zet

Hubris is Fine, If Earned

Someone left a comment recently attacking me saying “[they] do agree [I am] very aggressive and act like [I am] better than everyone else.” Here’s the objective reality. For most of the things I talk about on my live stream and make YouTube videos about I am better than everyone else on YouTube and Twitch. It’s just a fact. Seriously, I could (and have) cited ways I have been dead wrong and corrected myself over and over again. That’s what makes me superior. The others don’t. They double-down on their dumb-ass positions. No matter how vocal and ranty I have been about any of my positions when I’m introduced to new information and evidence I always change. If there is one thing that makes me superior, that’s it. And I have a record of producing superior people from my mentoring community, that others who have hired them and known them have gone out of their way to let me know. It does increase my confidence in my methods and tech decisions, but again, the biggest being not to become too dogmatic.

What pisses me off is this idea that being ‘aggressive’ and ‘better than everyone else’ is somehow a bad thing. It’s just fucking not. In this world of absolute idiocy aggressive rhetoric, unfortunately, is the only thing that gets through to most people. Am I this ‘abrasive’ (a term used to refer to Linus Torvalds) in person? Do I act this way at work on conference calls? No. Or at least, not nearly as much. But, in my personal and private live, on the topic of technology direction and helping people get employable skills, hell yeah, I’m fucking aggressive. That’s the type of person that has helped me in the past. That’s the type of person I want to be. And I definitely actively seek to produce people who will be ‘aggressive’ in their advocacy for things that morons can’t even understand. Does that make me a bad person? Fuck no.

#rant #hubris