When things were in flux, when the social orderâs rigidity slackened, a bold individual could jink through the gaps to greatness. Napoleon would never have made it from Corsica to Versailles without the revolution. It was when the established way of things went soft that an individual could press his own imprint into the times. You just had to be able to read the seeming chaos.
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Tough as that was, we had to suck it up and take on the task of changing the culture, given what was at stake. I knew it would take at least five years. (In that I underestimated.) And I knew the leader of the revolution had to be meâI had to commit to thousands of hours of personal activity to pull off the change. I would have to be up-front and outspoken about what I was doing. I needed to get my leadership team to join me. We all had to talk openly and directly about culture, behavior, and beliefsâwe could not be subtle.
There are way too many people in critique mode who belong to no formation, who spend their lives writing volunteer think pieces in 140 character bursts of Internet. It makes me feel defensive of the messy chaotic beauty of transformation. Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once.
most bemusing were those who seemed to intentionally trip themselves up â because it showed that they were a free spirit, or glamorously troubled, or too popular for secondary reading. They seemed to think it was interesting to be bad at things. They didnât seem to understand that being bad at things was the default. Almost everyone since the dawn of time had been bad at almost everything. It was simply the world operating as expected. It was like if you let go of an object and all it did was drop inertly to the ground. Far more remarkable if, when you let go, it began to fly.
âTolstoy says this thing in War and Peace that the higher up an organisation you go, the less freedom you really have. At the bottom, you can do whatever you feel like because it doesnât make much difference, but at the top, if youâre Napoleon or the Tsar, the responsibility is so big you just have to do what the logic of the situation dictates.â
science. Really, this was a lesson in humility. You couldnât blame the outside world for not conforming to your ideas. It wasnât the world that was wrong, it was you. Either you could be humiliated and angry and hurt, or you could let that go and start building a better model. He began to search where he always had: within himself. In some ways, it wasnât complicated: if tidal energy wasnât going to beat gas and coal on price, and you still needed tidal to win, you had to assume that gas and coal were finished.