Comment by hallmark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hallmark | Hacker News Reader

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I don't intend to be disrespectful to you, but were you perhaps arrogant and an asshole?

In the past, when I was passionate and full of ideas on a particular subject, I have later looked back and noticed my behavior to be.. less than what I would expect from myself. It was too easy to take that energy I had invested in my ideas and snap that around negatively toward others when they came off as ignorant or wasteful of my time.

The historical anecdote of Thomas Jefferson may have left out - for brevity, focus, or other reasons - the notion that Jefferson not only prepared heavily for the meeting, but likely also won over the participants through diplomacy. It's never just one trick that wins the day.

If you're building a team from scratch, that's wonderful. If you are coming into an existing committee or group of people, the soft skills come in very handy.

Before you take my comments as a quick insult, would you be able to look back at the entire newspaper debacle and see if there wasn't anything you could have done better to win people over? In retrospect only, consider those "stupid" and unprepared people a lost cause. It's not for their benefit but yours.

I actually considered this possibility after I resigned. It might sound pretentious but no I wasn't. I was just stuck with a bad board.

Why? First it had a track record for organizational incompetence. I should have known better but few of my predecessors especially the more competent ones had had a good experience in that position. They had all warned me when I began but in my naivete and exuberance I still took the position and assumed I could change everything. Second, after I left, one by one the board turned over and it became very obvious that I had simply been shouldering too much personal responsibility with making sure our organization ran smoothly. I ended up still having to advice the organization from the outside after resigning.

Most importantly, till this day, I still have a good relationship with many of the more competent people in the organization (many of whom were recruited by me). The organization remains moribund however, bound together only by the strings of infrastructure (and personnel) I left behind.

Nonetheless, I think the more useful point I have to admit you make is that when you are joining an existing committee or group of people, there is a bit of compromise that goes on. To that, I say, make sure you check the background of the people you are working with before taking up any position. If they are people with a track record for incompetence or failure (in my case the fact that many of the people I was working with had been staff with this organization for several years should have been a warning signal),don't accept the position. Your peace of mind is way more important than any opportunity to marktime in the name of making a difference.

Given human nature, it was probably both.

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