Against Your Own Self-Interest

The Art of Convincing Me I’m Not Getting Played

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Source: YouTube

I have a confession to make. I like Nickelback. I had not one, but several of their CDs in high school. I remember the day I learned this was a controversial opinion. Some interesting internet lore; in 2010 there was a website called "Dear Blank, Please Blank." People would submit funny entries and other people would waste ungodly amounts of time scrolling through them.

Source: Onward State

The site is shut down now. I wish I knew who built it. But one day in my mindless clicking, I came across one that said:

Dear Nickelback,

That’s enough.

Sincerely, The World.

That's when I knew that my CD collection apparently made me a contrarian. But to this day, I still like a lot of their songs. But more importantly, to justify this quick walk down memory lane, as I thought about an image that could represent my post today I was reminded of a Nickelback music video from 2005.

I've always thought music videos were exceptional mediums to tell interesting stories, but the vast majority of them are just ways to show the band in various aesthetic settings. But every once in a while (or if you're Lady Gaga, almost every freakin' time), you get a music video with a story.

Savin' Me, from Nickelback, is one such story. Quick summary. A guy is walking on the street and someone saves him from getting hit by a car. As soon as he gets saved he starts to see numbers floating above everyone's heads counting down, though no one else can see them. Over time, he realizes these are the seconds of people's lives counting down. By the end of the video, he sees a woman's number starting to plummet, and he saves her from getting crushed by a falling crane.

I thought about that story, and those numbers, because its the kind of transparency that you don't typically get in life. You don't know what someones numbers are. You don't know what someones motivations are. You don't know someones real character. There's so much about life that gets lost in the translation of attempted communication.

I've written again, and again, and again about the anxiety that people feel over the question mark that is other people's profit motive. Playing Different (Stupider) Games had the best summary of this idea:

"[People's] skepticism of the healthcare complex, the military complex, the prison industrial complex, all of these things are based on the skepticisms derived from other people's profit motives. In other words? People feel like they've been playing stupider games. And they're trying to wake up to understand what different games other people are playing. And how those games impact their own games; their own lives."

The status quo is for everyone to adhere to what economics refers to as rational self-interest. We're all gonna "get ours." Now, there's a myriad of terms for times when people act against their own self-interest, but often they're reasons people are acting dumb. Loss aversion, hyperbolic discounting, principal-agent problems, irrational exuberance, satisficing, bounded rationality.

All these terms typically exist to explain, "here's why you're being stupid; you should be optimizing for your own rational self-interest instead."

But then there are those rare instances where people demonstrate the ability to suspend their own self-interest as the primary variable for optimization and act in favor of higher reasoning. Whether thats sacrificing your own self-interest for that of your spouse, your children, your extended family, your community, your company, your country, or even just strangers.

So a key question is — why would anyone do that? Should you trust it? And should we all be doing a lot more of it?

Heart On Your Sleeve

There were a few examples of this that came to mind. The first was a personal experience. I remember years ago, my brother and I were trying to buy a few pieces of workout equipment. We went to a sporting goods store looking for something, and the guy that helped us said, "you can get it here, but its going to be way more expensive and not the best fit. But they have exactly what you're looking for at Walmart."

I walked out of the store and commented to my brother, "that seemed dumb! That guy sent us away to shop at a different store, rather than spend money at his." My brother's response was immediate, and instructive. "I like that place way more now, knowing that they're not just trying to screw me over selling me the wrong thing." In 2004, my brother was already tuned into concepts like Jeff Bezos' "customer obsession."

Jon Shieber reminded me just yesterday that this same thing happens in Miracle on 34th Street with the guy who built Jurassic Park and Matilda. When Kris Kringle starts working at the department store, Cole's, the manager hears from a woman that their Santa Claus is sending people to other stores where they can get things cheaper.

Source: YouTube

At first, the manager is about to go throw down on pro-competition Saint Nick, but the woman surprises him with this:

"You tell your Santa Claus that he made a Cole's shopper out of me. I'm coming here for everything but toilet paper and bananas. Any store that puts the parent ahead of the almighty buck at Christmas deserves my business."

Funny enough, the woman in the movie is Allison Janney, who also plays C.J. Cregg in The West Wing, which is where the other example came to mind from.

