Political Correctness Exposed

People use political correctness as an excuse to make status displays and to create some importance for themselves. It is almost always the self-important people who hit you with the PC stick, which means you can have some fun with it. It's a status game, so play the game.

When somebody says, “that was offensive”, they almost always mean that whilst they weren’t personally bothered by it, they recognise the possibility that somebody, somewhere, might see reason to take offence. And that’s enough for them to start blowing the political-correctness whistle. It’s an effortless and freely-available source of status, requiring no personal qualities or achievements.

This is why the PC whistle is almost always blown by people who have no other way of asserting their authority, because they have nothing to offer that would earn them respect or recognition for any other reason.

So what's the solution? Don't argue, because that will give them more to push against. And don't apologise, either, because that will inflate their moral authority and encourage them to continue.

The way to respond without apologising or arguing is to ask concerned questions. Two in particular.

If a status bandit starts hitting you with the PC stick, simply ask them if they felt personally threatened or assaulted. Don’t ask if they felt “offended” or “insulted”, since these things are, rather conveniently, defined by the victim. They are very broad terms. Stick to did you feel threatened? And did you feel assaulted?

It’s harder to substantiate a claim that they felt “threatened” if they really didn’t, and harder still to substantiate a claim that they felt “assaulted”.

And if they didn’t feel threatened or assaulted, then they simply felt annoyed, which is their problem, and they need to deal with it through the medium of normal social behaviour. Otherwise it's like complaining to the teacher when another kid smashes your conker in a fair fight.

You can ban racial and sexual harassment, but you can't ban status displays, which is why people seek elaborate excuses for lodging complaints when all they really mean is, "That guy's better at playing dominance games than I am, and I want to shaft him for it."

If they come back with “I felt harassed”, you can simply ask them to clarify: In what way did you feel harassed? In the sense that you felt threatened? No? In the sense that you felt assaulted?

If they can’t answer either of these things convincingly, then the chances are that their “harassment” claim of being “offended” was simply a cheap status shot.

Predatory Creativity: Get Over Yourself

I was running a course for a big law firm with Benni Bronsky, my business partner. At one point he held the whole room mesmerised with an amazing insight. He said, "The mind is like water. When it's calm, you can see clearly. But when it's churned up, you can't see anything."

He was talking in the specific context of what happens when you're trying to solve a creative problem and you get stuck and frustrated.

I was amazed. It was brilliant. Exactly the right insight, at exactly the right moment, and so artfully expressed. The lawyers loved it.

We were in the car afterwards and I said, "Mate, that mind-is-like-water thing was fantastic! What a beautiful insight! Where did you get that?"

"Er... Kung Fu Panda."

Now, let's be honest. Ideas can come from anywhere. Inspiration can come from anywhere. And when you see something you like - even if it's in a Disney movie - think about it, chew it over, internalise it, find examples for yourself, and then you can use it.

It's not theft, or plagiarism - it's cross-fertilisation. I call it Predatory Creativity. You don't need to steal ideas, and you don't need to force yourself to have your own, stunningly original ideas. Either extreme is unhelpful. You just have to be open to being inspired. And when you're open to being inspired, you'll find yourself taking, combining and reworking ideas from all over the place.

Don't be ashamed of getting your inspiration from places outside of your own brain. It's not like Constable was the first guy to think of painting landscapes. "Aw, come on, John... landscapes? It's been done, mate."

Take old ideas, old insights, from anywhere at all, live with them, make them mean something personal to you, and then your individuality will stamp itself on the end result. Don't be ashamed of Predatory Creativity.

The only thing stopping you is Status. Status is a term that describes levels of social dominance between people, and as primates, humans are utterly obsessed with their personal social status. We don't realise it, but we spend most of our waking hours trying to raise our status over others. One of the ways we try to do this, especially at work, is to prove how clever and original we are.

