Month: December 2019

The False Nature of Teams: Reflections on the Ohio State win over Michigan

I saw some of the most bizarre behavior during the Ohio State football game at Michigan in Ann Arbor over the weekend that its worth some observational notes. I don’t watch much college football all though I enjoy the ambiance of all fall football. The details are often too boring. The students are not yet perfected to the level of the pros and I don’t enjoy watching them. I think colleges hold back people; it doesn’t enhance them. They are good for educating people into procedures and to be good employees, but not so good in turning out unusual thinkers willing to push the limits and during the game my concerns were more than confirmed. If the goal is to find one’s place into some pecking order of procedural thinking, colleges do what people spend their money on. But they do not make leaders—I find that colleges openly lie about this objective and they charge way too much money for it, yet they convince people to pay it due to these sports programs.

Watching the Michigan side, complete with Tom Brady providing commentary in favor of the “Blue” of his former school there were these bizarre statements about teamwork, and that the team is greater than any individual, any player, any coach, anything. This was astonishing to me because I hear that come out of the mouths of many people all through my professional life from the statehouses across the country to the intimate business meetings that happen hour by hour. People say these really dumb things and it makes you wonder where they get this information. Well, I know that the colleges have become in America excessive liberal factories trying to program political activism into their students and charging a lot of money for the opportunity. In trade, most companies, especially large ones agree to hire the kids from the colleges because secretly they just want nice employees who won’t rock the boat with new, breaking thoughts. They will just do what they are told and suppress any frustrations that might arise from the arrangement. But here, at the Ohio State game was lies about the arrangement, that no individual is more important than the team and that’s just not how the world works. The snake oil salesmen have obviously been hard at work in the broadcast booths of our nation’s college football games.

In the end the game was a blowout in favor of Ohio State winning 56-27. The point of the whole exercise was to make people who have attended these universities over the years, which is the point of all college sports programs, is to give those who have graduated, a continued value for their money spent. These days its like getting DLC content for a completed video game. It gives the participants a feeling of unity and a kind of family atmosphere in those massive 100,000 people stadiums where these games are played. But right after the game is done and everyone goes home, the specifics are forgotten and its off to the next thing. The whole experience is to unify people into the team concept of college sports and to coax them into continuing to spend money on the perceived results. For the amount of money that we are talking the whole scam is pretty pathetic.

So it went at the start of the game and during all this fluffy commentary about team work being so much greater than any individual, yet the results of the game was all about individuals being better than others, and the rest of the team sat on the sideline cheering them on along with the people in the stands. The terms, “we won” as was the common term used after the game, or “we lost this one,” were ludicrous. Ohio State had better individual players who picked up the team and took them to victory. In this particular game the quarterback and the running back were the two main positions where exceptional play took place, but most of the rest of the game was just a bunch of average people fulfilling their positions. Sure, the quarterback needs someone to throw the ball to, and the running back needs blockers—but in those positions, most anybody can play those roles, which is normal for the college experience. Most any graduate can be hired or replaced, and nobody would notice. But, the exceptional players J.K. Dobbins finding holes to run through or some of those deep, accurate passes from Justin Fields weren’t part of some team other than they needed to follow the instructions of the leaders in running the proper routes and getting open to make a play. The individual efforts were far more important than any collective message about unity.

Tom Brady’s comments in support of Michigan were bizarre as well. Let’s try an experiment, let’s take Tom Brady off the New England Patriots professional football team and see how many games they win. Or let’s take away their now famous coach. The lie that a team is what wins football games is told everywhere in modern culture, people buy it completely due to these kinds of recreation events justifying their comments, but reality is not being observed. The hard work that Tom Brady has always put into the game is why his teams have changed the players but they always continue to win. He is the stabilizing factor; the players come and go but the victories are the results of the many extra hours of hard work that Brady does to stay ahead of the competition. The teams under him get the ability to win a Super Bowl ring by sitting on the bench as opposed to playing for some other team where they might be expected as individuals to do more. But the truth is, they are irrelevant to the winning process, but Tom Brady is the key to a chance—and nobody else.

And it wasn’t Michigan who made Tom Brady who he is. They didn’t give him his natural talents. They gave him a chance to show it off but Brady didn’t come out of his big win over Ohio State a number one draft pick. He had to work his way up and work harder than everyone else, and still to this day he does that. That’s why he’s over 40 and still has a starting job in the NFL. Who else is going to be better than him? In the end, it comes down to the exceptional who carry the masses—always, in sports, in business, in politics—in everything. Everything. The colleges lie to justify their roles, and the masses buy the lie so that they can feel like they are part of a winning formula. But it always comes down to individual effort that leads teams to victory. Not the other way around. Everytime someone says something so stupid as the “team” is bigger than any one person you can always know that the person saying it has no idea how the world really works, and they are faking leadership. Because leadership is not about team victories, its about doing what leaders tell you and riding their coattails to success. And like I said, a good quarterback, running back, or business partner needs someone to throw the ball to. But wins and losses do not happen as a team, they happen as a result of leadership by individuals over those hungry to be led somewhere for an effort they couldn’t get any other way. That is a truth many aren’t prepared to contemplate, yet it’s the true essence of this ever-present reality.

