The Pentathlon Mindset

George Patton nearly drowned in the swimming leg.

It was July 1912, the Stockholm Olympics, and the twenty-six-year-old Army lieutenant was competing in the first modern pentathlon ever held at the Games. He had already fired his pistol, fenced, and ridden an unfamiliar horse over obstacles. Now he was in the pool for the 300-meter swim, and by the time he touched the wall he was so spent that officials had to pull him from the water with a boathook. He went on to run the 4,000-meter cross-country course anyway, staggered through the last fifty meters, and collapsed at the finish line. He finished fifth overall, behind four Swedes, in a field of thirty-two competitors from ten nations.

Nobody remembers who won that race. Everyone who knows the story remembers Patton.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin was a French educator who believed that athletic competition could do what diplomacy often could not — build character across national lines and give nations something better to do than go to war with each other. He spent years lobbying the international sporting community before finally reviving the ancient Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, the first modern Olympics in fifteen centuries. He ran the International Olympic Committee for nearly three decades after that. By 1912, when Stockholm hosted what many considered the first truly successful modern Games, Coubertin had both the credibility and the platform to introduce a new event built entirely around his own philosophy of what an athlete should be. He designed the modern pentathlon with a specific soldier in mind, not the best marksman in the army, or the fastest runner, or the most decorated equestrian. He wanted to test what he called the complete soldier: the officer who could ride an unfamiliar horse into enemy territory, fight his way out with a sword, shoot his way clear with a pistol, swim a river, and run the rest of the way to deliver his message on foot. The whole package. No single skill wins. The whole package wins.

Coubertin's phrase for the ideal athlete was débrouillard, the resourceful one, the person who figures it out. Not the best at any one thing. The one who handles whatever comes next.

I have thought about that word most of my adult life without knowing it had a name.

A few years back, an online dating questionnaire asked what Olympic event I would most want to win a gold medal in. I answered the modern pentathlon without hesitation. My reasoning was straightforward: I liked that it was eclectic, not a traditional American team sport, that it rewarded both physical and mental discipline simultaneously, and that the jack-of-all-trades aspect was very appealing to me. I wrote that I fenced in college, liked cross-country skiing, and had been a decent runner, but I had also played lacrosse, hockey, and baseball, which were team sports, so I ruled them out.

Re-reading that answer now, I think I was describing something deeper than an athletic preference. I was describing the way I am wired.

I did not plan to spend my career in higher education fundraising. I arrived at UCI in the mid-1980s planning to be an aerospace engineer, changed my major to political science and economics my senior year, moved from California to Boston, then to the Midwest, eventually back to California, and back to the East Coast again. I turned down a policy analyst position in Sacramento because the pay was untenable, and ended up taking a job in the development office at UCI because a man I met in an interview saw something worth trying. That first position required me to understand the university's mission well enough to determine how strangers' interests relate to the mission, manage relationships with very different kinds of people, and solve organizational problems with no obvious precedent. None of those things were on my engineering syllabus.

What followed was twenty years of adding legs to the pentathlon. I managed IT departments, special events teams, accounting staff, and alumni communications under the same organizational umbrella. I coached youth baseball while leading a Scout troop. I flew small planes for a while and sailed when I could. I read history for pleasure and studied it seriously enough that it changed how I think. None of these things appear on the same résumé line. All of them turned out to matter.

The pentathlon athlete cannot afford to love any single discipline so much that the others suffer. The fencer who trains ten hours a day and neglects the swim will finish well down the leaderboard no matter how elegant his footwork. The same goes for the manager who knows his software cold but cannot read a room, or the parent who coaches flawlessly but forgets to just sit with his kid.

There is a particular frustration that comes with this kind of mind, and I should be honest about it. Specialists get to be the best at something. The person who does one thing with total dedication eventually becomes the authority, the go-to, the name people call. The generalist is rarely that person. He is usually the one called when the specialist's answer does not quite fit the problem.

That is a harder identity to carry. It requires making peace with being very good at a wide range of things and probably not the best at any of them. If you are wired to achieve, to produce, to check the box at the end of every day, the pentathlon mindset can feel like a permanent state of almost. Five disciplines, none of them mastered.

My son Teddy was wired the opposite way, and I say that with nothing but admiration.

From the time he could grip a bat, baseball was it. He played Little League, Babe Ruth, travel ball — spring, summer, fall, and winter, which is entirely possible when you grow up in Southern California. He messed around with a soccer ball for a season or two, picked up one of my lacrosse sticks a handful of times. But he always came back to the diamond. It was neither indecision nor a lack of curiosity. It was love. Pure, durable love for one thing.

