Category: misc

modern politics

~ ginsu ~ 5 Comments

If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re old, you have no brains.

This cleverly constructed insult is very hard to refute from personal knowledge: if you’re young, you only have half the knowledge required to speak from experience; if you’re old, disagreement is evidence of stupidity. There does actually seem to be some correlation between age and political philosophy, but fitting statistics over politics is an exercise in explaining music with numbers – it explains everything except what it actually feels like to hear a song, which is only everything that matters about music.

On the few occasions that I pay attention to politics, I feel like the crabby old man railing about what the kids are listening to these days – it sounds like so much noise, and each election seems to bring only a dismaying choice between two unpalatable options. I wish that elections weren’t about making the “least worst” choice. But I don’t pine for the days of big band music, bebop or classic rock – to the contrary, what bothers me is that no choice ever seems to offer anything that aligns with my sense of a modern world.

The essay “Why I left the GOP” is a journey from one pre-modern society to another. The author explains his privileged background, mainstream education and birthright belief in competition and free markets – but then war, Katrina, and actual contact with honest-to-goodness poor people opened his eyes. He had no choice but to flee the GOP for the liberal heart of the Democratic party. I’ve seen this article triumphantly distributed by my left-leaning friends, but it’s sad how his story is all about what he’s fleeing from – there’s nothing at all about what he’s fleeing to. I like everything about the article but its ending – it’s the story of a man who ran out of a burning building only to sprint blindly towards a cliff.

Most of my “intelligent” friends lean Democratic, in no small part because of the anti-intellectualism of today’s Republican party. The irony here is that the intelligent citizen recognizes that the conservative values of community, decency, humanity and individual strength require that we extend these benefits to everyone in our society. But there is stunning intellectual inconsistency in the failure to acknowledge the evidence of governmental incompetence in providing the most basic services. Is there anyone who would sing the praises of their most recent interaction with the DMV, IRS, Post Office, or community planning board? Is there any large governmental agency that provides the daily benefit of America’s largest corporations? Oh sure, you can rail against Exxon or Bank of America, but can you remember the last time you couldn’t put gas in your tank or find a working ATM? Who brought you more joy yesterday, the federal or state government, or Apple or Google or Amazon?

Rich people who don’t want want to pay taxes because they don’t want to help poor people are just being assholes. But rich people who don’t want to pay taxes because they have no faith that government can help poor people are just being rational, they are just responding to the daily evidence before their eyes. Why isn’t there a third party that can satisfy both the liberal heart and conservative brain? The largest third party in the U.S. is the Libertarian party, which has succeeded only in being more heartless than conservatives and more senseless than liberals. Can’t we do better than that?

I am waiting and hoping for the day when technology will transform politics. So far, the incredible rise of the Internet, social media, mobile devices, and electronic payment have only been used in politics for the same old purposes: raising money for existing political parties. Someday these modern advances will come together to form a new political party that is committed to direct change in our society without relying on the fundamentally outdated infrastructure of the old political system. We will see a political party formed on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, organized on Facebook and Twitter and Google+, funded through Paypal and Amazon and Square – and it will improve people’s lives through Donors Choose and other direct means of helping society without the inefficiency of governmental oversight. We need political leaders who recognize that this is not just the future, this is the unevenly distributed present, and government needs to be reconstructed to enable this transformation.

sports talk

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James Fallows notes that Bill Clinton’s speeches succeed because he treats his listeners as if they are smart, while most political speeches appeal to emotion more than fact. Fallows makes an interesting comparison:

The main other place you hear discussion based on the same assumption that people of any background, education level, or funny-sounding accent can understand sophisticated back-and-forth of argument and counter-claim is sports-talk radio. (“I understand the concern about Strasburg’s arm. But … “) You hear insults and disagreements and put-downs on sports-talk discussions. You rarely hear the kind of deliberate condescension, the unconcealable effort as if talking to slow learners, of many political “authorities” addressing the unwashed.

I’ve noticed this for years. I can hardly stand to listen to political news entertainment shows, whether Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann. Every one of them treats listeners as frothing idiots, and the callers they support on their airwaves only reinforce the image with loony claims and outrageous statements. One of Fallows’ readers echoes my sentiments exactly:

I’ve begun listening to sports talk radio on my way to work because I cannot bear to listen to the news–even NPR cannot escape the false equivalence trap and I find it depressing.  I am not at all interested in sports–as I was so obsessively when I was a boy.  But I enjoy the calls, the laughs, the passion of everybody on 98.5, The Sports Hub. […]  Nobody talks down–in fact, the hosts and callers pile on detail after detail, especially here in Massachusetts about the loved/hated/damned poor Red Sox and all their troubles.

