Gordon is Right

Gordon McLean has written an excellent post on his blog, entitled Why blogging is good, pointing to some of the conversation around the recent blog post from Clay Shirky claiming arrogance and lying can be useful traits. There are links to the discussion over on Gordon’s post, so you should go and read them first because (1) they’re good, and (2) I’m going to assume that you have for the rest of this post :-)

I was just going to comment on Gordon’s post, but decided I should celebrate the fact that I’ve got a blog (even if I don’t post to it as often as I’d like) and write my comment here.

Gordon says: “As for the issue being discussed in these posts I have to agree with Tom, particularly when he talks about how arrogance and confidence have a place in your “personality toolbox”, but the person who only has those tools is all the poorer for it. Unfortunately society, and certainly the workplace, still seem to favour people with confidence when what we should be doing is cutting through the noise to see what substance lies underneath.”

I agree, but I also think that we should all strive to reach into our “personality toolboxes” for our arrogance and confidence in order to call “Bullshit” to dampen the “noise” when we can.