We Spend Too Much Time Trying to Be “Good” When Good Is Often Merely Average
Or, the difference between filtered and unfiltered leaders
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Q: Can our ‘negative’ qualities bring positive outcomes?
In the movie Top Gun: Maverick, it has been over thirty years since Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell graduated from TOPGUN, but even after all these years he’s still a test pilot with the rank of Captain.
While he has won many honours over the years, repeated insubordination has kept him from flag rank. His TOPGUN friend (and former rival) Tom “Iceman” Kazansky has been protecting Maverick all this time from being grounded.
Maverick is called back to TOPGUN to train an elite group of graduates for an almost impossible mission, but he isn’t a teacher.
There’s a scene where Iceman tells Maverick that he still has a lot of offer to the Navy, that’s why he specially requested for Maverick to train the pilots. This is a mission where traditional thinking won’t cut it. This is an extreme situation, and the navy needs an unorthodox personality.
“The navy needs Maverick.”
Today, let’s talk about filtered and unfiltered leaders. More precisely, let’s talk about how you can identify in which bucket you belong, and how you can plan your career or choose your workplace accordingly.
The first kind are the ones who rise up through formal channels — doing what’s expected, playing by the rules, and meeting expectations. They are heavily respected and revered by everyone around them. These leaders, like Iceman, are filtered.
The second kind doesn’t rise up through the ranks. Doors are closed for them, so they come in through the windows when opportunity presents: eccentric entrepreneurs who don’t wait for consent; company execs who are unexpectedly asked to take over; leaders who benefit from a perfect storm of unlikely events. This group is “unfiltered.”
Unfiltered leaders are nobody’s first choice. In fact they don’t even make it in the list. They don’t do well in ‘normal’ situations, and they don’t possess most of the traits one would ‘normally’ expect. These are the Mavericks.
By the time filtered leaders are at the top spot, they have been so thoroughly vetted and approved that they can be blindly relied upon to make the standard, traditionally approved, by-the-book decisions.
Filtered leaders are indistinguishable from one another.
But the unfiltered candidates have not been vetted by the system and don’t even know what the approved decisions are. They do unexpected things are often unpredictable.
Yet, it’s the mavericks who bring change and make a difference.
Often that difference is a negative. Since they don’t play by the rules, they often break the institutions they are building. But, once in a while, under the right circumstances, these very ‘negative qualities’ become transformative. This is when they can help an organisation get rid of misguided beliefs and foolish consistencies, and turn toward better horizons.
Filtered leaders don’t rock the boat, unfiltered leaders cannot help but rock it. Often they break things, but sometimes they break things like the British Raj, as did Mahatma Gandhi.
Any kind of revolution, big or small, needs insubordination and disobedience. This is a default in all unfiltered leaders.
Now…since I’ve brought up the British Raj, let me say a few things about Winston Churchill. Personally, I’m not a big fan of him (Churchill-era British policies created the Bengal famine of 1943 that killed about 3.8 million people) but there are few traits I do admire about him.
Winston Churchill would have never been prime minister. He wasn’t someone who “did everything right,” and it was shocking to everyone that he was elected. His contemporaries knew he was brilliant — but he was also a paranoid loose cannon who was impossible to deal with. If you see the movie Darkest Hour starring Gary Oldman, you’ll get a glimpse of it.
After an initial rise, Churchill was eventually found lacking and deemed unsuitable for the highest offices. By the 1930s his career was effectively over. In many ways he was the exact opposite of Neville Chamberlain — the then Prime Minister who had always done everything by-the-book and was a prototypical “filtered” leader.
Churchill was a maverick. He did not merely love his country, he displayed a clear paranoia toward any possible threat to the empire. He saw even Gandhi as a danger, and was beyond outspoken in his opposition to what was a pacifist rebellion in India.
But this “bad” quality was integral to his success in times of great crisis during World War II.
The difference between good leaders and great leaders is not an issue of better. They’re fundamentally different people. Had the British said “Get us a better Neville Chamberlain” to fight Hitler, they would have been doomed.
At times like these, you don’t need a more filtered leader. You need someone the system would have never filtered. Because the old ways won’t work, and doubling down on them will be disastrous. To fight a menace like Hitler, you need a zealot like Churchill.
Unfiltered leaders have unique qualities that differentiate them. These may not be flattering descriptors you might expect, like “incredibly smart” or “politically astute.” These qualities are often negative that under just the right circumstances can transform into superpowers.
This is regularly seen across a wide variety of disorders — and talents. For example, studies show people with attention deficit disorder (ADD) are more creative. There’s a connection between humour, neuroticism, and psychopathy.
Impulsivity is a generally negative trait frequently mentioned in the same sentence as “violent” and “criminal,” but it also has a clear link to creativity.
Almost universally, we humans try to filter out the worse to increase the average, but by doing this we also decrease different.
When it comes to the extremes of situations, good or better or more doesn’t matter. What matters is different — those deviations from the norm.
The general rule is to know your “type” and pick the right pond. Identify your strengths and pick the right place to apply them.
If you follow rules well, find an organisation aligned with your signature strengths and go full steam ahead. Society clearly rewards those who can comply, and these people keep the world an orderly place. This is the safest path, and you are very likely to get hired, get promoted, and have a successful career.
On the other hand, if you’re more of an unfiltered type, be ready to blaze your own path. It’s risky, chances of failure are sky high, but that’s what you are suited for. Leverage the ‘negative traits’ that make you unique. You’re more likely to reach the heights of success — and happiness — if you embrace your flaws.
Life is tough if you are unfiltered, but there’s always some place in the world where misfits, rebels, and weirdos may feel at home. For example, all of Silicon Valley is based on character defects, that are generally avoided in the world, but are uniquely rewarded in this system.
Interestingly, the venture capital business is a game of identifying these very misfits and investing in them. For example, in a16z — one of the most revered VC firms in the world — there’s a saying, “Invest in strength rather than lack of weakness.” Any company that looks good on paper — good founder, good idea, good products, good initial customers, is likely to be a bad investment. What makes them good everywhere doesn’t make them remarkable anywhere. They are average at best. They don’t have any extreme strengths that can make them an outlier.
On the other hand, the companies that have the really extreme strengths often have serious flaws. But if VCs were to rule them out on the basis of serious flaws, they would rule out the big winners as well.
What top VCs aspire to do is invest in the startups that have a really extreme strength along an important dimension, so that they would be willing to tolerate certain weaknesses. In startups, character flaws are often your superpowers.
We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great, we must be different — or at least try to be different. And that doesn’t come from trying to follow society’s vision of what is best, because society doesn’t know what is best.
Change, after all, never came by following the rules. You need to be an eccentric. You need to be a maverick.
This world needs mavericks.
Timeless Insight
It’s hard to get an accurate picture of your life’s work from the get-go.
Being a doctor is not the way it’s portrayed on House. Being a lawyer is not the way it’s portrayed on Suits. Being a gangster is not the way it’s portrayed on The Sopranos.
Therefore “don’t give up on your dreams” is bad advice because it implies you’re supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on after watching a movie or hearing some story.
What I’m Reading
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Tiny Thought
Those who have nothing to prove never say they have nothing to prove.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