Brainwashed: How to Reinvent Yourself (Seth Godin) | Hacker News Reader

Brainwashed: How to Reinvent Yourself (Seth Godin)

changethis.com

57 pointsalbertcardona35 comments

When exactly were we brainwashed into believing that the best way to earn a living is to have a job?

I don't buy this. Humans are risk-averse and a having a job isn't the best way to earn a living - it's the easiest and to a certain extend the safest.

Founding a start up, or working as a freelancer isn't for everyone, and pointing fingers and yelling "you're brainwashed because you didn't make the same superior choices I did" isn't very constructive.

I'm not sure Seth is going that far, although I can see how one might misinterpret his message. What he's trying to say is: you can do it (be an entrepreneur) if you really want to.

I somehow didn't get the message as you did, it seems to me that he is saying that we are brainwashed to be average and to follow the crowd and working at a job to earn a living is one of the notions that have been put in our head during our brainwashing.

"it's the easier and to a certain extent the safest"

I think that's half his point. That's what average is, right? Easy and safe such that everyone can do it. Perhaps it's not being brainwashed, but the net effect of all human interactions will ultimately be average, so it's important that anyone wishing to achieve better must work a little harder to get nudged above it.

This reminds me of the language blub (ironically in an essay titled, "Beating the Averages"), except PG was very careful to prepare the reader for what he was about to say, "I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so to explain this point I'm going to use a hypothetical language called Blub." Perhaps Godin could've done the same, but that's not his style.

Taking risk aversion to its logical conclusion one will end up selling himself into slavery - a good slave owner will take care of housing and nutritional needs of his slaves in good or bad times because he has vested interest in the slaves being alive and healthy. It's easy to see drawbacks of slavery, and so it stands to reason that risk-aversion, like many other natural urges, must be controlled.

Employment in that regard is the same story - you are trading in part of your autonomy in exchange of lesser risk exposure. It's rarely a good trade.

Taking virtually anything to its logical conclusion is a bad idea. The logical conclusion of risk non-aversion isn't all that pretty either.

The opposite of risk-aversion is not risk-seeking, as you seem to imply, but risk-management as I have explicitly advocated in my previous post.

I don't share your intuitions about opposites. Risk-management is in any case a middle-of-the-road position. A person might rationally decide that the best risk/reward balance, given their particular goals, was to get a job. (Especially if these goals include doing a lot of stuff outside of work, since startups don't give you much free time.)

1. I disagree that risk aversion is not the same as risk seeking. If you are not avoiding risk, you are exposing yourself to it.

2. Even if I accept your premise, risk-management is, as foldr says, a middle of the road proposition. I choose to manage my risk by safely working a job and allowing myself, and my children, to pursue other interests fairly comfortably. Besides, someone has to work jobs. To paraphrase Office Space, "If everyone did what they loved, no one would be a janitor because no loves cleaning up shit."

Wait a minute, you don't think a third party who you barely know having complete control over you sounds incredibly risky?

I should have made it clear - I was talking specifically about reducing economical risk by turning over your fate to a slave owner. The elevated risk to personal security is obviously a downside as you pointed out, although a sane slave-owner will never kill you because he has already paid for all your future work. In addition slave will forever forgo all chances of climbing out of that hole because he does not keep any of the surplus product he has generated. And hence my point is that someone seeking to reduce their exposure to risk can easily end up subjecting himself to a different risk he didn't think about.

The parallel with employment is direct - by trading your economic liberty for a paycheck you are reducing your exposure to risk of there being nothing to eat. However you are also eliminating your exposure to the upside of your work. You are also picking up the risk of having loaded on debt and then being laid off, ending up in a dead-end career and work-place hazards.

What Seth points out is that risk of there being nothing to eat is vastly exaggerated in our minds, thus many of us trade the very real upside of our labor for the risk-protection we didn't need.

"Humans are risk-averse..."

Exactly. I think that's his point. That is what he means when he talks about the lizard brain. Our aversion to risk leads us into doing things that do not matter.

So many of his points are patently false. I wonder if the author is aware of the bubble in which he lives.

In fact, when trying to get through this manifesto I was constantly reminded of this Bill Watterson quote in his Kenyon speech:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.

Thanks. I didn't know about that speech. Here's the whole thing...

http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html

>Do you remember learning to factor quadrilateral equations? x2 -32x +12? Why were you taught this? Why did they spend hours drilling you on such clearly useless content? Simple: you were being trained to be a compliant cog, someone who could mindlessly follow instructions as opposed to seeking out innovation and surprise.

