House of Eratosthenes

Next week I’m turning sixty. And people are lining up, out the door and around the block, to find out what sort of lessons I’ve been learning in all that time.

Oops, check that. No they’re not doing that. But if they did…

It’s such a good question, I don’t need someone to ask it to start churning away, coming up with an answer. What’s the biggest lesson for me out of the past, let us say, forty-two years give or take. What’s really upturned my apple cart.

“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care” has emerged from the forty-five year fog with some unexpected weight to it. But that’s not exactly a surprise. I’d heard it, and I could see some truth in it at the very beginning. I may not have responded to it as well as I should have. So I learned. But as a true surprise? It doesn’t take the top slot.

I would say, to this imaginary line-up of people wanting to know what I’ve learned, my number one world-upside-down, pancake-flip epiphany would be something like…

The most important first step, before attending to an effort that is serious, is to purge the work area from those in attendance who are not serious. Offer them a hint, usher them out, deport them, defenestrate them. Maybe that comes off as cynical. But with team and group-think crammed down our throats these last several decades, it’s become a truth that hardens and emerges with prominence, becoming even more true, because we’re not allowed to openly acknowledge how true it is.

Some people are needed. Some people are not.

There are various messages people use to communicate “I am one of the unserious people who should be escorted out of the room before you start.” Griping about millionaires and billionaires hoarding all the wealth, is a good way to show you’re an unserious person. Serious people don’t need to worry about how much someone else has, or doesn’t have. They’re more worried about what people can do. And they don’t loot. Looting is what you do when you have a want or a need you can’t take care of yourself.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to their need.”

If you’re a manager, existing in the command chain somewhere — or, thinking you should be in it somewhere — a good way to show you’re an unserious person is to say things like “perception is reality.” There is some truth in this. “Command chain,” these days, is a string of salesmen selling things to each other, and yes perception is important when you sell things. But if the work is important, salesmanship should retreat as a priority. Sound space, I have found, is a limited resource. When people are consuming huge pieces of it to restate the obvious, it’s as good a sign as any that the wrong people are in charge. That there’s too much influence being wielded by unserious people.

I’m grateful for the time I have spent around salesmen. I learned a lot. I wish I didn’t see them as antagonists, like I did back in the early days. “Nothing happens until the sale is made,” their little wooden plaques displayed to all who were interested, along with all who were not. Well, that’s true. But to be effective as a salesman, you have to hold the mark’s attention. If you don’t do that, you’re not selling, you’re just making a lot of noise, wasting time and energy, probably being an irritant. And salesmen fall into this trap when they show they’re unserious people.

One way to show you’re unserious when you’re making your pitch, is to make a lot of noise that doesn’t mean anything. Every paragraph should have a purpose. Every sentence within the paragraph should have a purpose. Ideally, any one part of it would cause a huge structural catastrophe if it were not there. And the target of the pitch should be aware of this, that being on the receiving end of each sentence, of each word, is a productive use of his time.

I’m grateful for having lived through Obama. Obama taught me the human genome is flawed, and probably limited, because we have this tendency to follow whoever is the most entertaining to watch. But these tend to be the unserious people. Throughout the millennia, humans have had a lot of things to say to other humans, but there are very few things more full of fluff and useless sound making than an Obama speech. Obama broke that “Every paragraph should have a purpose” rule, broke it again, broke it a few more times, then crushed it into fine dust beneath His heel. He was archetypal among unserious people.

But fun to watch.

That’s generally how it works. Charismatic types, who have the talent to compel large numbers of shallow-thinking listeners to focus on every word when every word is disposable, have developed that particular skill for a reason. There was, in their case, a need. They did a lot of babbling and babble was all there was to it. They nurtured and grew this talent, out of a need to make the chaff look like wheat.

It’s a funny thing — we argue about politics on social media or we see others doing it, and we think “When you’re on your death bed, are you going to value the time you spent doing this?” Good question. But people ask that, and they’ll go right back to following unserious people.

If I had regrets about spending my limited amount of time on the planet arguing about politics, such regrets dissipated six years ago with the China Virus debacle when we all became sheltered-in-place political playthings. You know that saying attributed to Pericles: Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you. Point for Pericles; that’s more or less exactly what happened. And so I don’t regret arguing about politics. This sixty-year-old is filled with regrets about following unserious people. If I’m looking at all those candles on the cake nursing some burning desire for a do-over that I can’t have, the truth is that said desire would be driven by that, rather than by the other.

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Friday, July 10th, 2026