Back in undergrad, my friend FA and I used to philosophize over coffee about what the best metaphor for life is. Needless to say, we’d come up with similes that were both boring and un-insightful like, “Life is like a cup of coffee…”
Close to a decade later, having spent so many years in engineering, I think I’ve finally figured out a still-boring-but-more-insightful metaphor…
Nowadays, I think of life as the ultimate optimization problem – where you’re always trying to maximize your objective function given a process model with limited constraints, since none of us has unlimited time and energy.
The interesting thing about how we lead life is we’ve got our optimization problem backwards. Rather than focus on the fundamentals of building a more efficient process model, we strive to achieve more of everything, and end up burnt out. It took many years to learn that what matters more than what you achieve is how you achieve it.
Often, I get asked, so what’s the first thing you would want to tackle when you’re trying to fix your process model?
And the answer is simple but not easy; your environment.
Having lived in countries with completely different languages and cultures, I’ve experienced firsthand the impact of environment on aspects like your mindset, behavior, productivity, and health. And from your environment, you would first want to look at the people you associate with, whether in a personal setting or a professional one.
There’s a reason they say you’re the average of the five people you hang out with. In the provocatively-titled article, “Are your friends making you fat?” a study was summarized about the contagious nature of good (or bad) behaviors among clusters of friends, with friends “infecting” each other with obesity, unhappiness, and smoking.
So today I introduce The Joker’s series where I write about different archetypes of jokers who have a great tendency to waste your time, drag you down, or expose you to some sort of reputational risk when you associate with them.
I call them Jokers because they’re not serious about business and/or life, not because they’re funny, because trust me, there’s really nothing funny about them for all the damage they cause. They’re toxic, disrespectful, and petty. You don’t want them as friends, and you definitely do not want them as business associates.
Personally, I wrote this list for myself, because after two years of meeting hundreds of people, I found myself thinking, “If only there was a way to quickly filter those who are serious about work from the jokers.”
And the result is this series, so let’s start….
Joker # 1: The Too Much Talk Not Enough Work (Aka The Maneno Mengi/Kalam Katheer) Joker
This archetype was clearly delineated by Robert Greene in his book, Mastery, who called them fools:
“We can classify people as fools by the following rubric: when it comes to practical life, what should matter is getting long-term results, and getting the work done in as efficient and creative a manner as possible. That should be the supreme value that guides people’s actions.
But fools carry with them a different scale of values. They place more importance on short-term matters—grabbing immediate money, getting attention from the public or media, and looking good. They are ruled by their ego and insecurities. They tend to enjoy drama and political intrigue for their own sake.
When they criticize, they always emphasize matters that are irrelevant to the overall picture or argument. They are more interested in their career and position than in the truth. You can distinguish them by how little they get done, or by how hard they make it for others to get results. They lack a certain common sense, getting worked up about things that are not really important while ignoring problems that will spell doom in the long term.”
-A few things about them:
1) They spend a lot of the conversation talking about themselves, and they turn themselves into the hero in every given story. This is the most obvious red flag. They don’t bother asking you about yourself or what you do. They’ll always talk about their achievements, their awards, the contracts they’ve bagged, and the funding they’ve gotten.
Even when the conversation is not about them, they have this uncanny ability to redirect it back to themselves. For example, I once had a tear-inducing conversation with such a person who wouldn’t even notice that I was dead-bored, and besides the name-dropping, and the citing of millions of worth of assets which they had – or not, I asked a general question, “Having done business in Kenya for 20 years, what are the biggest changes you’ve noticed in the market?”
“My business never experiences a down period. Because a lot of my clients are high-profile and are happy with my work, my business has always been profitable, even during election years. You see, the good thing about me is…”
*facepalm*
How to test for this personality: Ask a general question about anything – the weather, politics, a football match – and watch them deftly redirect it back to themselves. Another metric you can use is to time the portion of meeting time they spend talking.
2) They use big, big words for small, small ideas, and have a huge tendency to name-drop. I have to give it to them…a lot of these people know how to speak with confidence. They usually hold positions of salespeople, marketers, or founders. They’re all about the catchy titles and phrases, and about saying the right things to the right people.
So for example, they’ll use words like, “revolutionary” for non-revolutionary ideas. They’ll describe how their public talks received standing ovations, when – if you were seated within the crowd – half of it would have stepped out because it was the last talk of the day, and the other half were on their phones.
They also probably read somewhere about how it’s important to be specific with numbers when it comes to sales pitches, yet they’re unable to substantiate their numbers nor stay consistent with them. For example, they wouldn’t be able to provide practicalities of how they achieved their numbers, and sometimes they tell the same story with different impact numbers – on the same day!
To test for this;
a) If they’re using big vague words, ask for specifics.
“How exactly was it revolutionary?”
“How many people talked to you after that ovations? Who were they? Can you connect me with them? Can you connect me with them now?”
b) If they drop numbers a lot to prove their case, dig deeper into them. What were the processes put into place to achieve those numbers – and don’t tell me something went viral, because chances are high that’s not the real answer.
The idea behind asking clarifying questions is not to get to the bottom of their claims, but rather to watch their reaction as you question them. By watching their body language, you can get a hint about how much truth lies in their claims – if any.
c) When it comes to name-dropping if you happen to know the person who was named, call them and ask for their genuine opinion about them. This will lead to very, very interesting conversations (you can trust me on this).
3) They need an audience…All. The. Time.
When you divide their day, you’ll notice more meetings than actual time carved out for any real work. Listen, if their job is in Business Development or Fundraising, you could count those meetings as work because they’re usually the path to closed deals, but when you see hundreds of meetings with zero closed deals, you start wondering if the meetings are just opportunities for them to brag and boast.
To deal with this:
a) Employ the three-meeting rule. By the time of the third meeting, you have to see something tangible – a potential contract, the green-light for a project, etc… If nothing formal has been drafted between the two of you, then they’ll keep on calling you to one meeting after another, wasting your time without any of you moving forward.
b) Find a way to subtly recommend to them that they get a friend or a spouse. Sometimes I feel these people are just lonely, and are simply looking for external validation. They might have been the fifteenth child in a house full with kids, or never have gotten any attention at school, so they’re overcompensating by seeking the external validation in professional settings.
Overall, the best way to deal with this personality was summarized in Robert Greene’s Mastery, “In the course of your life you will be continually encountering fools. There are simply too many to avoid. If they are causing you trouble, you must neutralize the harm they do by keeping a steady eye on your goals and what is important, and ignoring them if you can. The height of wisdom, however, is to take this even further and to actually exploit their foolishness—using them for material for your work, as examples of things to avoid, or by looking for ways to turn their actions to your advantage. In this way, their foolishness plays into your hands, helping you achieve the kind of practical results they seem to disdain.”
And if you read this and identify some of these traits in yourself, then maybe it’s time to sit back, reflect and make some changes.