They’re all really supposed to be just one. Put it on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, probably should’ve put it here, it’s a bit heavy…

We concern ourselves with the best possible outcome of an effort — AND — with a bunch of what I have come to think of as “dryer lint.” Usually, it’s got something to do with a process, this is that “process versus outcome” conflict upon which I have waxed lyrically before. But if we’re honest about it, we acknowledge most of these processes have to do with something more primal: Blame management. Making sure that, when & if it all hits the fan, you can’t be blamed. That is why people follow processes, and it is rational. What is irrational is castigating others for not following the same process, after it has become abundantly clear that if there is any possibility remaining at all for producing the desirable outcome, the process will have to be abandoned.

So there is: Making sure I’m not blamed; making sure nobody in my peer group is blamed; making sure that if anything goes wrong, all the blame falls on the head of that guy over there; making sure that if anything goes wrong, the blame goes to a group. That’s blame management. Then, there is credit management, by which of course I don’t mean “get my score up to 770,” but the preceding four concerns about blame, countered in credit: I get the credit if we meet the goal, my peer group gets the credit, that guy doesn’t get any credit, that group doesn’t get credit. That’s eight things, eight reasons for following a process that have absolutely zilch to do with accomplishing the stated objective.

To the eight, we add a ninth: A lot of people follow processes just because they find it comforting. Some of them, I notice, have received a lot of accolades for a very long time — like, back to fifth grade or something — for their “excellent leadership skills.” Even though if you watch them, you see they never actually make any decisions, other than to echo what someone else has decided and buttress it with their own soothing but piercing voice inflection. Or perhaps a polished and effective writing style. They place these behind ideas that are not theirs, and receive all sorts of flattery for their leadership and their decisions, even though they never ponder benefits or liabilities of anything, outside of social escalation. Ever.

What’s missing from all this swimming-pool-filter-trap-crap is autonomous, effective, confident decision-making. The stuff that actually gets things done. The making of good plans, strong plans, plans likely to yield the desired result. You know — the stuff we all say we want, all of the time?

What is happening here is not that we’re changing our minds about what it is we want to do; rather, we’re shrinking the diameter of our circle of concerns. This happens when the broader effort continues onward, not yet complete, but our own contribution to it has been played all the way out and there’s nothing left for us to do but sit and watch someone else carry the ball. Sit, wait, worry…and self-assess.

The temptation is to go all-or-nothing: “All of my decisions have been the correct ones,” or “I really bolluxed this thing, and I let everybody down.” If someone doesn’t have what it takes to admit to having let everybody down, and they don’t have what it takes to see themselves as a whole book as opposed to one page, the only alternative left is to take the “I made all the right decisions” approach and look for someone else to blame. In a large organization, a lot of this has to do with political capital. It keeps coming back to calculations, how much of it will be spent on admitting to a mistake, whether that much still exists in the account or whether this would result in a deficit.

And this comes back to the First Conquest Rule: “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.” Everyone looks for that First Concern, achieving the desired outcome that was defined at the inception, in something. It’s a matter of where is that thing. Does it expand to cover the effort in which everybody else is engaged, looking out for the interests of all contributors by looking out for the interests of this overall effort? Or does it shrink down to the size of that one contributor’s political interests, and social elevation within the organization?

As has been noticed by anyone who’s had misgivings about how a large bureaucracy functions, either from within or from outside of it: People tend to be very easily swerved from that productive line of thinking, “If we do it that way the organization’s goal will not be achieved, but if we do it this other way then maybe we all have a better shot.” Everybody likes to think they’re thinking that way, all of the time. Well hey, I like to think I look like a lifeguard on Baywatch whenever I’m in swim trunks.

But that doesn’t make it true. And 9:10 is a hefty ratio. That’s why when you look at the people who actually do manage to get things done, you’ll find one quality they all share most consistently is not that they’re necessarily bright, or pushy, or eloquent, or even that they’re inspiring. It’s that they cast a wide net in collecting the information that goes into their decisions, but after just a little bit of time they do make decisions — and they don’t lose focus.

And yeah, I know, “reading to well” is not correct. But I can really relate to the part about the algebra teacher, and the complex math in fourth grade, these were my experiences as well.

Tickld, via Young Conservatives, via The Federalist Papers.

Just a creative writing exercise that touched a lot of people. Calvin’s last goodbye.

Francis came over to his grandfather’s side, “What is it Gramps?”

