New chapters, old books

The dust has finally settled from the back-to-school routine. Among kith and kin there are several in the university pipeline. This includes one who just started college as a freshman, having made the trip from Saipan to the mainland. That’s quite a new chapter.

When it comes to getting into the college frame of mind, there’s a riff from an old business book that strikes me as useful. The book has a provocative title, Winning Through Intimidation, but it’s more about how not to be intimidated in the business world. Although the book was a hit in the mid- to late-70s, I didn’t read it until the late 80s.

Anyway, early in the book, author Robert Ringer mentions a chemistry course he took in college. Although Ringer felt uncertain about the new class, and was also clueless about the routines in the lab sessions, there was a seemingly knowledgeable student who was constantly spouting wisdom about how it all worked.

Ringer was, at first, grateful to be within earshot of someone who seemed to know so much about everything.

After the first test was administered, however, it turns out that the know-it-all didn’t know so much after all. He scored pretty much in the dead middle of the pack and far behind Ringer, as Ringer plodded along inconspicuously on his way to an “A.”

Ringer categorized the know-it-all as a “Court Holder,” someone who liked soaking up attention from any eager listeners nearby.

That’s probably a good lesson to heed for the college-bound. It’s certainly a simple one.

There are other lessons, by contrast, that sound simple, but are a bit more complex at decision time. One of my favorite books is Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I’ve mentioned the book, and the author, in this space before. As you can gather by the title, Taleb demonstrates how randomness plays a large, if not readily visible, role in our lives.

The book is solid, but my pals and I occasionally take things out of context just to be wise guys to each other. For example, sometimes we ruminate over the riddle of whether, when we were younger, we would have approached everything with such all-encompassing focus and energy if we had realized that our futures would be largely steered by random forces. That’s pretty much dark humor for when someone has had a bad week. But it is the case, nonetheless, that some of the most diligent students we knew didn’t get much for their efforts down the road not because they messed up somehow, but because of plain bad luck.

That’s worth thinking about, but I don’t think I’d want to jinx any students in the family by telling them just how precarious a career can be. Maybe it takes a degree of overconfidence early on to give someone the competitive edge they’ll need to best face the world, including its randomness, down the road. Note I said “maybe,” since I don’t claim to have any magic answers here.

Overall, looking back at college days and the years immediately following, it’s tempting to say, or at least to think, “If only I knew back then what I know now, I’d really be a superstar,” but I’m not convinced that hindsight is always clear. Sure, some decisions are clear stinkers in retrospect, but, in many other cases we’re probably oblivious to the many consequences that a “better” decision would have spawned.

Well, so much for back to school and a couple of favorite old books. On the book note, I’ll mention that Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s four mass-market books, in a collection called the “Incerto” series, are coming out in a boxed set of paperbacks on Nov. 15. A marketing blurb describes this as “an investigation of luck, uncertainty, probability, opacity, human error, risk, disorder, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand.”

While I’m eyeing Nov. 15 on my calendar, I might as well skip 50 weeks ahead and scribble a note, too. After all, that’s when it will be back-to-school time all over again.