The original figureheads were carved into the bow of a ship. They exist to express the spirit of the boat and to demonstrate its power and resilience.
Here’s an AI recreation of the most famous one:
The sailors were wise enough to understand that the purpose of a figurehead isn’t to steer the boat, trim the sails or do much of anything at all.
Now that most of us don’t sail in schooners, it’s possible we’ve lost the thread. When we organize around leaders, it’s easy to imagine that our goal is to have a thoughtful and resilient long-term thinker, who just happens to be the well-carved powerful avatar of our dreams.
It might be that we need one without getting the other.
Community requires individuals to have the option of speaking up. If we’re in this together, we ought to be able to chime in.
But while every member of the community can speak out, the ones that are heard also have something useful to say. Being informed is a requirement to be heard.
Sometimes, our insight can come from firsthand experience, but it’s most likely that we’ve learned about the issue and the alternatives we face.
Education is at the heart of the conversation. Organized schooling, substantial peer engagement and intelligent media consumption give us a chance to earn our opinion.
If we’re to publish, teach, invent, imagine or promote, we need the confidence to believe that we have something to offer. That we are, in some way, right.
But the enterprise of rational thought is based on theories, tests and improvements. We can never be certain, all we have is the best available explanation.
So the hard work is to speak up at the very same time you’re open (in fact, eager) to change your mind based on new data.
How much value per dollar does a freelancer produce for you? What’s the psychic reward for the time you put into your favorite hobby? That machine that takes time and money to set up and run… what does it create when it’s operating?
Not everything can or should be evaluated on a return on effort basis, but when we’re comparing two alternatives, it’s a fine place to start.
Instead, we often find ourselves focusing on how easy it is to avoid the issue and choose to focus our effort on more of what we did yesterday, or how painful it might be to walk away from a sunk cost or asset. We think about the effort around the effort, instead of the choices we can make each day about what might be worth our focus.
Disney theme parks created more than 20 billion dollars in revenue last year.
Coney Island, not so much.
Coney Island is dozens of small honky tonk vendors and attractions, an ecosystem, not a corporation.
Independent local stores got hammered by the more organized stores in the mall and then by the centrally controlled Wal-mart and other box stores. And then the big box stores got hammered in turn by Amazon, a rigidly controlled system that puts the little guys at its mercy.
RSS and blogs were a federation of independent voices. It didn’t take much for them to be co-opted by a few tech giants.
We’d like to believe that we prefer to walk down the picturesque street, visiting one merchant after another, buying directly from the creator or her gallery. We’d like to think that the centralized antiseptic option isn’t for us…
And yet, when the supermarche opens in rural France, it does very well.
It turns out that we respond well to large entities that pretend that they’re simply a conglomeration of independent voices and visions, but when masses of people are given a choice, they’re drawn to the big guy, not the real thing.
The long tail is real, but we’ve been trained to prefer it if the tail is contained within a centrally-controlled system run by a corporation.