Calvin reached over to the stuffed tiger on his bedside and and held him out shakily to his grandson, who looked exactly as he did so many years ago. “This is Hobbes. He was my best friend when I was your age. I want you to have him.”

“He’s just a stuffed tiger.” Francis said, eyebrows raised.

Calvin laughed, “Well, let me tell you a secret…”

My son, that is. I’ll be picking him up from the train station in a few hours; turned 17 Wednesday.

Happy birthday, kid! Here’s a picture of your Dad.

Update: Got ‘im, and whoa. Looks like we’re finally at the “kid taller than his Dad” stage.

I considered calling this something like “Chess: The Perfect Blend Between Process and Outcome,” since that drives more to the heart of the matter, but it’s too long and it takes too much reading-between-the-lines to get there. Anyhow, the point made is brilliant, as is the chess analogy:

Picture the situation: you know that putting your knight on e4, for example, leads to a counterattack that ruins your position. You move your bishop there instead. A normal opponent would think about what you were conceding to do that instead of the knight move and react accordingly. The Cuttlers, however, would go ahead with the sequence of moves, even though with a bishop there it will ruin their own position instead. And then they will insist that, because they made all the correct moves, that in reality the game is theirs, even as their queen and both rooks decorate the side of the board where you keep the captured pieces. The game WOULD have been won if the knight had been there, therefore your bishop doesn’t belong there, the move was invalid and the game is won, QED. Or do you deny that their moves were not perfectly in accordance with the rules?

Misses the point by a bit, don’t you think?
:
…[A]n expert can be reasonably expected to know about a specialized topic. Wouldn’t you ask an expert about it? But the point isn’t in merely asking, because a question is a tool designed to get a good answer. If the answer is wrong, then it misses the point of having asked someone skilled in the field – I can give you bad tax advice a lot more cheaply than your expert accountant.

Here we can see again the difference between condescension and humane behavior. If you question the bad advice, how does the expert react? Does he explain the reason for his advice? Does he accept if the reason doesn’t apply here? If you share something you’ve learned, does he take the time to show why that knowledge is irrelevant, or better, does he say he’ll read about it and then get back to you? That’s humane – it recognizes that what one has learned may be learned by others, that to be an expert is not to be flawless even in that realm of practice, and it shows a willigness to grow.

Or, you know, the expert could be insulted that someone else did a little research, discount the new information because of its unworthy source, openly question why you’re questioning their opinion in the first place, and then go right ahead and be stubbornly wrong about it, because experts say so. The bishop never belonged on that square. The reply moves were all well within the rules. Just tip your damned king, you peon.

That’s the funny thing about something like chess – the pieces are the same for each player, from a grandmaster to a patzer like me. One side’s bishops don’t suddenly start scooting sideways; the grandmaster’s rooks don’t level up to move twice per turn; my queen can’t shoot lasers just to make it fair.

Life is rather chesslike in this regard…

It’s easy for non-experts to interpret expert opinion way beyond the boundaries of what it really is. It’s obvious to anybody who’s ever been an expert about anything. And even if you’ve never been an expert about anything, you can ask an expert about something within their expertise and practically see it in their eyes: What’s the premise of the question, is it a valid one, who’s my audience, how are they going to misunderstand this. And, do I really know what I think I know.

Of course, now we live in a time in which a lot of experts make their expert-living off of doubting any uncertainty. And that’s perhaps worth a whole post in & of itself.

Historian takes on Cornelius Ryan, author of The Longest Day.

In his well-documented biography of Ranger commander Earl Rudder — “Rudder: From Leader to Legend” — historian Thomas M. Hatfield excoriated Ryan for repeatedly sacrificing “facts for dramatic effect.”

Scaling sea cliffs under fire is incomparably dramatic. However, the German guns were not in the casemates. “Sacrifice for nothing” became Ryan’s ironic storyline.

It is historically inaccurate, to the point of falsehood.

In Hatfield’s view, Ryan was not a professional historian but a man grinding out a book to meet a publication deadline. Ryan admitted he relied on one Ranger veteran for his entire D-Day account, a sergeant who manned an observation point over a mile from the most critical combat on Pointe du Hoc. Professional military historians seek multiple sources, to include after-action group interviews.

Earl Rudder, who later became president of Texas A&M University, was a superb special operations commander, but a man not given to grandiose language.

