How to Fire Your Gurus

My sister Talia came up with a brilliant line of philosophy back when she was about six years old.  It's one of those lines that people in my family now quote at certain appropriate times. Her statement?  "We all do dumb things."  Sounds simple enough, but it's a very difficult lesson to learn.

I've always been susceptible to gurus.  Gurus dispense advice.  I love advice.  I love watching interviews.  I love hearing what Warren Buffet has to say.  I love hearing Bill Gates or Steve Jobs give a speech.  I love panels where experts weigh in on who they think will win the next election or what startups will change the world.  There's something about my nature that makes me believe it all.  And so when I watch these shows, I believe that I am not just getting some dude's opinion which I can then tear apart and contrast with my own.  I believe I'm getting The Truth.

I understand that for a lot of people, distrusting gurus comes naturally.  For me, when I hear someone like Dick Cheney, it's hard for me to have the reaction that he's completely, totally, fundamentally wrong.  It's hard for me to believe that he hasn't thought the subject through. That he's not good at analysis.  To me, a man like Cheney, who has been a congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States cannot possibly be dumber than me on an issue where he has expertise.  He's gotta know something that I don't.  

But believing in gurus is paralyzing.  If you watch and read enough CNBC, you realize that everyone has an opinion.  If you follow them all, you can't make a move.  As Howard Linzon states in his blog, when it comes to finance, there really are no gurus.  Same goes for political analysts.  If you followed the advice of every guru who was sure that Barack Obama could never be elected President, you would have been a terrible political prognosticator.  

To stop subscribing to gurus, you have to watch Dick Cheney and honestly, truly believe that he doesn't know what he's talking about.  You have to watch CNBC financial analyst Jim Cramer and think that some of his opinions are buffoonish.  You even have to [note to self: Josh, don't go there, don't touch the Sacred Cow of people born from 1975-1990] realize that sometimes Jon Stewart sounds both pompous and uninformed.  You have to start calling them not solely the way others who have long track records of success and expertise have called them.  You have to call 'em like you see 'em.

For some this is easy, but I have a very deep respect for people with more experience than I have.  I think the first step to getting rid of gurus, if you have my temperament, is to live enough of life that you gain perspective and realize that most people have a very mixed track record.  2008 was a great year for that.  This year proved that even Warren Buffet is wrong sometimes, and that there very few people who are Warren Buffet in the first place.  I guess Talia reached that stage of life when she was six.  I'm 26, so I'm a late bloomer. 

To fire your gurus, you need to realize, as Linzdon says in a subsequent blog post, that failure is everywhere.  Somewhere there are some very smart people -- the kinds of older people you instinctively feel like asking for advice when you see them at a wedding -- who thought that Crocs was a can't-lose stock market investment.  People like Colin Powell -- COLIN POWELL! -- were sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.   I am always worried that I'll inadvertently grab an idea for a blog post and fail to credit the originator.  But that worry can also be paralyzing -- I mean, there are NYT columnists who outright grab entire lines from bloggers and publish them to millions of readers.

This past February, I was laid off from my first "real" job.  Of course, anyone laid off this past winter can take some comfort in the fact that their layoff was almost certainly due in part to economic reasons.  But the question always remains:  why me and not the majority who kept their jobs? I can look into that question forever, but a cold but almost liberating fact remains:  somehow, on some level, that layoff was a failure.

As Google says, the important thing is not to avoid failure, but to fail well.  This past year revealed that many of those elder statesmen who served as gurus were really just highly intelligent human beings who had enjoyed a long period of publicized success.  They cannot escape Talia's Law:  we all do dumb things.  Once you realize that the goal is not to follow a guru to utopia, but to keep moving, learning, adapting and changing, so that one day you might enjoy your long period of publicized success, the gurus become more expendable.  That's how build up the courage to go to your gurus and give them pink slips.  That's how you start acting like your own boss.