“We take cues from those around us.”

Quoted this article in another post recently, but Greg Satell wrote something on “four business myths killing us today,” and there are any number of good parts. I just want to quickly direct you to a couple.

Here’s Uno:

George Soros and others have noted that information has a reflexive quality. We can’t possibly verify every proposition, so we tend to take cues from those around us, especially when they are reinforced by authority figures, like consultants and media personalities. Over time, the zeitgeist diverges further from reality and myths evolve into established doctrine.

The interesting thing about this quote is how meta it is. You literally open the quote by saying “George Soros,” who is very leftist and villified massively by the right. Automatically about half the people reading this stopped caring. That’s where we are as people. It’s also funny how every media personality tells you not to trust the media as a whole, but to trust them. OK, goon.

That dovetails into this:

The trick is that you always want to start with a majority, even if it’s three people in a room of five. The biggest influence on what we do and think is what the people around us do and think. That’s why it’s always easy to expand a majority out, but as soon as you are in the minority, you will feel…