There's an episode where Jed Bartlett, a former Congressman and Governor, is running for president.

In his home state of New Hampshire, he's giving a talk and a dairy farmer asks a question:

"When you were a member of Congress, you voted against the New England Dairy Farming Compact. That vote hurt me, sir. And I'd like to ask you for an explanation."

Bartlett's answer is one of idealistic honesty that is effectively science fiction in modern politics, but its instructive nonetheless.

"Yeah. I screwed you on that one... Today, for the first time in history, the largest group of Americans living in poverty are children. 1 in 5 children live in the most abject, dangerous, hopeless, backbreaking, gut-wrenching poverty any of us could imagine. 1 in 5, and they're children.

If fidelity to freedom and democracy is the code of our civic religion, then surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says, 'we shall give our children better than we ourselves receive.'

Let me put it this way. I voted against the bill because I didn't want to make it harder for people to buy milk. I stopped some money from flowing into your pocket. If that angers you, if you resent me, I completely respect that. But if you expect anything different from the President of the United States you should vote for someone else."

Bartlett voted against a bill, knowing that it would hurt his constituents and lose him votes, because there was a higher cause than his own self-interest.

Kris Kringle pointed shoppers to cheaper options for toys for their kids against the profit motive of his employer, because there was a higher cause than his own self-interest.

Sometimes acting against your own self-interest is economically irrational. But being capable of finding the rationality in that is the only way to be human.

Rational Irrationality

In business, everything is a negotiation. Founders, VCs. Customers, suppliers. Partners, acquirers. Everything is an economic equation to divide possibilities between winners and losers. And pure capitalism doesn't seem to leave a lot of room for acting towards anything other than self-interest.

But the reality is any short-term extraction is structurally setup to negate the possibility of long-term availability.

If, in the short-term, you extract the maximum profit from a customer? That customer won't be available to you in the long-term.

If, in the short-term, you squeeze every percentage of ownership out of a founder in a funding round? That founder won't be available to you on their next company.

If, in the short-term, you squeeze every bit of value out of a friend? That friend won't be available to you for long.

We live in an age of grifters, hucksters, scammers, and narrative weavers. Everyone is looking for the opportunity to take advantage of others at the expense of any long-term value. And, what's worse, they've managed to craft such a strong sense of self that they can't acknowledge the way in which they've taken advantage of people.

I have a friend who dedicated years to working for a boss to help build something. These are bosses who are already independently wealthy, respected community leaders, popular in the media. And my friend spent 10 years helping them build their business up, always with the promise of that person sharing the economic value with them more meaningfully down the road. Then, come to find out, after 10 years of work, that boss is more than happy to pull the rug out and screw my friend out of what they've earned.

Your rational self-interest-laden capitalistic mindset might immediately jump to the conclusion, "he should have gotten it in writing up front." Sure. Maybe. And there's not much my friend can do other than dust himself off, pull himself up by the bootstraps he's built over 10 years of learning, and start again.

But that doesn't change my perspective of that boss. My unwillingness to work with him in the future. My unwillingness to vouch for him when I'm asked. My unwillingness to sugar coat the situation when future hires reach out to me for a reference.

Therefore, What?

I think every person has a responsibility to treat their life NOT like a status quo novel where they're guaranteed not only to be the hero, but to survive, succeed, and thrive.

I think every person has a responsibility to treat their life like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel that it really is. Choices and consequences. Consider the possibility that you are the bad guy. Consider the possibility that you're wrong. And then explore accordingly.

On my personal website, I have a collection of essays that I've titled "The Hall-of-Fame of Bad Behavior." The hucksters and grifters I've talked about there make up a who's-who of people who I can almost guarantee have never thought of themselves as the villain. Who are cocooned in their own self-importance, without the ability to generate self-criticism or reflection.

And my takeaway is to try and be better than that. To try and be willing to start with "how could I be wrong about what I think or do?" As Charlie Munger said:

“I have what I call an ‘iron prescription’ that helps me keep sane when I drift toward preferring one intense ideology over another. I feel that I'm not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I've reached that state.”

And then, I strive to work with people who have the same characteristics. And to refuse to hold up people who choose to optimize purely for their own self-interest.

I can't change everyone. I can't change everything. But I can change me.

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