Barking in Public

"We're Just People, Man"

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Have you ever seen The Big Sick? It's an exceptional 2017 romantic comedy about a guy who finds himself in a stressful situation with demanding parents, an on-again-off-again girlfriend, and a health crisis. Classic setup, but charmingly unique execution. It helps that Kumail Nanjiani is a real gem.

In the movie there is a scene I think about all the time. Kumail is having a rough day and goes through a drive-thru with a specific request: a burger with four slices of cheese.

"So four burgers..."

"No!" Kumail interrupts. "I want one burger with FOUR slices of cheese."

The guy on the intercom hesitates.

"We can't do that."

Finally, it's too much for Kumail.

"Who is this 'we' man?! It's just you and me! We're just people!"

I think about that scene all the time because I can't count the number of times I find myself in a conversation where I want to scream the same thing:

"We're just people! Be human!"

Case in point? Talking to BYU business students.

Don't get me wrong, some of them are great. But BYU has a bad habit of producing wannabe Mitt Romneys.

When I give advice to those kinds of younger people, I find myself wanting to break down the walls and open up honestly. Provide the inside baseball. Instead, I get the worst version of asking ChatGPT "5 questions to ask someone while learning nothing." I can feel myself wanting to scream, “we’re just people! Be human! Throw away the canned questions and just open up your heart!”

So I've started taking to an approach I refer to as "barking in public."

If a Dog Barks In The Woods...

After a particularly transactional meeting in a coffee shop a while back, I found myself sitting there. Deflated. The fake smile fading from my lips. And I looked around at all the other people around me. Using the same words, going through the same motions.

And I found myself thinking, "What if I just started barking right now?"

Whatever people’s response, at least it would be human. It would be organic.

One of the negative aspects of life becoming so dripped in knowledge work and white-collar KPIs is that it makes everything feel pretend. The relationships, conversations, outputs, inputs, day-to-day work. It can, often, feel meaningless.

It's not because it IS meaningless. Exceptional companies, capabilities, and outcomes have been achieved because of knowledge work.

But it can FEEL meaningless. I don't think it has to feel that way, but it does. And it feels that way because we let it. Because we fall into a trap of unencumbered normativity. Everything has to be normal, or else.

I've written over and over and over and over and over again about an exceptional talk by Visakan Veerasamy, where he talks about deviance:

"Most human creativity is spent suppressing human creativity. Deviance is punished by social regulation. That's why we don't have 1000x the greatness that we could have every year."

The center of our social structures have been focused on weeding out deviance. The reason people would be so shocked by me barking in public is because everything they know and understand makes it seem like seeing someone bark in public would be unthinkable. Because it kicks against the normal.

What that feeling creates in everyone is not just run-of-the-mill imposter syndrome, but rather a universal variant that has become like a hive-mind of normativity.

Universal Imposter Syndrome

The weight of normativity is crushing. The feeling that we have to be normal, talk normal, act normal, work normal — it's everything.

Even more than that, there is a performative element to the normativity. We don't just have to be normal, we have to be better at the normal than everyone else. Every conversation is dripping with comparative measurements against the norm.

Have you ever had a conversation where you're grinning internally at the abnormality of the person's thing?

You heard their company had layoffs and when you talk to them, they talk about trying to find a better cultural fit. "Sure," you grin to your internal self. "Translation? They couldn't cut it."

Have you ever seen someone's update on Linkedin and thought, "they quit their tech job to buy a flooring company? I guess not everyone can measure up."

You tell someone about a great role opening up and they say they're not interested because they're focused on a passion in their current role instead, even if it means less money, crappier brand.

Life has presented us with a scorecard of what is good, what is acceptable, what is worthwhile. And it's presented us with a watchlist for what is bad, what is unworthy, what is dangerous. And cultural normativity has made it really easy for those marks to feel near universal.

That universal scorecard forces everyone to be measuring their life, output, outcomes against a specific standard. And the reality is that the vast majority of people will be found wanting in that evaluation. As a result, it leaves the majority of people feeling inadequate. An imposter in their own cultural system. Desperately hiding any deviance.

Start Barking

The reality? The only thing worth doing is breaking the norm.

The cultural norm is going bowling with the bumpers up. It's playing Mario Kart with the Smart Steering on.

I've written before about how most of life is structured like a pyramid:

"Most organizational hierarchies are structured like a pyramid. Lots of people at the bottom, a few people at the top. And a lot of people like that structure, because the bottom is capped. But that, by design, means the top is capped too. To fully uncap the top, or in other words open up the maximum potential, you also have to open up the bottom. You have to open up the possibility that you might fail."

Uncapping the bottom, taking off the bumpers, turning off the Smart Steering. In fact, I think even framing it as "daring to fail" is a smidge overdramatic. It's not just about being willing to fail. It's being willing to be deviant.

Deviate from the norm:

• Spend all day reading a book, ignoring any work you need to get done.

• Say no to everything, even when it's your job to say yes.

• Get obsessed with something that has nothing to do with your work.

• Tell the person you don't know what you're talking about, even when it's your job to convince them that you do.

• Call the person, even if you already feel like just emailing them is an imposition.

• State the opinion, even when you know the people around you won't like it.

• Cry in a meeting, even when you know you shouldn't.

• Ask “why” even if they’ve already explained it twice.

• Ask someone to repeat their name, even if they’ve already told you twice.

• Take a professional acquaintance to help you lift some scrap metal, rather than just sitting down for a coffee chat.

• When someone asks you why they should want your job, tell them they probably don’t.

• Let your kid wear pajamas every day of the week, regardless of a school dress code.

I think all the time about the famous scene from The Newsroom where the main character is asked, "Why is America the greatest country in the world?"

He gives some simple answers. Some normative answers.

"The New York Jets." Not enough.

"Our constitution is a masterpiece." Nope.

The host keeps pushing him to answer: "I want a human moment from you."

And then, to everyone's surprise, they get a human moment. He provides a deviant response. “America is NOT the greatest country in the world.”

Now, his answer to that question is spicy. Though it's hard to put in context. On the one hand, it feels like its a deviant view, in part because of the reaction of the people around him. On the other hand, it may have been approaching a normative view at the time it came out in 2012.

Source: Gallup

The % of American's who felt satisfied with things in the US peaked in 1999 at 70%. In 2012, it had fallen to around 23%. Not totally surprising after a decade of the Dotcom, an unjustified war on terror, and the financial crisis. But perhaps the deviance was the level of fervor in expressing America's failings.

The decline has continued ever so slightly over the last 12 years, hitting ~20% in January 2025. Today, the deviant view feels like being willing to say America is, actually, still the greatest country on earth. In fact, John Coogan masterfully used the meme format of that Newsroom clip to express that sentiment:

What a Contrarian

Now, what I'm not describing is being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. When I asked ChatGPT for "contrarian" ideas I feel like it was drinking from the poisoned well of nonsensical contrarian-for-contrarian's-sake ideas that a lot of hucksters and jabronis keep feeding it:

I don't mean to be combative, counterpositioned, or difficult to talk to just because.

Barking in public is being willing to cast off what society expects of you in favor of what YOU expect of you. What do YOU think you should do?

I also don't mean being selfish and just doing whatever you feel like.

Barking in public is trusting yourself. Your underlying perspective, code, preferences, values — those should guide how you bark. It means doing things, not because something outside yourself tells you to, but because something greater than yourself tells you to.

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