12 February

The uncomfortable truth is that successful entrepreneurs are pretty much always socially obnoxious. That’s what disruption is, spitting in the soup of the status quo, a fart in the collective elevator. They’re successful *because* they break all of the comfortable truths of their time. Rockefeller, Ford, Edison, Jobs, Musk…all highly obnoxious people in polite society. Often with delusions that their huge success in their area of work translates into a generalised genius about everything. Like the local businessman who blusters and chest beats their way into local government, saying ‘this place needs be run like a business!’, and is then eaten alive by the politics, because a town is orders of magnitude more complex than their successful business. Humans will not change gradually, in a reasoned way. Humans mostly don’t think at all, even when it looks like they’re doing that, they’re simply imitating a beloved thinker, in social teams fighting other teams aligned behind other thinkers. It’s all just social team sports, for status. Bulls in china shops change the world. Or nature does it for us, with disasters.