Category: Philosophy

Guy no Logical Gibberish V

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We’ve discussed the idea that the human inferiority complex could drive our belief that aliens from another planet are intelligent beyond our comprehension, but we’ve never discussed the basis of our comprehension. The natural instinct when discussing intellect is to gauge it by comparing it to our own. We could achieve some level of comparative analysis by giving the aliens an I.Q. test, but we might consider that an unfair standard by which to judge someone or something from another planet, depending on the test. Another definition of intelligence might be the ability of a being to harness their surroundings to use them for a designed purpose. An example of this might be when humans use every natural and manmade element at their disposal to create a product. When an alien aircraft lands on earth will the product that transports them be born of greater intelligence or just different intelligence, based on different elements from their home planet?  

Abbot and Costello vs. The Alien Amazons

Are individual, modern comedians funnier than the comedians of, say, the 1930’s? Or are they just different? When we watch Abbot and Costello today, we probably don’t find them as hilarious as our grandparents did. A current teen, who has an altogether different frame of reference, might not even find them humorous. Some comedy is timeless, such as the Who’s on First? routine, but Abbot and Costello had a different frame of reference, a different base, and a different mainframe from which they operated.

When a radically new comedian, such as a George Carlin or Andy Kaufman took the stage, they were so different initially that we consider them brilliant and ingenious. Are they that brilliant and ingenious, or do they just change (sometimes radically) the landscape and language of comedy?

Is a Jimmy Fallon that much funnier than Jack Benny was, or is the comedy of a Jimmy Fallon more of a product of a different era that Jack Benny helped define in some ways? If we were able to flip them around on the timeline, and Jack Benny was everything the modern Jimmy Fallon is, would we regard Fallon as funnier than Benny? This switch would have to incorporate the time and place elements of comedy, the influences that led Fallon to the stage, and all of the prior comedians who changed the face of comedy prior to Fallon. If we incorporated all that into a more modern Jack Benny, would we regard him as funnier than a 1960’s Jimmy Fallon?

When the aliens touchdown on our planet, will they be superior intellects, or will their knowledge be so different that we don’t know how to comprehend their intellect? Will they be carbon-based, as we are, or will they be silicon-based, as some science fiction films theorize? Some scientists deem that impossible, as a Scientific American piece suggests that “silicon oxidizes, and it cannot support life.” What if the aliens introduced us to their line of alien products, our intrigue would initially lead us to believe that they’re intelligent beyond our comprehension, but what if their home planet operated from an entirely different periodic table? We assume that all life, comes from the shared mainframe of the periodic table, but when we find out that’s not the case, it will shock us, and lead us to marvel at whatever they do outside human comprehension. When, and if, we find out our assumption that all life operates from a shared premise was incorrect, we’ll be shocked into believing that they’re better and superior, when it could be as simple as just being different.

***

If you’ve read as many interviews with musicians as I have, you’ve run across the one-more-song phenomenon. I’ve read numerous musicians say they sweat blood and tears to compile enough songs to complete an album, only to have some record executive say, “It’s great and all that, but there’s something missing. We need an oomph song to put it over the top. Do you have one more song in you? We want another song to help unify the album thematically. Put simply, we want a hit.”

The musicians greet this directive with resentment and disdain, as they regard the exec’s request as flippant, as if it’s so easy to just write another song, and a hit song at that. The idea that the record exec would approach the main songwriter in such a flippant manner builds resentment between the two, until the songwriter approaches the other musicians and the producer with the request, “It looks like we need to go back to write another song,” in tones that mimic and mock the record exec. “We need a hit, so let’s go back to the studio and write a hit, because we obviously didn’t do that the first time out.” If you’ve read as many interviews as I have, you know that this musician eventually reconvenes with the other players in the studio, and they resentfully write “another song to appease the masters of their universe” and they haphazardly, and almost accidentally, create a song that ends up defining their career.

