Well, it's Tuesday and I'm supposed to be working but like so many other Tuesdays, I'm stuck in the middle of a very tedious and boring task--as is the fate of many-a Systems Programmer over the ages (Internet time here, people). I don't get out to Gaping Void nearly enough but reading through some stuff there, I ran across this nugget from his September 12th post titled "Good ideas have lonely childhoods":
5. "I want to be part of something! Oh, wait, no I don't!" I've seen this before so many times, both first-hand and with other people. Your idea seems to be working, seems to be getting all sorts of traction, and all of a sudden you got all these swarms of people trying to join the team, wanting to get a piece of the action. And then as as soon as they get a foothold inside the inner circle, you soon realize they don't really understand your idea in the first place, they just want to be on the winning team. And the weirdest bit is, they don't seem to mind sabotaging the original idea that got them interested in the first place, in order to maintain their newfound social status. It's probably the most bizarre bit of human behavior I've ever witnessed first-hand in business, and it's AMAZINGLY common. [AFTERTHOUGHT: "People are not primarily governed by their own self-interest. People are primarily governed by their own self-delusion."]
Rarely do I encounter something that expresses my own intuition as well as that.