The most successful sports talk radio hosts are highly intelligent and utterly ruthless in insisting that callers contribute information that is useful and fact-based. The culture and language of these shows can be crude, but their passion and devotion to truth is refreshing in a way that barely exists in other public discourse. Why is sports talk so intelligent while political talk is so dumb? Noam Chomsky believes that people invest their intelligence in sports because they are disenfranchised from more valuable pursuits:

Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way — so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports.

You’re trained to be obedient; you don’t have an interesting job; there’s no work around for you that’s creative; in the cultural environment you’re a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they’re in the hands of the rich folks. So what’s left? Well, one thing that’s left is sports — so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that.

This fits into Chomsky’s theories of society, but on reflection it makes no sense. People can’t really contribute meaningfully to sport, and they know it – you can have pride in your team and buy a ticket, buy a jersey or hat, but you’ll never be on the sporting field. The separation between the sports fan and the elite athlete is even greater than that between the citizen and the politician.

What separates sport from politics, in terms of the intelligence people will bring to the discourse, is that sports has rules and measurable outcomes, and passive participation can be rewarded by being right about the outcome (rewarded by pride, or in the case of sports gambling, by money). Politics lacks easily definable rules and outcomes that are clearly connected to actions on the field.

Is there something that the Internet can do about this, is there some kind of startup that could make politics more like sports, and therefore more attractive for intelligent public discourse? A company called HubDub tried something like this, making a prediction market for politics, sports, entertainment and other topics. Unfortunately, trying to pin down public predictions turned out to be challenging. They ended up shutting down their general prediction market to focus on the most popular topic with a steady revenue model: sports, of course. FanDuel seems like great fun, but it’s also another demonstration that most people will apply their intelligence, time and money to sports in a way that they just won’t to politics.

louie louie

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There’s a package of personal skills that I’d call “being good at life” – some combination of being open-minded, open-hearted, honest and adventurous. Here I’m not trying to define exactly what’s in the package; I’m just saying such a thing exists, and you know this when you meet someone who is good at life. These people glow with contagious energy, you can feel it within a minute in their presence, and in half an hour you are imbued with some measure of their magic. They are so good at life that the irrepressible force of life overflows the boundaries of their bodies and penetrates into the lucky souls nearby.

This happens in the two-episode story arc completed this week on Louie, which is very close to entering my pantheon of favorite TV shows over the last decade (in chronological order: The Sopranos, Firefly, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men). If you don’t watch Louie CK’s brilliant show, and you don’t want to know what happens in it before you watch it, then you shouldn’t read the rest of this. Just go watch Louie – the first two seasons are on Netflix, the third is available on Amazon Instant Video.

Louie is a bit of a sad sack – divorced, out of shape, mid-forties, and haplessly looking for love. In the first episode of this story, he goes to a bookstore to buy something for his daughter. He turns down an offer of help from the first salesperson who inquires because he sees the other beside him, a librarian-sexy woman played by Parker Posey. He mumbles about finding a book about flowers for his daughter, and she really engages with the request, asking questions about his daughter and suggesting something that seems just right. It’s not a perfunctory execution of her task as a retail drone – she brings authentic humanity to a routine interaction. Louie’s days are filled with dross and here is a pure rivulet of gold.

Some time later, he’s back at the store panning for more, and she remembers him, her greeting lighting up his heart immediately. Finding a book for his other daughter, she draws on the shared personal history of being a girl just starting to grapple with life and femininity, and suggests another title that will surely be perfect. Truly infatuated now, Louie returns to the store a third time and stumbles out the best possible pitch for a date that can be made by an overweight balding older man to a vivacious younger woman. She says yes.

It’s wonderful … and in some ways it’s the high point of this relationship, as this moment is on average the high point of all possible relationships – the moment when both people think there might be something there, when the entire history is nothing but short sweet vignettes of warmth and attraction, when none of the best things have happened yet and all of them seem possible, when none of the worst things have happened yet and none of them seem plausible.

In the next episode, Louie picks her up at the bookstore at the end of her shift, and almost immediately, certainly inevitability, the reality of the person fills out differently than the fantasy of the dream. She actually is a wonderful person – vibrant, compassionate, authentic, funny and adventurous – and their date quickly becomes a classic New York journey, the city so alive that it’s almost like the third wheel in their evening, a meandering trawl through a bar, vintage clothing store, gourmet delicatessen and spectacular rooftop views. Parker Posey plays a woman who is just so damn good at life that it’s bursting from her seams, and the magic of her performance is how she shows the dark beauty of those seams and the fragile stitching that holds this woman together. She’s good at life because she has to be, because she’s learned to be, because it’s the only way she can survive.