Rich Hoffman

Skycars are Ready: Yet we have to wait for stupid rules and regulations to catch up

If there is one thing that I’ve learned and developed over these many millions of words of contemplation and the questioning of virtually everything we assume in our political and social order, it is that we lose something very valuable in our teenage years for which we work so hard to develop as children, and that is fertile imaginations that take advantage of our very unusual brains and drive for improvement and creation. It would be my offering that developing that over a lifetime is the meaning of life for the human species. We were never meant to replicate nature and to learn to live within its rules. We were meant to question nature and to improve it the way an artist improves a blank canvass with strokes of paint and the thoughts that took a lifetime to build. And that any human invention of philosophy that has been put in place to restrict such an approach to life is evil, even if the intentions were good to start with, as we all know the path to Hell is paved with.

I was asked by several members of the business community about this new book of mine, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business as to why, earlier in 2019 when they learned I was doing it. As they asked, what could possibly be done new in that field that has not been done by thousands of other people already. Well, that has been the difficult aspect of it and is something I’m untangling due to my unusual life and experiences. Its not just about business that I’m concern, such as understanding why Lean Manufacturing is largely rejected by western cultures while eastern cultures thrive with it. Understanding why the original Walt Disney was a genius, or George Lucas was so successful while so many others try to copy but fail. The new film Ford vs. Ferrari is about the same kind of interesting characters who push the limits of social order in passionate ways for good new things to come forth. So was the great film produced by George Lucas about Tucker: A Man and His Dream. Or the Aviator by Leonardo DiCaprio. What makes genius in a culture and how can we protect it so we can get more of it? Then there is the piece of the puzzle that I think is most unique, tying that to the ownership of guns in a society and how that invention has allowed for minds to flourish and step away from tyranny so that imaginations could flourish. It’s not our education system that has produced such people, its in a mind free of fear either by daredevil minds or those growing up in households protected by family and friends with closets full of guns. My investigation has taken me to that precipice and its certainly virgin ground that has gotten deeper the more I probed. But it has been worth it. The quest has been very rewarding, and revolutionary.

It is in this context that I do much of what I do and think the same. Newcomers or occasional readers here might think that I am a mean, vicious person. However, the people who know me best understand that I am a very unencumbered person 24 hours a day. I wouldn’t say childlike. I would say rather I am unrestricted in my imagination which is vast and is the key to much of my problem-solving ability. People associate this way of thinking with a child, but to me children are learning to think like this, they don’t have the developed thoughts yet, the way an Einstein or a Nietzsche may have. Thinking is the thing that humans do, so doing it well is very much part of the puzzle and to people like me, the worst thing you can do to such people is put too many rules on them, to restrict them to people who don’t dare to think so deep or far. That is where destructive social orders come into play, the things we allow into our political discourse regardless of party affiliation. To me, if it restricts imagination, its evil. From the local zoning board that constricts the plans of a creative architect with stupid rules, or the inventor of a new mode of transportation that must wait for a cumbersome FFA to get their minds wrapped around an idea. To that last point is the subject of today’s article, but also the first step into a series of thoughts that I have on this matter that are paving the defined criteria of this new book of mine. But also serve as a contextual representation for the 21st century and the many challenges of this particular point in history.

For much longer than I’ve been writing here, or writing books I have been a big supporter of skycars. At first it was the Paul Moller Skycar M400 that I worked whatever political angles I could to help it along in the 1990s, where everyone laughed at it infuriating me tremendously. I was working for Cincinnati Milacron at the time and they were creating a kind of pre-Amazon parts delivery system to support their products all over the country, which at the time I was part of organizing with a fleet of vans to provide delivery within the day. Essentially a call would come in, we’d pick the part from inventory, carry it down to our vans, and drive to wherever they were in the country having the part to the customer that day, sometimes within a working shift. I tried to convince people that a Skycar could do the job much faster and due to the political response, I understood that it would take probably another 20 years to get the human race to catch up, and to me that was just stupid. Why weren’t people advanced enough to see the potential? That is the reason I used the M400 in my book The Symposium of Justice. I had Hollywood connections at that point in my life and I was hoping they would take the baton and run with it. But they didn’t. It was a very frustrating period for me to observe.

Well, now its that time and skycars are getting ready to hit the market. Dubai is bringing them into the mainstream in the next few years and the new electric concept called BlackFly is ready right now to fly from your driveway to work at the touch of a button. The problem is, and continues to be even in Dubai, that a political class protected by a lot of silly rules and regulations are standing in the way as they have for so many decades and that is what evokes my anger. The imaginations of the human species has done their job, but the weak and timid are holding back what we could all become due to their lackluster view of the world created artificially with restrictive, timid thoughts. While we justify the rules that are in our society as keeping people safe, the true nature of our beings is to be recklessly imaginative and to allow ambition to fuel product creation and implementation. Our regulatory culture is the problem, or obsession with silly rules to restrict imaginative growth is the problem and has been for a very long time. It is not the job of the unrestrictive imaginations to encumber themselves with those who have limited themselves to thoughts that keep them grounded and under control of the local masters who only want to hold their power given to them by the rules of the day. Its for everyone else to rise to the highwater marks set by the great thinkers who have worked their entire lives to become something unique. And the flying cars are the products of such thinking, and finally, they are ready for the market. Yet they wait for the lazy minded to get it. But first they’ll have to await the results of the Ohio State game against Michigan before they have room in their brains for the task, or some other college game where the small minded gather to reassure themselves that institutions are the boons of existence, and not the imaginations of the most daring. The point of my efforts is to give a scientific opinion on this obscurity, so that perhaps we can change it from what it is now in a highly regulatory business environment into something that allows such inventions to materialize in years instead of decades.

Rich Hoffman