SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS? READ THIS.

DAMN! Why didn’t I think of this 10 years ago? Where the hell was I? Oh, that’s right. I was busy working 7-days-a-week, 18-hours a day with and/or for a bunch of cock-sures.

Here’s the deal. Many moons ago, British philosopher Bertrand Russell uttered the following brilliance:

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cock-sure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Well, years later, after his untimely death at 100, a study scientifically PROVED it.

Seems that, in 1999, as I was busy cage-fighting with a producer who really believed he was brilliant, but couldn’t formulate a sentence written or otherwise, psychologists Kruger and Dunning were busy staging massive experiments at Cornell University to prove their following predictions:

Incompetent people dramatically overestimate their ability;
Incompetent people are not good at recognizing incompetence - their own or anyone else’s.

They took that notion and did a crazy-ass battery of tests ranging from humor to logic to see how these people would score and then, with the results in hand, asked the participants to rank themselves against the others. Well, guess what? The COMPETENT people ranked themselves accurately while the INCOMPETENT GROSSLY overestimated their rank.

“Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, Vol. 77, No. 6. ] 121-1134

Dunning and Kruger’s study also showed that incompetent people failed to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy, and they failed to recognize genuine skill in others. So here it is in black and white: Those people you thought were idiots, are idiots.

Here’s another hilarious irony that David Dunning found:

“…94% of college professors believe they do ‘above average’ work, although it’s statistically impossible for virtually everybody to be above average.”

Ha! Brilliant work, Mr. Dunning (and you, too, Mr. Kruger).

This study makes it scientifically clear that the producer I was fighting against was incompetent and would never be able to see his shortcomings. (It also gives me Ivy League back up for my theories expounded here on The Reluctant Genius even though I went to state school.)

Now, perhaps even more important, because this applies to YOU, the study found that most competent people tend to underestimate their abilities. Since I would like to believe that you fall into the competent corner, I’m going to ask that you pay attention to this: MOST COMPETENT PEOPLE UNDERESTIMATE THEIR ABILITIES. (You little devil, Bertrand, you knew this all along.)

The Dunning-Kruger study reinforces WHY, assuming you’re competent, you must bullshit your way through a variety of different situations. If you’re incompetent, you don’t HAVE to bullshit because you truly believe yourself to be stupendously brilliant and you’ll never figure out that you’re an idiot.

On the other hand, if you have self-doubt, but know deep down that you can do something -- even though it might scare the hell out of you, and you’re afraid to say you can do it -- then you must learn to BULLSHIT. BELIEVE IT. SELL IT. Trust yourself. You’re far better than you think you are. It's scientifically proven!

For more on bullshitting, check out What I Mean by Bullshitting.

Today: Do one thing that scares the living hell out of you. Bullshit your way through it; pretend you can do it and you will. Hell, that’s what I’m doing right now.