The conditions of the creation of this throwaway song are such that the artists involved often end up despising it throughout their career. Almost every musician wants the deeper cuts they spent decades compiling to define them and their brand, yet every audience member wants to hear “the hit” that the band probably spent three days writing, composing, and singing. The song has no meaning to them, yet they’ll spend the next twenty years playing it in concert so the audience will feel like they got their money’s worth. 

I’ve read about this happening so often that I think there’s something to it. It can be as simple as the difference between writing a complicated song about the fall of the Roman Empire and a simple ditty they write about their walk to Burger King. For some reason the Burger King piece hits, and their artistic dissertation on the Fall of Rome falls by the wayside. I don’t think it’s breaking news that most silly, little ditties about love and rocking every day and partying every night sell well and the important pieces usually do not. It might have something to do with the fact that people work so hard in their daily lives that when they get off work, they don’t want to think anymore. It might have something to do with the messenger, as opposed to the message. “Who’s this guy, a rock star? I’m not going to take the views he develops between bong hits too seriously.” The difference might also have something to do with the artist, as they try so hard to write an important piece that they try too hard, and it shows.    

It’s so difficult to predict what will hit, and most of my favorite artists often say they don’t even try anymore. They probably started out trying to appeal to our interests, but they realized that the best course of action is to create the best art they can, and if the audience loves it that’s gravy. When it happens with a song, story, etc., that didn’t require any effort on their part, the artist can feel the frustration in their answer. The complicated, brilliant works required them to jump through all the hoops of creative expression, and it was as difficult for them to be covert as it is to be overt at times, so they seeded and spruced their creation through the gestation cycle, until they decided it was ready to enter the birth canal. Pffft. Nothing. Then they wrote that little ditty about something interesting that happened to them on a walk to the local Burger King, and everyone went crazy. Writing the former was hard, as the perspective changed six different times, and the artist went through as many as twenty-five edits before they finally reach some form of satisfaction. When they wrote the Burger King ditty, they did it in a day, and they didn’t care about it as much. They’re all their babies, of course, but the artist works so hard on some of their material that they find it depressing when no one recognizes them for how important, intelligent, and well-informed they are. What does any of this mean? No one knows, and fewer care. As I wrote, it might have something to do with an artist trying so hard to write important and meaningful art that their effort shows. It might also have something to do with the fact that these simple little ditties, filled with silly and stupid lines, are more pleasing to hear, and read, because all we really want in life is to do is dance.  

Have Bus, Will Travel

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“Hold on a second, wait, wait, wait, did I just hear you say that you’re choosing to travel by bus?” I asked a fella named Rudy who was speaking to another group of people behind me. I interrupted Rudy. It was rude, but I couldn’t hide my amazement. When I asked him if his decision was based on finances, the fact that he didn’t have a fully functional automobile, or a fear of flying, he said no to all of the above. “Then, I don’t get it. Why would you choose to travel by bus?” I asked.

“I want to see the country,” he said, “and I feel like I’ve never truly seen the country before.” When I mentioned that he could see the country by driving in an automobile, he said, “That pesky chore of having to pay attention to the road gets in the way.” When I said he could take turns driving with his girlfriend, he said, “Long story short, I’ll be traveling alone.”

“Have you ever travelled on a bus before?” I asked him.

“I haven’t,” he said, “and that’s part of the allure for me.”

“Before you purchase a ticket go smell a bus,” I said. “Ask the company if you can have a smellment inside a bus to inhale the interior. Walk around the depot and smell some of its passengers. Have you ever smelled pungent B.O. before? Now imagine that smell crawling all over you for nine hours.

“I jabbed a stick into a bloated, roadside opossum one time, and I could smell the noxious gases that came out of it a week later on my skin, in my hair, and in the clothes I decided to pitch,” I continued. “Even that putrid, eye-watering scent couldn’t prepare me for the smells of the guy who sat in J-4. If we could bottle J-4’s unique combination of gangrene, attic, and a slight touch of what can be huffed on an emu’s undercarriage, after an extensive workout, I think we might make a dent in any overpopulation fears we might have.”

Rudy was listening with an “Okay, but,” look on his face that told me he wasn’t convinced. 

