Lies We Tell in Leadership, Part 4: Cherry-Picking
Lies We Tell in Leadership, Part 4: Cherry-Picking
"Toot your own horn" is well-intentioned advice, but it results in us deceiving listeners without telling an outright falsehood.
In the dingy tavern of Liar’s Lair, a woman sits at a corner table. She toils over a half-carved block of Carrara marble, hammer and chisel in hand. You ask the sculptor why she chose to work down here, in the dimly-lit bowels of Leadership Land. She replies:
I used to have my own studio, back when I was a painter. I would illustrate my identity additively by applying a dab of skin color, a brushstroke of ancestry, a stippling of favorite food/music/movies, a brown smear of political views, and voilà! Human snowflake.
Chisel in hand, she gestures at the other patrons of Liar’s Lair and continues:
I like watching them because they remind me of why I switched from painting to sculpting. I used to fabricate lies like they do: by adding brushstrokes to what looked good and covering up what didn’t. My embellishments eventually metastasized until they obscured the true nature of things, and I realized that the accumulation of little truths had paradoxically merged into one big lie.
Now that I’m a sculptor, I define myself subtractively. My task is to chisel away the falsehoods until I find the underlying truth; embellishment is no longer possible. Removing instead of adding has led me to a better understanding of the true nature of things.
Over-Promise and Under-Deliver
Consider the apex predator of fuzzy critters crossing the road; faster than a cheetah and more powerful than 250 draft horses; propelled by the hellish heat and guttural roar of an infernal combustion engine: the American automobile. The mechanical engineer who designs and builds the car at the beginning of the supply chain is, in some ways, the opposite of a used-car salesman at the other end of the chain:
The engineer’s job is to make the car objectively better.
The used-car salesman’s job is to make the car seem better regardless of its underlying quality.
Just like an unscrupulous researcher cherry-picking data to confirm a foregone conclusion, the used-car salesman highlights all the good things about a used car while downplaying (or misdirecting attention away from) all the things that are wrong with it. The used-car salesman thus earns a reputation for using sleazy, disingenuous tactics to make a sale.
And yet, we do the same thing when we hide our imperfect faces under makeup and our flawed bodies under flattering clothes. We buy homes, cars, and other public, high-visibility symbols of success; the debt we accumulate by borrowing other people’s money remains private and invisible. We aggrandize our lives on social media by posting photos about our glamorous vacations while neglecting to mention the indignities we suffered: the lost luggage, the dysentery contracted from the local cuisine, being tackled and handcuffed by an airport security guard who mistook your IUD for an IED.
Ethical or not, we engage in cherry-picking because it works. We’re all suckers for good stories and confirmation bias. We create information asymmetry when we selectively reveal details that are advantageous for us, while suppressing information that isn’t. It’s good for us when we cherry-pick, but bad for us when we drink someone else’s cherry-flavored Kool-Aid.
When we cherry-pick a lot of little truths and stitch them together, we create a Frankenstein’s monster of a lie. Here are some examples:
“I’m effortlessly beautiful.”
The most in-your-face example of cherry-picking is…literally your face. For women, the use of cosmetics to cover up blemishes is not only common, but often expected as part of a “professional appearance.” In some subcultures (e.g. metrosexuals) and East Asian cultures (e.g. Korea), it’s increasingly normal for men to wear makeup, too.
Less obvious examples of cherry-picking are:
Push-up bras that embellish women’s figures
Shoulder pads in suit/sport jackets that exaggerate men’s shoulder-to-waist ratio
Camera filters that smooth out blotchy skin in Zoom/Teams teleconferences apps
“MySpace angles” and duck faces
The cumulative effect of widespread individual cherry-picking is a distortion of our collective standard of beauty. Meeting those warped beauty standards requires further cherry-picking, which further strengthens the beauty standard’s iron grip on our faces and bodies.
The infinite loop continues until enough people muster the courage to defy the tyranny of social norms. But that’s unlikely to happen in the workplace because of the next lie…
“I’m a consummate professional.”
Schoolchildren tease each other mercilessly for being different. Grown-ups do the same, but we pretend to be dignified about it; our term for forced conformity is “professionalism.”
The urge to stifle our individuality comes 50% from cherry-picking, 50% from mandatory insincerity (covered in part 2)1. This arises from individual needs clashing with organizational needs in the Straits of Conflicting Interests:
Most of us would prefer to be smarter, richer, happier, sexier, [positive-sounding adjective]-er than average, rather than being merely mediocre. Standing apart from the crowd necessarily means highlighting our individuality.