Ryan’s interview of Rudder didn’t produce the sizzle Ryan sought. Ryan asked Rudder where and when he arrived in Normandy. Rudder: “Omaha Beach, H-Hour.” Ryan asked if Rudder had lost friends in the battle. Rudder: “Yes, many.” Was Rudder wounded? “Yes, twice.” Ryan appealed for a dramatic moment. Did any single incident stand out in Rudder’s mind? “No.”

One moment? The battle for and on and over Pointe du Hoc was two-and-a-half days of endless suffering, death, violence and chaotic hell, yet Rudder and his Rangers had succeeded in achieving their critical mission.

Hatfield noted that a man with solid Hollywood connections helped correct the record. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan held a ceremony at Pointe du Hoc. With Rudder’s widow and 2nd Ranger vets at his side, Reagan said: “Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion, to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. … These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the men who helped free a continent.”

Via Instapundit.

I’m not in any position to criticize Mr. Ryan, but it’s always worrisome how quickly you can find disagreement among the presumably knowledgeable, during these times in which we live when all sorts of different disciplines of scholarly work drive so hard toward something called “overwhelming consensus.” I recall some since-deceased relatives who helped me back in school researching my own family history, and as their generation died off my thoughts turned to the questions I probably should have asked them about little details, that I no longer could. Questions that would remain unanswered forever.

It must be a blissful brand of ignorance that permits the amateur and the historian alike, to believe it is only the answers that endure, and the questions that are temporary. That’s not actually how it works.

And there’s a reason for this. While most anyone with any experience at all will understand the frustration involved in dividing bad ideas from good ideas, the bad ones often looking so much like good ones, this is a difficulty that tends to exist only in advance. Good ideas, as distinguished from bad ones, have a way of looking like good ideas in the aftermath, as well as in the currency of their execution. That’s why people say things like “this is / is not working out.” This is a rather durable trend with few exceptions, although there are exceptions to just about everything.

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else, as the saying goes. This is to be expected. When you biff it, and you aren’t willing to admit you’ve biffed it but you want people to keep listening to you, of course it becomes politically necessary to come up with an excuse, be it good or bad. And if this is something that tends to happen over and over again to the same person, after awhile this person will naturally acquire some talent for coming up with excuses. It is also an inevitability that this person, or group, or ideology, will become very stubborn about always getting the last word in. There’s no other alternative for them, since controlling the narrative is important when you’re selling a bad idea.

Good ideas tend to speak for themselves. Yes, here and there you have to wait around a bit to find out if the good idea really was a good idea. That’s rare enough to be an exceptional case, and usually there is some defined test that can be run after this interval to prove the idea was good. And, yes, there are some exceptions to that as well.

Priorities in these things, though, are determined by the trends and not by the exceptions. And so we see these purveyors of bad ideas consistently lunging for, grasping for, insisting upon, control over the same things. Control over the definitions, of phrases, words, motives of their opposition. Control over the definition of the goal, and then the re-definition of the goal, and then the re-re-definition of the goal. If the idea being sold is a good one, of course none of this is necessary. The idea speaks for itself. The aftermath of its implementation says all that needs to be said, about what a good idea it was.

Jordan Ellenberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal.

…today, I don’t think we’re paying too little attention to our young geniuses. I think we’re paying too much.
:
Talent isn’t a number. We would never presume to identify the great novelists of the future by counting the number of vocabulary words they knew at age 10. To think we can do the same for math and science—as if proving the Riemann hypothesis were something like getting 100,000 on the math SAT—is to adopt a depressingly impoverished view of science and its demands on its practitioners. The cult of genius tends to undervalue hard work and the productive persistence that psychologists nowadays like to call “grit”—not to mention creativity, perspective and taste, without which all those other virtues may be wasted on pointless projects.

Those of us who managed sky-high SAT scores at 13 were 20 times as likely as the average American to get a doctorate; let’s say, being charitable, that we’re 100 times as likely to make a significant scientific advance. Since we’re only 1 in 10,000 of the U.S. population, that still leaves 99% of scientific advances to be made by all those other kids who didn’t get an early ticket to the genius club. We geniuses aren’t going to solve all the riddles. Most child prodigies are highly successful — but most highly successful people weren’t child prodigies.

Hat tip to Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm.

Not sure if I fit into what he’s discussing; probably not. I was one of the “bored” prodigies. Didn’t hand things in, didn’t hand things in, didn’t hand things in, and then came the threats of holding me back a year. It’s not an isolated case by any means, and seems to be happening more and more often now: Kid doesn’t do his work, so the adults start fighting with other adults. Then, as an experiment, I was put in the advanced group, stopped being bored, and started doing work.

