even if we have to make an announcement to the press tomorrow and admit we were wrong."
Next time your holding company says something publicly, read it in this light.
When you're done gagging, you'll understand that you don't have to travel to learn about the world.
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