Unmasking the Chameleon : A Survival Guide

The late great Charlie Munger, Warren Buffets BFF, long advised his readers to adopt a lifelong habit of building a Latticework of Mental Models for thinking and decision making, to help one understand and navigate the complexities of this world.

All of us reading this have a likely list of “I wish I had…” regrets. Whether it is short or long list is a good clue to how introspective you are. My top two (for now) are – I wish I had started saving and investing a decade earlier than I actually did and I wish I had started going to the gym a decade earlier than I actually did.

But earlier this year I unexpectedly stumbled into a third regret.

On some idle Tuesday earlier in the year, doodling in one of those pointless MS Teams meetings that is both a defining feature and a bane of post covid work life, I drew myself a doodle that hinted at a framework I wish was part of my mental model for thinking and decision making much earlier. A decade earlier at the least.

But now that I have drawn it, obsessed about it and decided to make it a part of my mental model I am going to write about it here for 2 reasons.

1. Stress test it by sharing it and getting feedback on the model

2. Follow the good advice that the best way to think and polish thinking is to write it down

for starters here is that doodle I drew :

Now the core idea of this venn is that there are only 4 types of people most of us will encounter in life. And at work :

And it would save you and me immense future trouble, stress and grief if we did 4 things well going forward :

a. Learn to correctly and quicky slot the people we meet into these 4 slots – a real but NOT an easy skill. Errors are inevitable.

b. Do everything possible to limit our time with type 3s and 4s in your life.

c. Understand that all Type 3s and 4s are wily chameleons and will try to pass themselves off as Type 2s and a scarily large number succeed at it. This is at the root of the whole problem.

d. Deliberately seek out a few Type 1s – Because they are the BEST people to get good feedback from (even better than Type 2s because they don’t care about appearing kind. And good genuine useful hard feedback rarely is or feels ‘KIND‘ – see the Jobs anecdote below)

Now each of the above takes some hard thinking and harder doing but for now lets just aim to understand why doing ‘B’ above will it be harder than you think ?

Note : If you stop reading NOW, you will have gotten the main point and value of this essay. Everything below is ‘extra’.

Odds are you are working in a nice cushy corporate job if you are reading this blog. Or at least that is what the wordpress analytics is telling me. And the corporate ladder’s top half is thoroughly greased with a slippery ‘anti niceness’ oil whose explicit purpose is to weed out type 1 and 2. So if you work in a typical company (and most of us do) then you very likely are dealing with 3s and 4s all day long. Because they tend to be in senior roles, having being unaffected by the anti niceness oil encountered on the climb up the ladder. Think Dilbert’s Pointy Haired Boss, Catbert and CEO characters. David Graeber’s bullshit job hypothesis also hints at the vital need to appear ‘NICE’. Bullshit jobs are non essential by definition and so being collegial is critical for survival since one is essentially dispensable in the BS factory.

One (of many) reasons this is so is because Hard Necessary Decisions at inflection points of a firms life are made easier by Type 3 and 4. Type 1 and 2 hesitate and stall because hard choices hurts stakeholders and that sits poorly with them. They care.  

Also Type 4s are NOT the proverbial villains I might have inadvertently implied. You know who a famous type 4 was ? Steve Jobs. And look where he got Apple.

Being nice is based on mood. Being kind & good is based on principle. A kind person will be brutally honest with you when it is warranted and give you accurate feedback if s/he is your boss. A nice person will sugarcoat. Sugar coating removes the essence of good feedback. Like getting served non alcoholic beer or eggless sugarless cake at a terrible party. Honesty trumps Niceness when improvement is the goal and work and life is all, ideally, the pursuit of getting good real feedback and improving. Maturity implies a preference for plain truths over gilded illusions. Kind dishes that.

(A fantastic anecdote about Steve Jobs’s related to his reputation for being a hard boss and doling out merciless criticism was notorious. His Head of Design Jony Ive (a design legend), years ago, after seeing his fellow colleagues crushed, protested to Jobs. “You can’t be this nasty in your feedback Steve!” And Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like YOU.” … “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback!“)

So being ‘Type 4’ is not all evil laughter and villainy. Its sometimes needed to get the (steve) job done. (See what I did there….also I now suspect Jobs was a Type 1 but wrongly labeled a Type 4 because it made for a better story in the press)

The application in MY (and hopefully YOUR) life of this simple model

Now you can’t choose your relatives and most times you can’t even choose your work colleagues either. But the good news : You CAN choose your friends. And a good use of this model is to carefully assess and then filter out everyone who you suspect is a type 3 or 4. And at work, be wary of them. Limit exposure, avoid entanglements where possible.

And it won’t be easy.

a] ….Because YOU are not a Type 3 or 4 (I do hope)

b] …..Type 4s (Sociopaths 😈) tend to be quite smart and phenomenally good a disguising themselves as a Type 2. Even better than Type 3s. They are world class chameleons.

c] without a long enough relationship you can never confidently know why someone’s type IS. We don’t know how Nice or Kind someone is until they don’t have to be. You need good data and good data takes time to accumulate.

But the reward in the end is worth it. A life surrounded with trustworthy KIND people who are NOT faking it. That’s a worthy goal! You should start by ‘Always be a little kinder than necessary.’