As we talk about people who live in the back of the train and are not the leadership type, using Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality, there are sure ways to detect their destructive attributes.  I call them “time eaters”: people who are afraid to do things in the world and disguise their impact by consuming time, hiding their lack of leadership.  Because they are too timid to live life in front of the train, they make a lot of noise to seem helpful in a fast-moving world.  They are the kind of people who want to consume your time with small talk or discussions about small things that are not important to the task.  And when you are doing important things in life, they seek to take up your time to associate themselves with some level of success without committing to fulfilling the endeavor.  And the really insulting thing about it is that when they want to waste your time, they fail to recognize that, as a fellow human being, you must be suffering from the same ailment as they are.  When people don’t know what to do, they seek means to disguise it with nonsense and waste time trying to look productive, but only with meaningless chatter.  A good example of this is the occasional salesperson who tries to sell you something in a shopping complex and stops you with “can I have a moment of your time?” as if that moment were not infinitely valuable.  The assumption is that, as two fellow human beings, you have some obligation to waste time on someone else just because they request it.  And in so doing, a lot of unproductive output occurs.  Being nice and accommodating will often leave you feeling empty because these people seek to drain you of your effort to fill up what’s empty inside them.

Using the metaphor of the speeding train, the people in life at the back of the train are always trying to bleed you of information when you are the leader type at the front.  So they are always trying to get you to come to the back, where they are, so that they can feel part of the process.  They, of course, wait for you to do something meaningful, then try to associate themselves with the success.  But because they are the back of the train types, they need to eat your time to gain something they didn’t earn.   And when you take the time to give it to them, trying to be nice, they fill the time of the exchange with nonsense, hoping to blend in and to look helpful.  They talk about sports, about the lottery, about wine, donuts, and college football teams.  But they never have the guts to talk about the things that really matter because they are in the back of the train and are only trying to appear as if they are part of a team.  When we talk about teams, there are usually leaders.  Then there are the people who like to spend time talking about silly things, trying to associate with success in the exchange.  I find wasting time with people in the back of the train talking about nonsense is a sure path to failure, because leadership is about being on the cutting edge, seeing things as they come, and dealing with them there.  Not talking about cutting the grass and what your neighbor is doing.  If it doesn’t involve life on the cutting edge, it’s mostly about wasting time. 

And in that way, I see a different kind of tyranny in the modern world designed by people who live in the back of the train.  They want you to always read their terms of service agreements for every little thing.  They want you to waste time figuring out a new software update for your smart TV that adds all-new control features to your remote.  They want to drag you into meaningless states for baseball stats and sports while the world outside burns away.  There is an evil in these time eaters that tries to keep you from getting to them by trying to trap you in the back of the train and away from the front so that they can work their malicious schemes.  And before you know it, on any given day, you have wasted 24 hours of your life and achieved very little.  Because your day was filled with “time eaters” who took away precious time to be on the leading edge with analysis from the back, trivial nonsense that are observations, not leadership-led.  And even in that sentiment is the notion that success should never be achieved at the cost of our humanity, of not communicating effectively, or of volunteering to waste time with people in the back of the train out of compassion for their position.  And that no achievement matters more than talking to another human being.  Even if what everyone is saying to each other is meaningless in the scheme of things.  The point of communication is to validate the lack of leadership that the other parties are terrified of, and the point of existence is to make them feel better about it. Not to actually achieve things. 

So beware of the “time eaters.”  I avoid them as I would any disease.  There is a real menace in their actions that intends to destroy the world, and I don’t like it at all.  And I say all this not to be mean, but to explain why I don’t allow myself to get stuck in projects or circumstances that are “time eaters.”  When I see and hear that the people I’m dealing with are “time eaters,” I remove myself from their company quickly and move on to something much more interesting.  If I feel what I’m doing isn’t important, then I don’t do it for long.  And people do take offense to it, but that’s OK.  I see value in the back of the train only in the analysis it provides.  But it only helps in a kind of future state, as leadership is fast and furious, and is not a team exercise.  The concept of teamwork is designed to be a time-eater of shared consumption of resources to appear busy and proactive.  When, in reality, it’s just intended to keep leaders from the front of the train and to trap them in the back with all the other slugs.  And the more time they waste keeping essential things from happening, the worse the world is.  Whether the issue is a discussion about a meaningless topic or wasting time with the TV remote, “time eaters” are a real problem imposed on us by an evil that lurks just beyond our senses.  And the war they have against us is a very real terror against the human race.  The lure is in compassion, wasting time with people who can’t contribute to success because they lack the ability.  And in that effort, the whole ship sinks, and this is by design.  So, to prevent that eventuality, beware of the time-eaters.  They will seek to destroy the world with nonsense and sell it as a value because of the human need to feel wanted by other human beings.  And in that exchange, vast evils are expressed and injected into society to undo all thoughts of goodness.

Rich Hoffman

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