Being good at life is a learned skill, no one is born this way. Some people learn from a blank slate, or even better from a foundation prepared well by a loving family and fortuitous circumstances. But some people learn in order to recover from misfortune, from illness or abuse or poverty or genetic disadvantage. For this group, being good at life is a survival skill, a necessity more than a blessing, medicine to cure a fatal condition.

great trailer

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Let me count the ways I’m excited about this trailer for the upcoming movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby:

  1. Baz Luhrmann – he’s renown for fearless interpretations of classics like Romeo + Juliet and La Bohème. The 1974 Gatsby film was a stultifying period piece – that kind of boredom just isn’t possible in Baz’s world; he is always more faithful to the emotion than the period.
  2. Carey Mulligan – she’s proving to be one of the great actresses of her generation. From the brief bits in the trailer, it looks like all of the actors have really absorbed the book (though I’m a bit worried about Elizabeth Debicki’s screamy Jordan Baker), but Mulligan stands out as a true embodiment of Daisy. Her line delivery of “You always look so cool” says exactly what that line is supposed to say.
  3. Jack White’s cover of Love is Blindness – U2’s Achtung Baby might be my favorite album about love and relationships (well, that or Tunnel of Love), and Jack White’s searing cover is a perfect backdrop to this fevered trailer.

The release date of Christmas 2012 gives me something to aim for, as a date to finish the Gatsby Project.

Update: The movie’s release date has been moved to May 10, 2013.

too early in the game

~ ginsu ~ 20 Comments

Last month, I wrote about why Second Life failed so I didn’t have to write about why Second Life failed. I mean, that post wasn’t about reasons for failure, it was about the fact of failure. My thought was that there are many people who simply assume Second Life failed, and they’re wrong, and there are many who will passionately argue that Second Life has succeeded … and they’re wrong too. Failure can only be judged by the ones who were trying to succeed.

It would be safer for me to say that failure is a matter of perspective, for surely failure passes through the same lens as beauty in the eye of the beholder. I do understand that many SL Residents were on their own journeys, and so of course they are their own best judges of the success of those journeys. But it would be an artful evasion to claim that any of those journeys, or even all of them together, constitute the sum total equation for the success of Second Life. We were trying to do something more – or at least, something else – and we failed. (Of course, I’m talking about the team and the company that I knew, years ago. The team there today is on their own journey, which I know next to nothing about.)

So if I’m willing to be this myopic and insular about judging failure, you can bet I’d be just as parochial in reviewing the reasons. I’ve seen and heard a lot of speculation that I don’t agree with: poor strategy, worse execution; lack of focus, misplaced focus; poor technology, doomed architecture; dumb marketing, uncontrollable PR; niche market, bizarre customers; crazy culture, undisciplined development; bad hiring, bad management; feckless board, dominating board, ignorant board. I’ve heard it all, and while there may be a grain of something like truth here and there, none of these things holds real explanatory power as a reason for why Second Life failed.

We failed as people. We failed as a team. Our failure was intensely personal, particular to each person involved, and ruinous to the overall team.

I’m going to switch now from “we” to “I” but I want to be really clear about why. We Lindens were all in it together, and there is a broad sense in which all credit and blame goes to all of us … but not in this post. Here, I’m talking about maybe half a dozen people, and so it would be too much of a personal attack for me to try to describe the failures of anyone other than myself. I’m willing to attack myself in this forum, but not my former colleagues, all of whom I still respect and a few of whom I love like my own family. But I want you to remember the “we” because otherwise the rest of this post is going to seem incredibly egocentric: there’s a certain kind of self-blame that’s really self-aggrandizement, and though I regard my own failures as critical, even the most deluded version of the story couldn’t claim it was all about me.

So. I failed as a person. I failed the team. I was responsible for many elements of our strategy, execution, culture and management, and those decisions aren’t the ones I regret. What I regret, to the extent that I’m capable of regretting such a rich learning experience for me, is giving up. I don’t mean at the end, when I was tired and disillusioned and looking around at a company I didn’t recognize and a future I didn’t want to live. A lot earlier than that, I gave up on people that we needed, people who were flawed and fragile but necessary. I let people fail, I let people go, I let people hide in their illusions and fears, I let them give up because I’d already given up.