If you can overcome your need for status, you'll become more creative and more effective. When you're irritated because somebody made a spontaneous status display that challenged your dominance, then your mind becomes like churning water and you can't see anything except the need to make a counter-display.

You can't be at your most creative until you recognise status for what it is - a grubby little whore that doesn't care who it attaches itself to. Then your mind can be clear, like calm water, and you can see for miles.

Making Decisions

I discovered something very interesting about how a particular intelligence agency - one of the world's best - goes about its decision-making. It quite freaked me at the time, actually.

When they're planning operations, in which the stakes are even higher than the mere life or death of the individual operative because they're about national security, they recognise that the reason why people can't make decisions is very simple. Every time you make a decision, you must automatically sacrifice all the other options on the table. And nobody likes to lose options, which is why nobody likes to make decisions.

If you ask yourself which option is the best, then you're on a hiding to nothing. You might as well write a letter to Santa, because you're in wish-land.

Instead, ask yourself, "Which of these options can we live without? Can we live without this? Can we live without this?"

Whatever is left, you can't live without - and there's your decision. It's brutally simple, which is why it works.

Go on, try it.

How Do You Know If You Suck?

You don't. (I mean you don't know, I don't mean you don't suck. It's possible that you do suck.)

I was having a beer this evening with a friend of mine whom I trained to perform improvisational comedy. He and a bunch of his colleagues performed a kick-ass show at Jongleurs in Battersea a couple of months ago. Tonight, he said, "Well, we all know the second half sucked, and the guys were speculating - how come you made us perform that particular format? How come you made us do a sucky show when there's so much other stuff you could have got us doing instead?"

I was astonished. The second half didn't suck. The throat-mikes gave too much feedback so we had to turn them down, but the performance was superb. It was their first show, although you wouldn't know it. And the performers think they sucked.

I asked him if he had any feedback from the audience - you know, of the "you sucked" variety - and he said, "Oh, no, they all loved it, I still get people coming up to me and congratulating me, they think we're all geniuses and heroes and they can't figure out how we pulled it off."

The agonising truth is that you simply don't know if you suck or not, if your ideas suck or not. You just don't know. So the next time you have an idea about something and want to express it, don't censor yourself. Get the idea out there, and let your audience tell you if it sucks. If it does, change it! What's the problem? And if it doesn't suck, what's the problem?

Positive Thinking

When I was learning to ski, I hit every obstacle you could imagine. Skiers, trees, pylons - I could probably hit a helicopter overhead if I was having a bad day. As we skied through some trees (or rather, as my instructor skied around the trees and I skied into them), she asked me why I kept hitting them.

"I don't know", I said, "you're the instructor. You tell me."

She asked me, "Well, where are you focusing your attention?"

"On the trees!"

"Why?"

She had me there. "So I can avoid them, I guess..."

"Uh-huh. And how's that working out for you?"

Sarky cow.

From that moment on, I started to focus on the gaps between the trees. And I never hit another tree again. She was teaching me positive thinking, although I didn't realise it at the time.

It now amazes me how many of us go around focusing on the "trees". We become experts on the damn things, and blind ourselves to the gaps.

When you book a holiday, do you tell the travel agent all the places you don't want to go?

"Well, I definitely don't want to go to Kiev."

"OK sir, no problem, where do you want to go?"

"You see, they don't speak English, and the hotels are all grotty, and..."

"So where would you like to go, sir?"

"And the food sucks."

"Sir, could I ask you to wait to one side while I deal with the next customer? Thank you so much. Hello madam, where would you like to go?"

"Not Kiev, that's for sure..."

If we've got more common sense than to do this when we book holidays, why do we do it in business meetings? We all sit around saying "Yes, BUT" to the things we don't like, sniping away at each other, killing each other's ideas, blunting each other's imagination - and then we go home and ask the kids, "did you play nice with the other kids today?"

Tomorrow, see what happens when you say "Yes, and" to somebody's idea, instead of "Yes, but". And let us know how it goes.

PS. Kiev is actually very nice.