It didn’t last into high school. Maybe I went back to being stupid. Or, more likely, the being-bored-with-class thing was just a symptom of something much larger. Public school has always been friendly to those who think inside the box, which is a kind way of saying it’s always been hostile to those who think outside. It’s a bureaucrat-friendly zone, and I have the impression from being a parent & former student that it is crystallizing, becoming a more strident and uncompromising version of its past self.

I didn’t mix well with the (other?) prodigies. I recall a certain need for a grasp of conceptual command of something, when I asked a teacher I was directed to ask one of the prodigies. I did, and what I got back was a sequence of steps I could execute so that I would be solving the problem as expected. I repeated the question about the concept, and got back the same sequence of steps. It emerged that the prodigy didn’t have the answer to the question I was asking, hadn’t developed it, didn’t need it. There is no one particular episode to which I’m pointing here, this is a generalization that applied to several events from that year or two.

I suppose by high school I maybe “matured” to the point of understanding and accepting that school is a crushing bore, and you have to just do the best you can and limp through to graduation day. I was too slow to grasp what we’re forced to learn in adulthood: Most of life is boring. Plodding through is not the answer, what you need to do is shrug off the boredom, think about the outcome, link it to your identity and take pride in what you do.

My gripe with K-12 is that it seems to be grading kids on their ability to fully come to terms with that. Which isn’t something that is too likely to happen, and if it does, it’s certainly not likely to happen early. If the kid’s going to be a success, it’s much more likely to happen because the crushing boredom somehow never becomes a factor.

Which makes the argument for more-attention-to-prodigies, up top, 2nd paragraph, a little distressing:

Some educators rebrand child prodigies as “exceptional human capital” and hold us to be the drivers of global economic competitiveness. “These are the people who are going to figure out all the riddles,” the Vanderbilt University psychologist David Lubinski said in a recent interview. “Schizophrenia, cancer — they’re going to fight terrorism, they’re going to create patents and the scientific innovations that drive our economy. But they are not given a lot of opportunities in schools that are designed for typically developing kids.”

It’s fascinating to me that with all this zeal we have for separating people and putting them in organized boxes, we’re so sluggish to form the separation that truly matters: Those who plan according to process and those who plan according to outcome. The surface-thinkers vs. the vertical-thinkers.

The latter of whom, time after time, we see are getting in trouble at school for thinking too pragmatically. They can’t see the point to handing in the assignments, so they don’t hand them in, and this is pegged as a “who cares” sort of an issue — kid lacks discipline, kid’s pig-iron stupid, poorly organized, who cares what it is? We’ll just treat him like he’s stupid and threaten to flunk him. Nowadays it’s “treat him like he has a DSM-V learning disability, and medicate him.” Back when it was happening to me, I couldn’t see why there was so little analytical thought being put into it, even as the grown-ups were getting in these arguments with each other over the work I wasn’t doing. As a grown-up, I can see the passion was really not so much about what it took for me to succeed, but more like about their differing approaches to life. They were having arguments about definitions, with the outcome-thinkers requiring strong and crisp definitions in order to even begin to assess what was going on, and the bureaucrat process-thinkers who fight so hard to keep things from being defined. And it was all my fault, really, for getting them into these fights with each other, by not doing my work. These two sides shouldn’t be coming into contact with each other, ever. Or, very rarely anyway, only under very tightly controlled conditions.

Back to the school thing, though. We talk so much of kids learning to think creatively, solve problems, think outside the box. Had that energy managed to find its way into the public school apparatus, the apparatus, I think, would have been taking a very different evolutionary path from what it has been taking, and would look very different from the way we find it today.

Kurt Schlicter writes about why you shouldn’t argue with liberals:

The truth is that conservatism is an ideology that is in accord with natural law and basic human decency, while liberalism is merely the summit of a slippery slope leading down to the hellish depths of collectivist misery.

Liberals aren’t going to like to hear this manifest and demonstrable truth. So you’re going to get called “racist,” “sexist” and “homophobic,” even if you’re a conservative black lesbian.

What you are not going to get is an argument. An argument is a collected series of statements designed to establish a definite proposition. Arguments involve the presentation of facts and evidence from which one draws a conclusion. Implied within the concept of an argument is the potential that one might change his conclusion. But liberals start with the conclusion.