Most of us also have a congenital desire to be accepted into a group, which requires us to subsume our individuality under the group identity. We do this by cherry-picking: hiding certain behaviors and exaggerating others.
The result of extensive cherry-picking is a public persona made up of fragmented truths that combine to form a mosaic of deception. When everyone does this, we end up with a set of bewildering “professional” behaviors such as:
Men strangling themselves with a silk slave collar. The modern necktie signals “my livelihood is dependent on what others think of me.”
Women removing body hair, because how dare we look like anything less than perfection (arbitrarily defined by society). It’s unprofessional to keep my natural eyebrows, which start at the temples and grow straight across my face and onto yours.
Odd speech patterns, such as:
Using “invite” as a noun.
I forwarded the meeting invite so we can have a discuss about the populate of Mongolia and decide if we need to ramp up widget produce there.
Replacing “use” with “utilize.”
We used a ruler → We utilized a linear distance measurement apparatus.
Inserting “in the process of” into every stated action.
We are using a ruler → We are in the process of utilizing a linear distance measurement apparatus.
Today, we look back on powdered wigs, foot binding, and codpieces as laughable anachronisms. Future generations will shake their heads at the strange fashions we have today – social norms created by cherry-picking in the name of “professionalism.”
“I’m a brilliant thinker.”
There’s an old saying out there:
Better to remain silent, and be suspected a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
Superficially, this pearl of wisdom is an injunction against the spouting of nonsense. Read between the lines, however, and you’ll notice that it implicitly advises in favor of cherry-picking. By filtering out the buoyant, airy drivel that floats to the surface of your mind like pond scum, you ensure that the few words you utter are deep and insightful.
We’re guilty of this, big time. We were promoted in our day jobs by keeping a low profile 98% of the time and ensuring that the remaining 2% was memorable to other people. We cherry-picked the data so other people only associate us with extraordinary work. Our best ideas shine brightly atop a shadowy mountain of our terrible ideas, misbegotten strategies, and stillborn projects.
We do this online, too. The words you’re reading now are the survivors of a fierce Darwinian struggle where the bad writing dies swiftly by delete key and the unclear explanations are eaten by the fitter ones. We only write good jokes during rare bursts of mental clarity, like oases dotting a humorless desert2. This entire Substack is a distillation of the incoherent circus calliope that plays inside our heads at all waking hours.
Our excuse for cherry-picking: we don’t want to waste your time with our mundane work…and because we feel good if you think we’re cleverer than we deserve. Our egos aren’t going to stroke themselves, you know.
Speaking of which…
“My job-interview behavior is representative of how I am.”
Note: these are American behaviors, based on our experiences growing up and working in the United States. If you were raised in a different culture and cherry-picking feels foreign to you, please let us know in the comments.
“Tooting your own horn” sounds like something an embarrassed mother would discourage her pubescent son from doing after she discovered titillating magazines under his bed. Conversely, it’s common to encourage job seekers to “toot their own horns” on their résumés and during the job interview. Try not to think about the autoerotic undertone of that phrase the next time you sit down to interview a candidate…
Autobiographical vignette time! Years ago, I (primary author of Adventures in Leadership Land) interviewed for my first formal leadership role. I did not toot my own horn and remained fully clothed during the interview. My abstinence arose from A) a foolhardy streak of non-conformism, and B) inspiration from Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, where the first page reads:
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. […] People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did.
When asked “what is your greatest weaknesses?” I answered honestly and forthrightly:
I’m introverted to the point of appearing unsociable. I’m allergic to small talk and crowds. It will take me longer to build rapport with a new team full of strangers.
I’m conscious of how I spend my time, so I tend to be impatient.
My leadership experience was limited to teaching assistantships and leading-without-authority in online communities, so I’d struggle to put leadership theory into practice.
My formal training was entirely in the sciences and engineering, so I expected a rough transition from technical work to managerial duties.
I got the job. However, when I later asked my interrogators what I could’ve done better, they were unanimous in telling me that I “sold myself short” and that “I should’ve tooted my own horn more.” They explicitly encouraged me to cherry-pick more in future interviews. Essentially, we reward people who respond with “mY gReAtEsT wEaKnEsS iS aLsO mY gReAtEsT sTrEnGtH” or some equivalent BS peddled by Indeed or the Harvard Business Review. If my competitors for the job had been better qualified, I would’ve lost the spot to someone who had no compunctions about deceiving the interviewers without telling an outright falsehood.