“Trains will make stops, but not at every Podunk town junction. An extended bus ride can make what might be a seven-hour trip into nine hours, which might not seem like much of an addition, unless you’re seated next to the smells of a J-4, and you can’t sleep because you stayed up all night, the night before to sleep the bus trip away.

“We all go a little nutty when we’re sleep deprived, but the nonstop bus stops can mess with your mind, as it might take fifteen to twenty delirious minutes to find sleep, until the next bus stop arrives thirty minutes later, at which point the cycle repeats. Repeat this cycle often enough, and you’ll become intimately familiar with the term hypnagogia. 

“I see it on your face,” I said. “You’ve never heard the term. I didn’t know it either, until I traveled by bus. Put simply, the mind messes with you in the hypnagogic state. I’ve read scientific descriptions that suggest a hypnagogic state can occur anytime in the brief moments we transition to and from sleep. We commonly refer to this brief mental state of moving towards sleep or wakefulness without completing the transition as being half-awake or half-asleep. In my experience, the incredibly surreal hypnagogic hallucinations are most vivid when someone or something abruptly forces us out of sleep. 

“I don’t know about you, but I wake whenever I come to a complete stop, be it after a car ride, bus travel, or anything that puts me in motion,” I added, “I saw most of my fellow passengers sleep through a stop, and I envied/loathed them for that ability. How do you guys escape the laws of nature, I wanted to ask. When I would wake with each stop, my sleep-deprived brain told me that J-4 was getting ready to do something awful to me. This cyclical drama continued for me throughout all the stops the bus made, until I reached a level of delirium where I wasn’t sure if the dead and undead passengers around me were products of my nightmares or participants in it. 

“As I slipped in and out of sleep, I ate, just to do something with my hands. Halfway through, I realized I must be pretty good at eating, because the guy in H-2 leaned up over his seat to watch me do it to a bag of Gardetto’s. I don’t know if this guy was graced with a unique ability to stare his way into dreams, or if he discovered those super powers during our little trip together, but a couple hours into this trip, I was convinced he attained a supernatural form.

“I love the smell of those things,” H-2 informed me. I wasn’t sure what world he said that in, so I gave him the rest of my bag, because I suspected his need for Gardetto’s might lead him to display his ability to alter his ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the way an octopus will to formulate an attack strategy it needs to capture the unique prey it finds.

“I thought conceding might also end the cold war I was having with H-2, until I realized that when I could only smell the Gardetto’s, it only served to increase his powers,” I said. “With the advanced state of delirium I was in, I wasn’t able to tell if I was dreaming or not, but at some point in our travel together he altered into some some form of hybrid that reminded me of a Cyclops in Greek mythology. He had the same face, and the same hands were tossing Gardetto’s back to me in J-3. He fed me in such regular intervals that I came to expect them. When it took him too long to feed me, I cheeped like a baby bird, but he did not regurgitate a Gardetto into my mouth, as I feared he might. He’d just turn around and tossed one back to me. 

“Those cheeps must’ve been aloud, because when I awoke from this half-sleep, half wake state of delirium, the passengers around me were uncomfortably quiet, and a four-to-five-year-old was laughing at me over the headrest. The kid then mimicked those cheeping sounds, while laughing at me, until his mother pulled him back.

“My grievances against bus travel date back to my teen years when my dad forced me to take the city bus to school, but it didn’t dawn on me how deep seeded my bias against bus travel was, until a man named Alex informed me that he wouldn’t walk to a Walgreens with me.

“But it’s right there,” I said, pointing to the establishment.

“I had to walk everywhere I went back when I was poor,” Alex said. “Now that I have money and a car, I don’t want to walk anymore.” I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard, and it didn’t dawn on me until later that I have a similar, deep-seeded bias against travel by bus.

“You name the method of traveling a great distance, other than walking or running, and I’ve probably tried it. Check that, I’ve yet to go anywhere by stagecoach or pack mule, but I doubt that they compare to the horrible experience you’ll have on the bus. If I were you, I would seriously reconsider another mode of transportation.”