Oh god...

It was because that concept was really useful :P I factor them all the time when trying to engineer things.

I liked the quadrilateral (as opposed to quadratic) touch.

And the x2 (as opposed to x^2) touch.

The sharp ones get a different lesson from high school algebra: Apply your mind, find the pattern, and you'll get better results out of less work than everyone else.

I have to admit, I was annoyed when I discovered the world of discrete maths that high school focused so much on calculus and algebra.

I think my class maths would have been better off understanding how to tackle counting and probability problems to restore some balance.

I have no idea where this is coming from. I mean, I know my share of naysayers, but this is America. We're told from day one "You're in America! You can be or do anything you set your heart and mind to!"

The American Dream isn't exactly an obscure phrase...

So, "brainwashed into believing you're average" is complete nonsense.

The American Dream is precisely about being average. The white picket fence and all that.

"The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States of America in which democratic ideals are perceived as a promise of prosperity for its people. In the American Dream, first expressed by James Truslow Adams in 1931, citizens of every rank feel that they can achieve a "better, richer, and happier life."[1] The idea of the American Dream is rooted in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence[2] which states that "all men are created equal"[3] and that they are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights"[3] including "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."[3]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream

More accurately, it's believing you could be anything you want and choosing an average comfortable life. This is in contrast to not having the choice at all. People like having choice, not necessarily using it.

What's wrong with a comfortable life? I mean, from a genetic perspective, what I really want is for my child to have children. Having and "average, comfortable life" has, thus far, been a pretty good way to achieve that.

I didn't say there is anything wrong with that. What exactly are you arguing against?

The corollary to your statement is that if I have an average, comfortable life, I did not choose it. I simply let myself "fall into" that life. I view this as a negative statement, though perhaps you didn't mean it that way. I chose a comfortable life and worked to achieve it. It didn't just happen to me because I coasted along.

Apparently this is only the intro to a larger manifesto that you have to click "View this Manifesto" through to read. (didn't realize at first) Here's the link:

http://changethis.com/manifesto/issue/66.01.Brainwashed#view

I understand the article appeal to the would be entrepreneurs, but still, I feel somehow warped "marketers" thinking behind it, something I would call a disrespect or disdain towards an actual work.

For example, I have been working in a team of about 1000 people, consisting of software developers, testers, QM people, sales and management, who together worked on a large software system deployed in hospitals.

There are several companies fighting in this niche, and all of them are big corporations. The magnitude of the task just doesn't allow any small startups to compete. And yet, most of the people working on it are employees, because just that is the way the work is organized.

But let me ask, why should some marketer call it "compliant work"? Why it doesn't deserve to be called just a "work", at least?

Maybe what Mr Godin doesn't realize is that what he calls "compliant work" is something which allows him to survive in society - food he eats, clothes he wear, or doctors who care after him... most of this is "compliant work"...

The message I take away from this is that Seth believes he much much more special than the people who draw a wage.

And he's right, he is more special. He is also ready to explain you how to become special - a better you.

Imagine that a person is in fact brainwashed - how would she react to someone trying to explain it to her? Would she perhaps become defensive? How would she go about discovering if she is brainwashed or not? How would she go about changing that?

I submit it is in fact nearly impossible to use one's own world view to understand the limits of one's own world view. The best way to explore the boundary is to listen to someone who has gone further than yourself in a given direction.

The other great option is to look for people with a more limited world view than your own, pay attention to patterns of behaviors and convictions that make those people limited and then look for the same patterns in yourself. I have made many great self-discoveries using this tactic.

It seems that this is nothing more than an (average) attempt at providing self-help type information in the form of a conspiratorial stab at public education. (Seven Ways to Blah Blah Blah.) Notice that he immediately derives the goal of public schools from a result: people become complacent, therefore the "system" intends to brainwash people to be complacent!

ugh, is he serious? does anyone actually believe that the reason people don't run their own businesses is because they were brainwashed? as opposed to, um, lemme check, lack of desire, lack of funds, lack of skills, etc. i have issues with this assumption that the natural state of everyone is to be above average. i don't think the math works.

A good read. Summary: Through failures, learn the ability to ship arts (work that matters) and ship them.

"Do you remember learning to factor quadrilateral equations? x2 -32x +12? Why were you taught this? Why did they spend hours drilling you on such clearly useless content? Simple: you were being trained to be a compliant cog, someone who could mindlessly follow instructions as opposed to seeking out innovation and surprise."

I agree with this. He's right.

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