They don’t change their conclusions based on the facts and evidence; they change the facts and evidence based on the conclusion they want. This is why a 105 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming, while a 60 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming. As is a -20 degree day.

That, in & of itself, is a better argument than anything you’ll ever get out of a liberal.

He goes on to recommend what amounts to lowering oneself to the liberal’s level. I think that part is a joke…

I had to make some arrangements with someone. I’ll leave it unmentioned who, but it’s a person with whom I am entangled in a financial way for the time being, which is awkward since she doesn’t look at money the way I do. Also, I had to add her to my bank account as a payee, from one bank to a different bank, which I figured out was a matter of business I should resolve by going into the branch and speaking with a human, the old-fashioned way. There is a history of these things getting FUBAR’d, it used to be mildly aggravating, then it got humorous, then it got tedious — THEN, it happened a few more times and I’m just tired of it.

Well, yeah, of course the cashier can’t help with something like that, so I was sent off to wait for a banker. And wait I did; not exactly brimming with exuberant optimism or high spirits at the beginning of it, I was left to pickle for awhile, long enough for my weekend errand schedule to get rearranged a bit, which is frustrating in itself on a Saturday. I picked the wrong branch, and maybe I picked the wrong forum as well. Two bankers, tied up with two customers. On and on it went, sit and sit I did. Sit, and listen to the endlessly repeating dialogue with the young couple-with-baby trying to explore their options now that they’d found they couldn’t open a checking account. Ugh. This was aggravation on steroids, because you had to feel for the baby and the parents, plus the banker was handling it completely the wrong way. The old “Let’s make this a compassionate conversation by making it forty-five minutes long, and about two or three minutes of useful stuff.” What were the takeaways. Well, there’s the possibility that the outstanding matter might be cleared up, and you’re legally entitled to get a free credit report by doing blah blah blah.

It turned out I wasn’t waiting for the end of this, because another banker eventually freed up. And then didn’t help very much. But, sitting there, mulling over how people think about money, and how they are encouraged to think about it when they’re at what we might call the “scratching and clawing” phase of life, I had time to think about something: We really do not do much to encourage the insolvent to become solvent. You hear a fair amount about people of all ages being encouraged to “go back to school,” that’s about as close as the advice ever comes to what would seem to me to be most needed: Find ways to improve your value.

What is it that you’re doing, if anything at all, to make this economy go? Is there a gap between whatever that is, and your true potential? How do you translate that gap into action? That’s the bulls-eye; “maybe you should think about going back to school” approaches it, but doesn’t hit very close to the mark at all. And that’s about as close as we ever seem to come.

“You’re legally entitled to get a copy of your credit report as long as it’s just once a year” doesn’t hit the hay bale. It doesn’t even land inside the same archery range.

And here’s my gripe: What’s the opposite? “Oh well, there’s more to life than making money!” That one…THAT one…we hear all the freakin’ flippin’ time. And I’m entirely unsure about why that is. Who says this? Who listens to it? Who believes it? Oh sure, it’s true in the strictest, most technical sense. But my point is, so what? There’s a lot more to life than picking your nose, which isn’t easy, but people manage to get that done don’t they? There’s more to life than saving a baby trapped in a burning house, but if someone is put in the position of having to try for it, you’d want them to succeed wouldn’t you? Well, wouldn’t you?

I hate this phrase with the passion and radiant heat of a thousand suns. It’s just stupid. It envisions conflict within the act of simply generating an income or making a profit. As far as crass generalizations go, it would be much more correct to envision service to one’s fellow man within such things.

“More to life than making money” is the polar opposite of what young people need to hear. It’s just a turnkey solution phrase we say, not because it works, but because that’s what old people have always said to young people. It’s like “clean your plate”; common sense should immediately tell you this is a recipe for getting fat and staying fat, and maybe the advice should be “lock it up in clean Tupperware when you aren’t hungry anymore.” We read and listen to stories every single day, about so-and-so in these dire straits because the IRS ruled on such-and-such a matter in such-and-such a way…or, his wife has such-and-such a health drama going on and it isn’t covered. Alright then, we live in an age in which fortune is fickle. And the fickle fortune, is the fortune of basic survival. This has always been the case; in fact, looking at it from a long view, we happen to be the generation that has it the easiest, and we still haven’t reached the point where there are any guarantees.