When One Thing Doesn’t Work, Try Another

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“That won’t work … Yeah, that won’t work either. I tried it,” they say when we offer solutions to their situations. “Why do you insist on helping me? Why can’t you just listen?”

“When one of my friends has a problem,” we say, “I try to help them.”

“Why do you always think you have to help?” they ask. “Is it because there’s some part of you that needs to be right?”

“If I needed to be right, why would I propose so many, different solutions? If I have an unusual need to be right, I would only pose one solution and stubbornly insist that you try that. My motto is, if one thing doesn’t work try another. If I thought I was always right, why would I write as much as I do? I’m searching for answers and solutions, and when they work for me I suggest them to my friends to see if it might work for them.”

“Well, you can go ahead and shove your solutions up your nether regions,” they say, “because none of them work.”

“Fair enough,” we say. “What solutions have you found?”

“I’ve tried everything. I have,” they say. “Nothing works.”

It’s simplistic to say that for every problem there is a solution. It’s simplistic to say if one solution doesn’t work, try another? It’s also simplistic to say that some dilemmas are complex and some are very simple. There are only so many facts, and there are only so many solutions. When we argue over truths as they apply to solutions, we think that if all parties concerned dug deep enough, we might eventually arrive at an agreed upon truth.

One thing I think we can agree on is everyone wants to be happy. “Happy? How do I get happy,” she says. “I ain’t got time for happy,” he says from below a hat with a toothpick in his mouth. Happy is a big problem that requires big-time answers, and it’s probably something we’ll never achieve … unless we tried to do it another way.

“I’ve tried it another way,” they say. “That doesn’t work either.”

“How’s that working out for you?” a character asked another in Chuck Palahniuk’s book Fight Club. Sarcastic rhetoric can be used as tool to help others reflect upon their ways, but that’s a little too woo woo for me. I just want to get them to try another way.

These little problems might have solutions, but we get stuck thinking mere mortals cannot solve them, because we’re susceptible to the dumb guy/smart guy dynamic. If we cannot resolve a matter immediately, or easily, we feel dumb, because we thought we’d be able solve such things by now, and we feel like dumb guys looking out on the smart guy world that is able to solve their problems so easily. The most frustrating element of this dynamic is that we know some smart guys, and they’re not really that smart. They just have this ability to adapt to variables without the fear that others might consider them dumb for not being able to solve their own problems.

What is that? How do they do that? I don’t know if we’re born with preconceived notions about who we are, or if we age into them under the umbrella of idyllic images. We don’t know anything about all that, but we thought we’d be much further along than we are now. We’re still not able to figure things out as well as the smart guys who really aren’t that smart. So, what’s the difference? The difference is they approach problem-solving from an ego-less perspective. They’ve been fixing their problems for so long that they know that anytime they try to fix matters there will always be variables that make them feel dumb. They also know that whenever they try to fix something, they’re going to do it wrong a number of times, before they finally fix it. When they fail, they have the same feelings of frustration, feelings of failure, and embarrassment as everyone else. Everyone wants their first solution to work, and everyone feels like an idiot when it doesn’t. The difference between them and us is the “what now” principle. 

We just screwed up big time. What now? The first thing we should do is curse the manufacturers who created everything from the tools we use as useless to the various swear words we have for product itself. “They shouldn’t have made this so … hard!” When we’re done with that, we might direct our anger at ourselves, our loved ones, and any neighbors who happen to be watching us without offering any help. The next step in my personal scientific method of fixing things is to walk away. As much as this problem drives us crazy and embarrasses us, there is no time table on most problems, and the best resolution might be to walk away. Go play on your PS5, go eat some chips while watching one of the brainless A&E Wars shows, and play with the dog for as long as it takes you to approach that “what now?” question with some other ideas on how to approach the problem. 

