4th
“The Power Broker” Explains it All
Happy 4th of July everyone!
Since I’m up kinda earliesh, and don’t have much all to do just yet, I thought I’d write a blog post about a revelation I had last night while eating dinner at a friend’s house.
The revelation was spurred by the book “The Power Broker”, Robert Caro’s massive tome about Robert Moses.
Actually we have to go back a few days, to a conversation I had with Brooke, wherein a recommended she read the book if she wanted to have a better understanding of the history of NY, and I mentioned that if she did read it, then she’d be able to cite all kinds of stuff like “Here’s why this road never went all the way out to Laguardia” or “Here’s why this highway cuts right through this neighborhood” or “here’s why….” and so on and so on.
Bear in mind, I’ve never read the book. Not a page, but through the wonders of intuition and picking up bits and pieces of conversations, I was at least able to say that much about some of the book’s content. I really don’t know jack about Robert Moses, and it’s not particularly high on my list of priorities. Reading a 1200-page book is even lower.
Nonetheless at dinner last night, the book came up and my friend who had read the book said it was one of his favorite books, and that because of it he was able to cite why certain highway exit ramps were where they are, etc. Pretty much the exact same line I said to Brooke, the only difference being that he actually had real knowledge and I just had some superficial knowledge about real knowledge. (Bear in mind, he said it took him 6 months to finish it. It is gigantic)
The problem for the truly smart people in this world (not me) is that much of life doesn’t ever require you to get passed the “knowledge about knowledge” stage. Usually you can get by with knowing what something is about, rather than actually knowing something.
And that, frankly, favors people like me, who are good at picking up random bits of stuff and calling it up on the spot, rather than people who put in the time and due diligence to know something meaningful.
Granted, that mainly applies in day-to-day life and conversation and other general things. That probably doesn’t work so well if you’re a computer programmer or a nuclear bomb designer. But even then, to excel in a specific field, you really just need to be dive into one specific field — everything else you can kinda go the BS route and be okay, if not better.
It’s not fair to people with patience and (actual) intelligence, but that’s just how it goes. Snippets of incomplete knowledge combined with a decent gut instinct will get you at least somewhere.
