the lost art of b.s.

i live in ongoing awe of some of my more senior colleagues. these are people who can, in any situation, retain and recall all of the salient details and also command a sophisticated and insightful understanding of the big picture.

i will never be one of those people.

on some level my expectation must have been that without any particular effort i could passively become smart and good at stuff. having realized that such a transformation would actually take a tremendous amount of motivation and effort, and that - let's face it- i probably wouldn't succeed anyway, i've started looking for loopholes.

basically what i've found is that there's no upper limit to how much one can bluff. it all started with a couple a stalling devices that i picked up from some friends at work- things you can say when you're up against a wall that either so vague or so universally true that they're almost never the wrong answer. while i want to say that over the last few weeks my blogmate and i have been involved in a collaborative effort to expand the list to cover one's behind in a variety of situations, the truth is probably that while i've been busy confabulating bullshit answers, my blogmate has actuallly been getting smarter and more sophisticated in her understanding of things.

whether or not i'm acting alone, i'm escalating my ploys to make it look like i know what's going on. i've come up with two basic approaches:

#1) embellishment- if you have a reasonably good idea of what the key issues are, but have been unwilling or unable to back yourself up with hard data you can usually get around ever providing it. the truth is that most people don't want to listen to you drone on about the details anyway- all you really have to do is use big words to get across that you understand the concept and make it seem like you're doing people a favor by leaving out the minutiae.

#1a) dumbing it down- the opposite tactic, only for the most skilled participants, is to use inappropriately small, childish words to describe highly complex or worrisome phenomena- it makes it sound like you've arrived on a higher plane of understanding.

#2) plausibility- if you actually have no idea what's going on but you have enough free time to harvest some (but not necessarily all) of the details, you can usually arrange them to come out of your mouth in such a way that they make sense to everyone else. take it step higher by either drawing a conclusion that sounds pretty reasonable (and vague), or by finding a way to make your data back up a known reality.

every day i get one step closer to greatness.