Being an Asshole = Being a Great Artist

Do you know the cliché of the musician overdosing after having composed the songs that shattered a genre? Do you also know the recurring trope of a poverty stricken bohemian, secretely building a masterpiece on the side?  How about the trope of the egotistical virtuoso, that just can’t get enough whiffs out of his asshole? Yeah, the type of guy that walks over the corpses of past friends, that pave his way into ultimate glory. Do you know him?

Some people carve this mythology into their minds religiously believing in a blunt maniquean mantra that by being ruthless and unscrupulous psychopaths, they’ll achieve prosperity in life, in contrast to the innocent and good-hearted incompetents of the world, that simply aren’t alpha enough as they are.

Is it so?  Is being an asshole a crucial trait for anyone with aims of being the next Steve Jobs?

Speaking of the devil, there is a remarkable scene in 2015’s Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, where (Steve) Wozniak -the cofounder of Apple- asks (Steve) Jobs to acknowledge the names of the team members behind the Apple II.

Jobs declines and Wozniak calls him an asshole, whose products are better than him as a person. Nonchalantly Jobs boosts on this fact. Nevertheless before leaving him, Wozniak takes a last shot with the phrase:

«It’s not binary. You can be decent and gifted at the same time».

I suspect that many people that associate competence or success with being assholes confuse the terms correlation with causation. To explain the difference let me give an example.

For the sake of this argument let’s say that most soldiers with a good performance in combat smoke cigarrettes, while those that lose their nerves in the heat of the battle don’t.

A new non-smoker recruit upon learning this, could decide to go on a journey to develop lung cancer just for the sake of climbing up the military ladder.

Does this mean that he will be a good soldier, just because he bought the latest unfiltered Marlboros?

No. As a matter of fact, the same day that he gets deployed in Vietnam, he gets killed. Ice cold.

Why?

The real reason why these soldiers had a higher performance was because, they tended to breath longer and thus it was easier for them to keep calm and have a better aim. That is, the inhaling of oxygen was the causative factor, while smoking was the correlative one.

Somehow when people are convinced that their bad behaviour will give them the keys to success, they consequently develop a tunnel vision, that forbids them to look at examples of people that «made it» without leaving their morals behind. Well, maybe I should help this change. I’ll write down a list of people, that are considered to be successful that also happen to NOT BE ASSHOLES:

– Hugh Jackman: Check what the people that worked with him say about him.

– David Lynch: If you listen to the people he worked with, they say he never shouted at them or lost his temper.

– Keanu Reeves: Same as Jackman.

– Quentin Tarantino

– Daniel Radcliffe

– Etc.

If you want more examples here is a ton of them:

To wrap this up I must present the following equations:

You can…

a) Be an Asshole AND Successful

and also:

b) Not be an Asshole AND Not be successful

BUT at the same time the following is also true:

You can…

c) Be an Asshole AND UNsuccessful

and also:

d) Not be an Asshole AND successful

It’s not binary.

Radwulf

07.02.2022