don't believe your own bullshit
Just don’t.
I used to work somewhere that had this unfortunate predisposition of believing its own bullshit.
Everyone bullshits a bit. And marketing is pretty much an entire discipline dedicated to figuring out where the truth/bullshit boundary lies and riding as close to the line as possible.
A bit of light sugar-coated bullshitting is ok, it’s expected, it’s normal. But, you have to use it with caution, and you have to know that it’s bullshit.
Where I worked really did not. It was surreal watching marketing say stuff that was pretty much as close to the bullshit boundary as you can safely get. Only for then senior leaders to think that was the baseline for the organisation. Watching them in turn speaking to others adding their own exaggeration to the marketing “facts” that had already been stretched to the limits of truth. Then hearing others take quite obviously overblown nonsense, and even in-turn exaggerating that.
It was bad for a few reasons. Hearing senior managers say things that are obviously false makes you wince your face off. But more than that, for the people who actually care about the greatness of the organization, it is such an enormous inhibitor of progress.
When your organization believes it’s significantly better than it actually is, the effort to grow and evolve all but evaporates. At that point stagnation is almost inevitable.
This is a true story about the place I used to work. But I think it’s also true of the UK too.
The UK is completely consumed with its own bullshit. From the lies told about the goodness and civilisation of its Empire, to the lies told to domestic serfs and slaves about the divine right of kings, to the modern day lies we tell ourselves about ol’ Blighty, and our world-leading position in the world.
If you ever hear a politician saying the phrase ‘world-leading’ (they all do it) know that I’m fucking cringing in the back.
Fuck being ‘world-leading’ anyway – we just need to focus on being better. You only achieve that by acknowledging your faults and weaknesses and having an honest desire to make them better. And then getting of you arse and actually making things better. And this last point is important, because eternal bloviation achieves pretty much nothing at all.
If you want the UK to be better, then the first thing you need to do is work harder yourself.
Which is what I’m going to do, right now…