The irony was, when I joined the company, I was supposed to be an experienced hand that would bring some sanity to a crazy world. But I indulged my own worst instincts – throughout the craziest times, when I could’ve done the most good, I just brought more crazy. I was having fun, but I chose my own twisted growth over a higher goal, and at times I was just plain mean or selfish or drunk. I really wasn’t ready for the opportunity that Linden Lab presented to me. I really wasn’t the guy I should’ve been when I got there; I didn’t know what I needed to know until I left.

Too many of the key leaders at the Lab were working through similarly damaging personal limitations. You might ask whether this really points to a failure in culture or hiring or leadership, and that would be a fair question. It’s true that Linden had a way of hiring certain kinds of people and forcing them to confront their own deepest flaws – but I think that’s beautiful, a feature not a bug. What we needed was one or more or all of us to conquer our flaws, to enable the entire team to rise above the limitations of each of us. But none of us defeated our own demons, and so all of us perished.

I’ve been gone from Linden Lab for over two and a half years, and still my failure haunts me. The last day of the year is always a good moment to come to terms with the passage of time, and this New Year’s Eve I’ve decided I should finally accept the fact that I’m never going to let it go. I’ll try to reach peace through the zen realization that peace is unattainable.

great jobs

~ ginsu ~ 4 Comments

The death of Steve Jobs raises and answers the question that haunts the psyches of ambitious entrepreneurs everywhere: “Was it worth it?”

Praise follows death like the glowing debris that trails a comet, and the writing in the sky says that Jobs was the greatest CEO ever. A few muted voices remember that he was famously harsh to work with, but this is universally regarded as an entirely justified mania for perfection. Considering his accomplishments, it seems almost irrelevant that he denied the obligations of paternity for one child, and consciously decided that his children should know him through biography rather than time spent with him, even – or especially – in the final stretch towards death, when the remaining time must be remorselessly allotted like oxygen in a sealed room.

This isn’t criticism of a great man. It’s a reminder that many of us would willingly make the same choices, were such greatness within our reach.

We say it’s not so, and try to believe it. We encourage each other to remember family, remember health, remember that a life of striving includes the quest to achieve a full and humane life through our work. But the life of Jobs is the story of his jobs, of his one true job: making a dent in the universe through the creation of products that become a part of our lives. For his success in that, we forgive and excuse his personality defects. We cannot blame a man for failing to uphold principles that we would throw aside ourselves if only we could be assured that the universe was malleable to our touch.

Saying that “you are not your job” is a comfort; it alleviates the cognitive dissonance between your self-image and the productive economic output you contribute to the world. The lessons of Steve Jobs deny that comfort; his strongest exhortations insist that you are all about the things you make for the world – not for yourself, not for your hobbies or leisure, not even for your family and certainly not your friends if you have any. You have to do great work, never settle, remember that each day could be your last, don’t waste time living someone else’s life.

There is no obligation to community, family or friendship in these words – though strangely, there is an overwhelming commitment to society in the desire to dent the universe, for this is not a universe of cold cosmological phenomena, it’s a universe of people, and his ambition is all about changing how people live. For Jobs, if this ambition involved sacrifices of a more universal personal nature, there is no question that it was worth it. It was worth it for him, and his efforts were certainly worth it for us.

It’s touching to see the determination with which Jobs’ sayings are repeated in the wake of his death. But the message of his most appealing words isn’t quite the message of his life. He told us to follow our hearts, to trust our intuitions, to ask ourselves if our plan for this day is how we’d want to spend our last. But those are not goals, they are only beautiful means to an uncompromising end. The goal of Jobs was to be insanely great in a world-changing way. That’s the hard part of the message to understand. All of us can hope to understand what is in our own hearts, and can hope to have the courage to follow it. Almost no one alive has a realistic ambition to change the world – what many of us think of as world changing is merely interesting, hopefully entertaining, and possibly enriching.

worlds collide

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You’re not a writer if you’re not writing something today about that day 10 years ago …

My wife was screaming about something on TV, but I couldn’t get out of bed. My head was heavy with flu, the sounds couldn’t penetrate the haze of mucus and sick. We had moved to San Francisco from New York two and a half years ago. I still missed The City, still missed the feeling of living in the giant beating heart of the world, a heart that pounded with the rhythm of my own. I grew up in a Jersey suburb 45 minutes from the Holland Tunnel. One of the few reliable moments of magic in my youth was the anticipation of a trip to NYC, which peaked the moment the towers came into view around a bend in the turnpike. The towers were monumental, elemental, permanent – I could no more imagine the city without them than the sky without the sun.