It cannot be that easy, we think as we watch others solve their problems so easily, and they do so with an ego-less approach. That’s disgusting. And we think it is both, especially when their solutions lead to better health, wealth, happiness, and peace of mind. If they don’t like themselves the way they are, and we suspect they do with jealous rage, they appear to know themselves far better than we do, and the most sickening part of it is they want us to be as happy as they are. They want to share their mentality with us and help us shed our complexities. They don’t demand we use their solution, and they’re not hurt when we don’t. Their goal is to join our quest for a solution to that which plagues us, and their solution often involves doing it differently than the way we’ve been always been doing it.

The problem for the problematic is that they don’t appear as concerned with finding a solution that might work for them, even internally. They might also think that we’re too dumb to solve their problems for them, and we both know that is a possibility, but when the only thing we’re doing is asking them to consider other possibilities, we ask who is stubbornly clinging to their ideas? In our searches for an antonym to a solutions-oriented person, the best AI could come up with is a problems-oriented person, a defeatist, an Eeyore, a person committed to the impossibility, as it applies to learned helplessness, and my personal favorite the “yeah-but!” The goal of the yeah-but is not necessarily to find a solution but to draw attention to the complexity of the problem because the problem serves a purpose of garnering attention, sympathy, and some acknowledgment of their problem for what it is.   

At some point in our cultural history, the solutions-oriented problem solver became the bad guy. “I just want you to listen,” they say when our mind clicks on. They might also preface their narrative with, “And I don’t want you to think about how to solve my problem, I just want you to listen.” My thought is if I propose a very specific solution, doesn’t that mean I listened? “Doesn’t matter, I don’t care what you think!” Okay, well then why are you telling me your problems. So, we listen. As good friends, we allow them to proceed without interruption, or a note about what we think might be a solution to their vexing problem. Gee golly, that just stinks that that happened to you Mary. “Thank you.” We’re done? “We’re done.” Ok, I guess that was a lot less taxing. I don’t know how we got to a place where someone trying to help another out became a bad thing. You’d think we’d try something else, but we don’t, so here we are. 

I saw that smile once in the otherwise uneventful silence of a hospital’s emergency room (ER). While counting what felt like hours for an ER attendant to tend to me, I overheard another ER attendant inform a teenager that she had a condition. I can’t remember the specifics of her condition, but I remember that it was not dramatic, life-altering, life-threatening, or severely debilitating. “This will require some effort on your part to maintain a modicum of good health,” The ER attendant informed her.

The teenage patient smiled a half-smile that she couldn’t hide, when she received the diagnosis. She turned that smile off quickly as the ER attendant listed off what she would have to attend to to maintain good health. She listened with her serious face on. She didn’t intend to smile, but it happened. She turned it off, because she knew how serious the moment was, but she couldn’t keep it off for long. She turned away from them when the smile rose again. She knew she wouldn’t be able to stop smiling, and she knew it wasn’t appropriate for the situation. 

Before I speculate on what I thought sparked that twinkle in her eye, let me write that it’s entirely possible that the ER attendant’s diagnosis soothed her because it was something, and those of us who have had our body fall apart in small, confusing ways can empathize because we know that something is far better than the fear of knowing nothing. 

Some of us can spend months living in the confusing scary world of knowing nothing before we break down and schedule a visit to our doctor’s office, or worse, the emergency room. We eventually reach a point where we know we need help figuring out what’s wrong with us. We listed our symptoms on various medical websites, trying to come to up with a diagnosis of our own, and we found a whole lot of nothing. Armed with a diagnosis, we, like this young woman, can find some solace, because it puts an end to the not knowing, and a proper diagnosis can lead to specified medicinal care and proactive measures we can employ to maintain some modicum of health that could lead to better health, more energy, and a longer life. A diagnosis and a prescription, or as in this case a prescriptive course of action, are solutions to our problem that can lead to a comforted smile.

The smile I saw on her face was something different however. I saw a little spark in her smile that suggested she couldn’t help but find this a little exciting. We can’t explain such a smile, but we know that this diagnosis will add some dramatic complications to our life. Most of us live simple, boring lives, because we inherited quality genes that provided us with a finely tuned and well honed machine that rarely breaks down. We appreciate the brilliance of the design of our body, on some level, but after living with good health for as many decades as we have, it can be … a little boring at times. When our body breaks down, in small, relatively harmless and painless ways, it can be interesting and even a little exciting for reasons that we know are kind of weird and tough to understand or explain. 

