“Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” The stage version has a moral too. In this quintessentially theatrical world, there’s a tacit argument for resourcefulness, imagination and valor.

Consider a brief list of reasons that teamwork will make any normal individual perform below his highest potential:

1. Your best time for thinking might be the other guy’s best time to take a nap. If that’s the only time you can have a meeting, one of you isn’t going to be operating at peak performance.

2. Credit for success is distributed across the team. So is blame. If you believe people are motivated by a desire for credit, or a desire to avoid blame, teamwork is a blunting force.

3. In any group of three people, there’s generally at least one disruptive moron.

4. People have different work styles. Some people like to do everything just right. Others like the quick and dirty approach, fixing things as they go. In a team, you spend half of your time arguing over the best philosophy for every action.

5. To mediocre minds, a brilliant idea and a dumb idea sound identical. A team will vote out the best ideas along with the worst.

6. The dominant team members will get their way over the objections of the meek, no matter how competent the meek might be.

7. In a team, you must continually explain yourself, defending every thought and every action.

8. Everyone has a different risk profile. Your appetite for risk won’t be shared by the group.

9. Everyone wants to do the fun stuff and not the boring-but-necessary parts.

10. You eat when the team agrees that it’s time for lunch. That means you’re often hungry while trying to work, or wasting time eating when you’re not hungry.

11. All meetings last longer than they should.

One of the implications of more people working for themselves, and working from home, is that people will be somewhat freed from the tyranny of teamwork. I wonder if that bodes well for the future of humanity. At least it works for me. I just hate office gossip.

People won’t notice you’re bald if you keep yourself very fit. There I said it.

I recently saw an old friend and my first impression of him had been dominated by the fact he was so obviously fit. It was a brilliant case of misdirection. And it made me think about all the ways people mitigate their bad luck.

Generally speaking, a high level of fitness can compensate for whatever imperfect genes your parents gave you. Fitness is enough to achieve good looks if you bother to dress well, take care of your skin, and get a good haircut.

And fitness, along with a good diet, can also suppress the most common killer diseases that your genes might predispose you to. You can’t prevent bad luck, but you can keep it at bay.

If you have the bad luck to be born to a poor family, education can compensate for that. Some schools are better than others, but almost all of them, at least in developed countries, will get you where you need to go.

If you’re unlucky in love or business, your degree of effort can compensate for that. In both cases it’s a numbers game. If you keep trying, you’re bound to get lucky eventually. You just have to be willing to move on to the next attempt, and learn from your failures.

If you boil it all down, the only types of pure bad luck are the truly random disasters such as being struck by lightning, hit by a car, or falling into the MRT tracks just when the train is approaching or being born without the gene for optimism.

Optimism is what gives you the willingness to stay fit, eat healthy, and keep trying. You wouldn’t do those things unless you expected them to work.

So suppose science finds the gene that controls optimism. And suppose it can be manipulated. That would be enough to solve the healthcare problem and boost the economy. People would get fit, avoiding medical costs, and they’d work extra hard because they believed it would pay off in the long run, thus fixing the economy.

The optimism gene is probably the most important one in the universe. Someday we’ll find it. That will be interesting.

The best quote I’ve seen lately about white collar work comes from commenter Webster:

“The white collar sector is all about no activity punctuated occasionally by useless activities.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

There’s only us
There’s only this
Forget regret
or life is yours to miss

“People look without seeing,
hear without listening,
eat without awareness of taste,
touch without feeling and
talk without thinking.”

How do you measure a life of woman or man?

Candidate A was associated with witchdoctors and often consulted astrologists. He had two mistresses. His wife was a Lesbian. He smoked a lot. He drank eight to ten martinis a day.

Candidate B never managed to hold down a job because of his arrogance. He slept the whole morning. He used opium at school, and was always considered a bad student. He drank a glass of brandy every morning.

Candidate C was decorated a hero. A vegetarian, he did not smoke. His discipline was exemplary. He occasionally drank a beer. He stayed with the same woman during his moments of glory and defeat.

And what was the answer?

A] Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
B] Winston Churchill.
C] Adolf Hitler.

So what then is leadership? The encyclopedia defines it as an individual’s capacity to motivate others to seek the same objective. The bookstores are full of texts on this theme, and the leaders are normally portrayed in brilliant colors, with enviable qualities and supreme ideals. The leader is to society as the “master” is to spirituality. This, however, is not absolutely true (in either case).

Our big problem, especially in a world that is growing more and more fundamentalist, is not allowing people in prominent positions to commit human mistakes. We are always in search of the perfect ruler. We are always looking for a pastor to guide and help us find our way. The truth is that the great revolutions and the progress made by humanity were brought about by people just like us – the only difference being that they had to make a key decision at a crucial moment.

It’s just that I don’t see an awful lot of good films or good comic books these days, which considering the immense amounts of money that are pumped into the production of these things, I think I would ideally like a much better success ratio. Yes, sort of big films with their budgets of $100 million-plus, if they are successes then they make back quite a bit for the studio, I guess, but this is after six or seven that really haven’t made back their outlay.

You have to be thinking of this in terms of its environmental and economic impact. I would have thought, particularly in the current climate, where the world economy does seem to be circling the drain, we might have to start thinking about handling our culture differently. We might have to be more conservative in throwing these huge amounts of money at our movie directors, at our actors, at our sports heroes.

We might have to start rethinking all this. Is it really worth spending all that money? Wasting all those resources? I mean, $100 million, that would pretty much sort out the horrifying flood damage in some country.

We might have to start rearranging our priorities and not just trying to anesthetize ourselves with endless television shows and movies because we’re bored with our lives in the filthy rich Western world. We might have to change our priorities a little bit. If we are going to spend our money upon film, then let’s start valuing the people that produce wonderful things with very little to go on. Let’s stop being so childishly awed by what are essentially fireworks displays.

Most films that I see it seems that the level of criticism that they are expecting is on the level of a fireworks display. It’s ooh and ah. Those seem to be the only responses that are appropriate to most modern films. I think we’re in for a period of cultural revaluation. I certainly hope that’s true, because I think if we’re not, we’re in for a period of cultural damnation. I think that we’re fairly evidently heading to hell in a hand basket, and we have got to change our priorities. We’ve got to rethink this entire thing, and I think that rethinking our culture may be a part of that. I certainly hope so.

I am also struggling with myself all the time, but I am very optimistic in this sense. People are realizing more and more that happiness is freedom, and freedom is to be able to “travel light”, not possessing a lot of things, because at the end of the day, the things start to possess you.

I don’t think I really made that decision as I would like to say, it came quite naturally to me. All my possession are in a way replaceable except for maybe a handful of memorabilia which my friends and family have given me.

One day I realized that if I buy a castle, I cannot think about anything but taking care of it. Not that I can afford a Castle now but hey who knows.

I would rather buy a small farmhouse, so to keep it is very easy, and I have time to go to the mountains, to walk, do spend my life in the way that I would like. In short: the less you have to keep, the more you have in freedom. And one of the lessons nature teaches you is exactly that: keep your contradictions, as summer is the opposite of winter.