But a plane had just crashed into one of them. Surely an accident, I’ll read about it tomorrow when I’m over this flu. My wife is still yelling, and I bury my head deeper into the pillow and ignore the looming reality. And then the second plane into the second tower. Now even my virus-addled mind has enough strength to put together the picture, or maybe, isn’t strong enough to construct an alternate interpretation. It’s not an accident. The towers are coming down, the world is ending. I finally roll out of bed with just enough momentum to come to rest in front of the TV, where I sit slackjawed for the next two days, watching the grim images pile up, the towers falling, bodies falling, people running, debris and dust and ineffable dismay, the pictures and posters of the lost.

A call from the office asks when I’m coming in, gentle but insistent. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, I’d already decided I couldn’t do this work anymore, before that day. And now, these people, they couldn’t understand, with their happy California sunshine and bleeding optimism. They couldn’t understand what it meant to turn a corner of anticipation and be greeted only by empty sky. I wanted nothing of them. I wanted to go back, back home, back East. Now that trip could seem like a run to a ravaged home rather than a run from a broken promise.

But that was a problem; the excuse was too easy and at the same time, insurmountable. I could tell myself that I was going home to help, but no one could look at that smouldering hole in the earth and believe in selfish lies. I wasn’t running to help, I was running away, away from expectations, dissatisfactions, disappointments. The loss of September 11 deserved better than to serve as easy explanation.

Four months later, I had quit the firm but hadn’t left the Bay Area. My life had become unmoored from a certain stable career path, into a meandering decade of exploration and discovery, of triumph and loss and the subtle closeness of the two, of searching for monuments to fill the hole in the sky.

start me up

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A couple of months ago, a good friend was talking to me about the differences between most people and “entrepreneurs like us.” I had to recoil at the phrase. He’s a real entrepreneur – founded a couple of successful companies, working on a third, constantly driving and innovating and dreaming and creating. At my best I never reached his heights. I’d been a “startup guy” for a dozen years, and proudly wore that badge – as a startup lawyer learning business basics, boardroom battles, and founder secrets; as a venture capitalist investing across sectors and geographies; as a startup manager in multiple different roles and companies. When I finally founded my own company, I felt I could finally accept the label entrepreneur, and it felt great. But it didn’t last very long. I’d accepted a job at a large company not too long before that conversation, so “entrepreneurs like us” couldn’t include me anymore.

I’m not too flexible about the term, unlike those who believe in four types of entrepreneurs. I think an entrepreneur makes a for-profit business that didn’t exist before, without the benefit of existing infrastructure. That rules out what some call social entrepreneurship, because working for nonprofit good is too different than pursuit of viable commercial enterprise. And it rules out corporate entrepreneurship, because starting a new division or business line for an existing company is very different from starting a company from a cocktail napkin.

I said different – I didn’t say harder or more admirable. The numbers probably say that social and corporate efforts are harder, as there seem to be more new companies than there are new social efforts or successful businesses started within large companies.

I’ll differentiate some more: Although I’d include both the fruit stand owner and the tech company titan within my view of entrepreneurs, I don’t think they’re the same in most ways, even at their respective starts. Fruit stands aim for some daily living, selling a well-understood product, within a social infrastructure that understands and supports the concept of buying and eating fruit. The most extreme tech founder dreams of all the money imaginable, with a product that initially seems bizarre, with no apparent revenue model, distribution channel, or plausible customer interest. Although these two kinds of people have something in common, they have a lot more differences. So “entrepreneur” isn’t a binary label – it’s possible for one entrepreneur to be more entrepreneurial than another. Labels are most useful when we use them to distinguish and measure concepts. I don’t like seeing a meaningful word diluted to appease egos or ease conversation.

Because the company I work for now is fairly well known, I should doubly-triply-quadruply emphasize that this is all my opinion, and moreover it’s my opinion about me. I can believe that for many entrepreneurs, coming to Google doesn’t mean that your days as an entrepreneur are over – those entrepreneurs are more entrepreneurial than I ever was, which I’ve admitted isn’t a high bar.

And although I’m still a startup guy at heart, I can believe that Google can in important ways return to its startup roots, even though I’m naturally inclined to disbelieve that a large company can have the “energy, pace and soul of a startup.” But I’d say that you have to measure the energy and pace in the context of the scale of the ambition. People who think that Google is slow or that the competition is anything other than the unknown future are probably underestimating the enormous opportunity remaining in the information economy.