I do not know what was going on in her head, of course, but I imagine that she knew that this condition would not only require attention from her, but her family, her friends, her employer, her school, and everyone else who cared about her. She probably sat in that ER room thinking that she would become the center of attention among those who cared about her. Until they could devise a plan to help her manage her day-to-day activities, she would also be a subject of sympathy from those concerned about her health. She knew she could talk to them about it, and that smile suggested she looked forward to those conversations and all of that love and attention that followed. She knew she would be able to express her concerns, and she knew they would finally listen to her, because this was a big deal. They, along with her doctor, would help her devise a plan that would include a disciplined diet that she would have to follow, and she probably figured she could violate it when she was “feeling a little naughty”, and because she had a relatively mild case, the consequences of these violations would be minimal, but her friends and family would still be concerned when she did that.

She probably also thought about her obnoxious brother, boyfriend, and everyone else who thought they knew what was wrong with her. They probably offered her a guess, and she argued with them and told them that it was far more serious than that, but they wouldn’t listen. They also offered her simplistic home remedies that promised some quick-fix solutions to what ailed her. Her smile suggested that she couldn’t wait to tell them they were all wrong, all along, and her condition was far more complex than any of them dreamed. Armed with ER attendant’s diagnosis, she realized she could now tell them all to go to hell. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. This is a big deal. You have no idea what I’m going through here. I have a condition that requires constant care and treatment.” That smile told me that she couldn’t wait to drop these lines on her obnoxiously simplistic friends and family. And if they continued to argue with her, she could drop some delicious line, such as, “Oh, so, you’re telling me that you know more about this than a doctor?”

***

What is the antonym of solutions-oriented thinking? Is there one? Thesauruses list a number of antonyms for solution, but they have no listings for an antonym of solutions-oriented. These formal sites do not list a term like problems-oriented or problem-centric. Those terms do not exist in their view, because no one is problems-oriented, at least in the sense that they use problems to achieve some happiness. Less formal sites suggest that a problems-oriented person would rather stew over their problems rather “than activate critical-thinking skills to find solutions.” Having problems makes them feel more adult, responsible, and important, and any attempt we make to try to help them arrive at a solution only minimizes their problem in their eyes.

Solutions-oriented thinkers are no smarter, healthier, or in any way better than those who appear to relish talking about their problems. Solutions-oriented thinkers are often quick to recognize patterns and devise an immediate solution, but they, too, have to face the flaws in their pattern-recognition thinking. When those humbling experiences occur, they choose a more methodical approach that includes consulting others, manuals, or another more methodical approach, and they use that information to devise another solution.

“But I thought you just said your initial solution was the answer,” their agitators say. “I thought you knew-it-all.”

“I was wrong.”

Solutions-oriented thinkers are wrong as often as everyone else is, and as we listed above they’re not smarter than us. They might try to find a solution, and they might fail. This leads their agitators to another smile, the inevitable, “See” smile, followed by, “See, you’re not so smart.” 

When I was teaching a bunch of young-uns how to shoot a basketball, I displayed the proper technique. I missed the shot when I was showing it to them them. “Why would I take advice from you?” they asked. “You missed the shot.”

“Just because I missed that particular shot doesn’t mean it isn’t the correct way to shoot the ball. If you use proper technique, your probability of making a shot increases.”

The problems-centric person does not want to listen, and for a wide variety of reasons they prefer to keep shooting the ball the way they’ve always shot it. When their shot never improves, they say, “I just suck at basketball, and the sooner I come to grips with that fact, the happier I’ll be.” The player who wants to get better might not want to take advice from a person “Who missed the shot,” but their best bet will be to try a method other than the one they have, because they will rarely make the shot the way they’re currently shooting it.     

The solutions-oriented thinker might be surprised, confused, and frustrated when their proposed solutions don’t work, and problems-oriented people might enjoy that initial failure, but the solutions-oriented person does something that shocks the problems-oriented person, they try something else. True problem solvers find arriving at a solution an ego-less approach. The recipients of their ideas often believe it is anything but.  

