Published on MediaPost, 4 November 2022.
Professor, author and entrepreneur Scott Galloway had Jeff Bezos pegged.
Sure, Bezos claimed that every one of the 238 cities that vied to house Amazon’s “HQ2” in 2018 had a shot, but Galloway, in a Twitter post, somehow knew: it was going to be either NYC or DC.
Does Galloway have a crystal ball? Superpowers? Is he Sauron?
Nope, nope, and not that we know of. Per his own account, all he did was ask himself what he himself would have done: “When you’re 55 and the wealthiest man in the world, you are the master of no. Add to that that you’re about to be newly single — would you decide to spend 13 hours, much less 13 weeks a year, in Indianapolis? How did I know it was going to be NYC or DC? I have personal insight into midlife crises.”
It's not that Galloway understands people generally; it’s that he understands people who are like him.
I’m not throwing shade here. Plenty of people don’t know themselves well enough to extrapolate out into anyone else’s behaviour. But, like Buffalo Bill coveting that which he saw every day, how do we begin to understand people? We begin by understanding those who are most like us.
In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his blog, “I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 p.m. and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”
He then created FaceMash, which allowed people to vote on which woman was “hotter.”
Like Galloway with Bezos, Zuckerberg’s insight wasn’t particularly powerful; he was just acting on the thing he himself wanted to do. That didn’t mean he understood people; it meant he understood people like him.
It is very possible to understand people like us while being utterly perplexed by people who are not like us. The farther someone gets from our experience, the more challenging it becomes to anticipate how they’re likely to behave. For college-aged Zuckerberg, it was an easy insight that college kids want to pit women against each other. It was much harder for him to fathom, years later, that his product would be used as a “tool for ethnic cleansing” in Myanmar.
Please note: I am NOT letting Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg off the hook here. I’m merely observing that it’s not surprising for him to be more astute about some people than others.
It can be a huge advantage to be astute about people, even if it’s only people like you. And the closer you are to the dominant paradigm — or what the dominant paradigm tells us we should aspire to — the bigger that advantage might be.
Someone might, for example, deeply understand tech bros. He might understand people who love fast cars and want to travel to space. He might deeply understand people who have an obsession with billionaires.
Those insights might have made this person extraordinarily successful, in industries where he didn’t need to understand people — he just needed to understand people like him.
But he might find himself more than a little surprised when he has to deal with people who aren’t like him. More than a little surprised to learn that, as Nilay Patel wrote in The Verge, “Most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies… What most people want from social media is to have nice experiences and to feel validated all the time. They want to live at Disney World.”
It's likely Patel’s advice will go unheeded. After all, its intended recipient wants nothing more than to be unmoderated. We’re about to find out whether he can expand his repertoire.
Kaila Colbin, Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator
Founder and CEO, Boma