Masturbatory self-aggrandizement isn’t exactly a new concept – that’s just a fancy term for “bragging.” But while bragging to stroke one’s own ego is distasteful in most social settings and discouraged by major world religions3, we suspend our scruples when it comes to selling ourselves.
Unacceptable in real life: A middle-aged man boasting about his high school sports career in a bar.
Acceptable when selling oneself: The same middle-aged man recounting half-forgotten experiences from decades ago during a job interview.
Unacceptable in real life: Pretending to be someone you’re not. We use words like charlatan, phony, fraud, and poseur (optional “u”) to describe someone who impersonates the real deal.
Acceptable when selling oneself: Stuffing a résumé full of novice-level skills and impressive-sounding adjectives, like a taxidermist stuffing fluffy cotton balls up the rear of a dead rhino.
This double standard is not only illogical, it’s dangerous because we discourage the harmless behavior while encouraging the harmful one. By bragging about his high school glory days at the bar, the middle-aged man is only hurting himself by showing his lack of accomplishments over the last three decades. But if he brags about his “25 years of experience” when he only got one year of experience 25 times, then he inflicts real harm on other people – both the employer who overpaid for overpromised talent, and other candidates who didn’t get the job.
We must be wary of people on their “best behavior.” Their cherry-picked performance is not representative of their true nature. We know this logically while reading about it on a screen, but it’s too easy to forget when we’re interacting with them. Our mental machinery is busy processing what they’re saying, leaving us with little capacity to evaluate the infinite possibilities of what they’re not telling us. This extends way beyond job interviews to any situation where someone is trying to sell themselves to us: to first dates, solicitors, and politicians.
7/9/2023 Clarifications/Conclusion
The original subtitle of the essay was:
"Toot your own horn" is a polite way of saying "deceive your listener without telling an outright falsehood."
Several Redditors contested this. After thinking about it, we agreed that it didn’t reflect our beliefs. We tweaked the subtitle to better suit the rest of the article.
If we had to sum up this essay in a single sentence, it would be an old Benjamin Franklin-ism:
Half a truth is often a great lie.
Our distaste for cherry-picking is akin to how some people feel about abortion: it’s appalling and makes us shake us heads at the moral decline of society...unless it benefits us, in which case it's okay. Totally not hypocritical, right? (In case you missed it, we explicitly admitted to tooting our own horns in an earlier section).
Therefore, we aren’t telling anyone to not put on makeup, to appear unprofessional, or to avoid tooting their own horn. For now, just be mindful of what your cherry-picking does to society at large; we’ll cover that in Part 5, during our departure from Liar’s Lair.
And if you’re hiring anyone: caveat emptor. Don’t drink the cherry-flavored Kool-aid.
Paintbrushes vs. Chisels
You glance again at the entryway to Liar’s Lair. Above the door is the inscription:
Tell me what you lie about, and I’ll tell you who you are.
You look at the neat, orderly letters chiseled into the stone, and look back at the sculptor and her half-complete marble statue. Noticing the shift in your gaze, she says:
She gives you a second to ponder whether she’s lying to you or not, then continues:
The asymmetry between confirming vs. disconfirming honesty made it easy to switch from painting to sculpting. Trust and honesty are so fragile – you can add brushstroke after brushstroke to illustrate someone’s true nature, but it only takes one lie to ruin the whole painting. And sometimes, the big picture tells a different story from the brushstrokes that created it.
Once you find a lie, that’s where the fun begins. Remove the lie, you’ll find the true nature lurking underneath. That true nature is often a secret that someone wants to keep hidden.
To emphasize her point, the sculptor planted the tip of her chisel into a crevice on the statue and flicked her wrist. A chunk of marble detached from the statue, revealing a brilliant green emerald inside.
We couldn’t figure out how to classify this lie, so we listened to our turd-throwing procrastination monkey and dumped it in a later post.
And sometimes, when we get desperate, we just plagiarize borrow someone else’s joke.
Pride/arrogance even appears on multiple “top evils” listicles in major world religions:
7 deadly sins of Christianity
4 passions of Jainism (mana)
5 poisons of Buddhism (māna)
5 thieves of Sikhism (Hankaar)
Most of the other major religions also admonish against hubris, but they don’t include it on a “top 10” list.