Some solutions-oriented thinkers in solutions-oriented positions, in a Fortune 500 company, decided to put their money where their mouth is by doing away with the traditional interview process. Through trial and error, they’ve decided to do away with the closed boardroom, “hot-seat”,  interview that challenges the potential candidate to solve a hypothetical problem. “This is the problem. Quick, what is your solution?” These Fortune 5oo companies found that this line of questioning doesn’t separate the quality, ideal candidate from the less than. These innovative companies decided to send their questions to their potential candidates’ homes, via email, before the interview, to allow them to process the question, trial and error it, and arrive at what they consider the best possible answer. The Fortune 500 companies now recognize that quick thinking candidates look and sound great in the traditional interview, but that that does nothing for their long-term. The “hot-seat” scenario questions will find the person who “thinks quick on their feet”, and it shows the candidate’s problem-solving hard-wiring. By sending the questions home, however, the companies are now suggesting that their ideal candidate does not have to think quick, and that methodical thinkers often come up with better, more creative, and sometimes more innovative solutions than those who come up with quick, bullet point solutions. The methodical thinkers are trial-and-error processors who diagnose a problem, come up with a solution, recognize the errors of their subjectivity, pose other solutions, recognize the errors of their impulsive, patterned thinking, and arrive at a final solution that the “hot-seat” thinker who “thinks quick on their feet” probably wouldn’t even consider. The take-home method might also allow the potential candidate to forecast variables and diagnose and treat them accordingly. 

The quick-on-their-feet candidate always looks and sounds better behind closed doors. They display confidence, experience, intelligence, charisma, and a number of other intangible qualities we admire in those we meet, but how many quick-thinking, well-spoken, and confident candidates turn out to be the best employees over the long haul? How many of these ideal candidates only display their ideal qualities in the interview? How many of them outperform their peers in the training room, answering every question the trainer asks. We call them hotshots, and hotshots know how to make excellent first impressions. They know how to dress for success, they memorize the answers headhunters want to hear, and they do it all with an award-winning grin. Yet, depending on the industry we’re in, we often find that these types often shine bright and burn out quickly.

Most of the best employees we work with are quiet, unassuming types who offer unique, creative, and innovative approaches to problem solving. They may not be the best employees in the training room, as they may not be the type to raise their hand to answer the trainer’s questions, and they may not be the best employee after the first two weeks. It might take them a little time to figure out the finer points of the machinations of their company, and it might take them a little more time to figure out their role in it. They aren’t the type to dazzle their employer in the early stages in the manner the ideal “hot-seat” quick thinker can, and this frustrates them because everyone wants to make a great first impression. This has haunted them since high school when the “hot-seat” quick thinkers dazzled their teachers. The methodical, slow processors often tried to keep up with them in the beginning, because that’s just what they did in high school. We often had the wrong answer in class, and we were ridiculed for it by our peers, and at times our teachers. We learned to avoid sticking our neck out. Candidates who could absorb such ridicule, and endure the lack of faith they received from teachers and bosses for initially being wrong developed the ability to simply try something else. These candidates, Fortune 500 companies are now saying, are such a rare commodity that they’re willing to upend the traditional interview process to find them. They know such thinkers do not perform well in the standardized, traditional interview format, so they tried another one to find that special candidate who tried something else when their initial, impulsive thoughts didn’t work. The Fortune 500 company doesn’t want people who are always wrong of course, but even the best candidates are going to be wrong once in a while, and some of the times those errors will be humiliating. When that happens, they’re forced to endure the “what now” questions, but due to their mode of thinking, they’re more accustomed to the what-now questions than the “hot-seat” quick thinking dazzlers. What do we do when all else fails? Decades of trial and error evidence have shown Fortune 500 companies that their ideal candidate is an ego-less thinker who already knows what it feels like to be wrong, and they know what to do about it. By changing the traditional “hot-seat” interview format, these companies were trying something else to try to find those who try something else.