Winning is a fundamentally cruel business, and becoming a winner means shedding some of your best human qualities in pursuit of the prize. That’s the payoff, the price of first place. Nobody ever did it without some ruthlessness, or greed, or selfishness, or venality. Nobody ever came first at anything without cultivating a darker side. And ambition, as someone said, makes us look pretty ugly.
But it’s not an absolute price. Balance is everything. You can be a winner and still retain essentially decent core values, enough to outweigh whatever dark side of your personality you cultivated to get there in the first place. You can be enough of a nice guy for people to overlook your faults.
The reverse does not apply. The wholly nice will not succeed. The wholly nice exist mostly to be clambered over by the mostly nice, the fairly nice, the nice-ish, the not-so-nice, the plain horrid. Be nice: but perhaps not too nice.
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This is the age of the slogan, the soundbite, the snappy phrase in place of considered argument. Thought is dying; reason’s gone critical. In bookshops and magazine racks we’re told only what we want to hear: we’re told it in neat, bullet-pointed affirmations of our own worth.
No more. This is the fightback. The resuscitation. This is the slogan as explainer of the world. One a day for a year. Three hundred and sixty five phrases, soundbites and bullet points with which to make sense of the way things are now and point to how things could be tomorrow. Read them and weep.
Defining the age through a slogan a day
This is the age of the slogan, the soundbite, the snappy phrase in place of considered argument. Thought is dying; reason’s gone critical. In bookshops and magazine racks we’re told only what we want to hear: we’re told it in neat, bullet-pointed affirmations of our own worth.
No more. This is the fightback. The resuscitation. This is the slogan as explainer of the world. One a day for a year. Three hundred and sixty five phrases, soundbites and bullet points with which to make sense of the way things are now and point to how things could be tomorrow. Read them and weep.
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