The conclusion to all this is: If you’re in that thing that I described up above as “what we might call the ‘scratching and clawing’ phase of life” — SCRATCH. And CLAW. Maybe, if all it takes to wipe out our illusory solvency is a routine physical that finds a malignant lump or a brain cloud, we should act like it. Go to school if that’s how you can maximize your income. Learn a new trade. Get this job, quit that job, job-hop like a little jitterbug if you have to, whatever it takes.

This is all just an extension of that other thing it seems like young people aren’t being told anymore: If you’re going to play, play to win. And, you have to play. Have kids, but be married and able to support the kids before you have the kids. And be able to support the marriage before you have the marriage. Have good ideas, implement all of the very best ones, and make sure you get your cut whenever you implement a good idea. If you lose, find a way to make your ideas better, and better, and better still, until you win. Then keep winning until you’re obscenely rich, teach those kids of yours how to do the same, feel no guilt and sleep well.

That is the advice we should be hearing more often. The truth is, though, we’re not hearing that, we’re hearing the “more to life than making money” nonsense. And we’re hearing it because we’re embroiled in a culture war, between those who accept that we live in a universe of cause-and-effect, and those who reject this. And those who reject it, are winning. These are the “you didn’t build that” people, the people who think all good things and all disasters are spontaneous, and there’s nothing for us to do about any of it, in prospect or in retrospect. You’ve heard Patton’s quote “I wouldn’t give a hoot and hell for a man who lost and laughed”; these are the losers-and-laughers who are winning. The paradox is obvious, don’t ask me to explain it, it’s their way — they lose at everything except arguments about whether it’s good to lose. They will always win, culturally. Their way is so much easier. That’s why it is so important that every person who desires success, learns to think with autonomy, as an individual.

It truly is a conspiracy to keep the masses poor, discouraged, malnourished, dispirited, apathetic and stupid.

We’ve discussed this before, but the numbers are broken down lately more meaningfully.

Those who can, do; those who can’t, make up a bunch of new rules to force others to do.

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

Practical thinking, broadly, is divided into two phases. You figure out what’s going on based on the evidence you manage to collect or that finds its way to you; then, you figure out what to do (or avoid doing) about it.

Maturity means you noodle these things out based on the expected outcome. Soon after we’re born, we have what it takes to recognize we need to get those questions answered, and a little while after that we develop the methods for answering them. The obstacle to maturity is that, in childhood, “outcome” is indistinguishable from “gratification of self.”

It is only in the later years that a conflict arises: Should I win more privileges for myself, or my peer group, or elevate the social stature of myself & my peer group; or, should I pursue an agenda (and evaluate the success and failures of previous efforts) based on concern about the eventual outcome? See, a baby bawling for a tit in his mouth doesn’t have to worry about that conflict. In his world it’s all the same.

The Isla Vista shooter never had to cross that barrier into maturity, that rite-of-passage wherein one has to consciously decide to accept criticism, admit to mistakes, revise strategies, in order to achieve a defined beneficial outcome. And as we see from the VA mess, which our current President inherited unfairly but about which He nevertheless learned for the first time from watching the news — neither has Barack Obama.

Not exactly a fresh or brilliant insight, and it could be criticized for being overly obvious as far as observations go. But recent events make it clear that it’s not nearly obvious enough; pointing it out has become a necessity.

Mulling it over a bit more, I see what we’re looking at is really a triangle of primal forces, and those who fail to achieve this rite of passage aren’t quite so much failing to surmount an obstacle, as taking an errant path. The baby who has the luxury of ignoring these meaningful distinctions due to living in a simple world not yet complex enough to require them, yammering for his momma’s tit in his mouth, is acting on 1) self-gratification, 2) a defined (instinctive) process and 3) fulfillment of an objective. When he enters school, the teachers will educate him in processes he’ll only follow because he’s being told to follow them, and there will be a gap between #1 and #2. When he is expected to solve problems, there will be a division between #2 and #3, and when he begins to work to serve others there will be a gap between #1 and #3.

It takes a certain level of maturity to say “Hey wait, that isn’t going to achieve the defined goal” and then come up with an effective and viable alternative sequence of steps likely to yield success. Our society still values it; we still want our leaders to have this ability. What we are losing is the ability to encourage it. Our education system lately doesn’t seem to be doing much to challenge it and develop it.

There emerges the question about whether it can. Certainly, it’s possible, but there has to be an effort to shape the curricula. In a job, especially a job that produces material wealth, it will be a natural and unavoidable development in any successful employee.