Ah, but that last bit, the “soul” of a startup … what does that even mean? That’s tricky, and probably the topic of another post.

the pages of illusions

~ ginsu ~ 1 Comment

Ah, it’s that time of year, when we make promises to ourselves that we won’t keep.  For virtually every new year since the mid ’90s, I’ve made at least one of the following three resolutions: (1) get a new job, (2) get more exercise, (3) write a book.  Totals over the last fifteen years:  9 jobs, 2 years in which I exercised more than the prior year, 1 book (unpublished).

To be fair, 7 out of the 9 jobs were really a single job to me:  learning how to be an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley.  I’ve learned some good lessons, and although I didn’t achieve the outcomes I aimed for, I’m not sad about the experiences of the last dozen years.  How can I be sad?  After all, everything I’ve learned only gives me fodder for another book . . .

I’m going to title this book The Age of Illusions.  If I can do this properly, I’ll be working on three intertwining themes:

Illusions of youth.  In your 20s and 30s, you’re at the peak of your powers, or at least in the prime of your unrestrained ambitions.  You’re out of childhood, with the energy of youth and none of the detritus of age. Maybe I’m taking turning 40 too seriously, but I mean this as a celebration, not as resignation:  If you haven’t crashed into a wall by the time you’re 40, you’re doing it wrong.  If you haven’t learned your limitations the hard way, you wasted the resilience of youth.

Illusions of enterprise.  My core work experience of the last decade was at a startup that could be considered the most successful failure of the Internet age.  Changing the world is hard, and most of the people who say they’re doing it aren’t even really trying.  At Linden Lab, we weren’t just trying to change the world, we were trying to recreate it in a better image.  We didn’t get where we wanted to be.  Some say that failure is a badge of honor, but I can only agree with that sentiment where the goal was so great that even trying is reasonably regarded as lunacy.

Illusions of empire.  The first decade of this millenium was a rollicking cascade of unreal events.  The background of all of our tales of this decade may be the end of the American empire.  It’s a story too large for me to tell with my limited skills, but somehow I have to acknowledge that I’m fingerpainting on the canvas of epochal history.

Folks, don’t hold your breath:  I estimate that it’ll take me almost six years to write this book.  I think I’ll only average around a page per week, and I’m aiming for at least 300 pages.  Ah well – it’s nice to have a slot filled for those annual resolutions all the way through 2016.

Happy New Year!

you gotta love yourself

~ ginsu ~ 2 Comments

The final lesson in the four-for-forty series is the hoariest, hippyest, horriblest of them all. “Love yourself” is the basic rule of all personal development, so there’s no shortage of Internet advice on how to love yourself. To me, the advice has always come across as self-indulgent babble that may be good for crackhead pop and comic treatment, but it’s succored a generation of wimps who can’t hold down a job.

The first hundred times or so I heard “You gotta love yourself,” I thought: “No I don’t.  You don’t tell me what I gotta do.” Then I began to ask “Why?” and I finally heard a reason that made some sense to me.

Loving yourself requires accepting your faults, and accepting your faults gives you more options for how to react in any situation. That’s a quantifiable rationale, testable both in theory and in practice – and as a bonus the measurement also gives guidance on whether you’ve taken self-love too far. Here’s a simplified example:

Let’s say you receive a bad outcome that is at least partially based on something you did. Here is a count of your options for how to react –

  • Self-hate: Since you will blame yourself to the exclusion of other factors, you only have two choices: (1) rigorously apply yourself to skills improvement, even though it’s likely that no amount of improvement would have given a different result, or (2) drink enough to obliterate your self-hating identity.
  • Self-love, of the over-indulgent kind: Certainly the outcome wasn’t your fault, so your choices are (1) smugly wait for the next chance for the world to properly join you in your love of you, or (1) ignore any possible evidence that your actions contributed to failure. Yes, those are numbered the same because they are the same.
  • Goldilocks self-love, the kind where you love yourself just right: You can be clear-eyed about what really happened. You can apply yourself to change, you can recognize the factors that were out of your control, you can put the outcome out of your mind in good humor and good health. You can do all of these things and you probably will.

Basically, loving yourself just right gives you all of the options of the other two conditions, with the additional optionality that comes from not being ideologically compelled to react in a way that is harmful or indulgent. You gotta love yourself just right, because the alternatives are suboptimal. Sure, that’s a particularly dry and uninspiring way to put it, but what can I tell ya, I love this way because it’s mine.