He was good enough that the choice paid off. Not just statistically good, but genuinely good. The kind of good that comes from ten thousand hours freely given because the ten thousand hours never felt like work.

In his senior year of high school, he mentioned for the first time that he wished he had tried another sport competitively. By then the calendar had run out on that particular door. I understood the feeling, the wistful glance at the road not taken, but I never thought he had made the wrong call. He had found his discipline early and gone deep. That is its own form of courage.

I have thought about that difference between us more than once. He was built for the pentathlon no more than I was built for one event. We were just built differently. Neither of us had it wrong.

Patton apparently felt this acutely. After Stockholm, he threw himself into fencing with obsessive focus. He hired a French maître d'armes for private instruction and trained harder than anyone on the post. His fencing improved dramatically. What he could not do — what the pentathlon's design would not allow — was let that improvement define him at the expense of everything else. The event kept pulling him back to the whole.

Thirty years later, the pentathlon mindset showed up in a Belgian crossroads town called Bastogne.

It was December 1944. The Germans had punched through Allied lines in the Ardennes in what would become the Battle of the Bulge, encircling the 101st Airborne Division and threatening to split the American and British forces entirely. When Eisenhower convened an emergency commanders' conference at Verdun on December 19, most of the men in the room were still trying to understand what had happened. Patton was not. He stood up and told the assembled generals he could attack with three divisions in forty-eight hours. Eisenhower's deputy barely suppressed a laugh. Omar Bradley told him to give himself some leeway. Patton said he could start as soon as he left the meeting.

He kept the promise. Within forty-eight hours he had wheeled the entire Third Army, more than 250,000 men and hundreds of tanks, ninety degrees from an eastward campaign in the Saar, over icy roads in the worst winter weather in fifty years, and driven north into the German flank. His 4th Armored Division broke through to Bastogne on December 26, ending the siege. By January 16 the Bulge was sealed.

What made the promise credible, even though it sounded like theater, was that Patton had seen it coming. His intelligence officer, Colonel Oscar Koch, had briefed him on December 9 about a suspicious concentration of German panzer divisions that had gone quiet on the Third Army's front. Koch told Patton the enemy was favored if they struck. Patton's response was to keep his Frankfurt offensive on track and quietly order his staff to begin sketching contingency plans for exactly this scenario. When the Germans hit on December 16, Patton already had the maps drawn. The pivot that stunned every other commander in Europe had been sitting in a folder for a week.

Patton understood something about the men around him that made the whole thing possible. He said it plainly: "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."

Koch had surprised him. Given a mission and the latitude to pursue it, the colonel found what no other Allied intelligence officer was looking for — and handed Patton the week he needed.

That is not battlefield improvisation. That is the débrouillard in full: see the whole board before anyone else does, run the scenarios while others are still focused on the objective in front of them, and be ready to deliver the message on foot when the horse goes down.

I took a professional strengths assessment a couple of years ago, the kind that identifies where your natural talents cluster. My top five came back: Strategic, Achiever, Ideation, Responsibility, Intellection. Three different domains represented in five results. My mind apparently investigates possibilities, produces output, generates connections between disparate things, takes psychological ownership of commitments, and keeps a constant internal hum of reflection running in the background.

Reading those results, I recognized the pentathlon immediately. Not one domain. Not one discipline. Five distinct capabilities from three different areas, all pulling toward the same finish line.

The Gallup description of Ideation stopped me cold. It said people with this talent are fascinated by ideas because they can find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. That is the pentathlon in a sentence. The whole sport exists because a 19th-century Frenchman looked at shooting, fencing, swimming, riding, and running and saw that they were not five unrelated things. They were one thing: a soldier who could handle whatever came next.

I think about this when I think about what I want to pass along to my grandchildren. The world they are growing up in is ferociously good at identifying and rewarding specialization early. Schools sort children by aptitude. Algorithms serve them more of what they already engage with. Travel teams recruit eight-year-olds and develop that one skill relentlessly.

What I hope for them is not that they resist any of that. If one of them finds a diamond the way Teddy did, I want them to run toward it with everything they have. What I hope is that they get enough exposure first. Enough different horses to ride, enough cold rivers to consider, so that when they do commit, they know it is the right thing and not just the first thing.

Some of them will go deep. Some will go wide. The pentathlon does not require everyone to compete.

Patton collapsed at the finish line in Stockholm. He got up. He went to France. He won the war.

The pentathlon did not beat him. It made him.

The Right Galaxy for the Right Movie (REVIEW)

The Mandalorian and Grogu
Directed by Jon Favreau

My rating: 3¾ of 5 stars

My step-daughter gifted me the ticket. She knows I am a fan of old-school Star Wars and figured I'd appreciate the excuse to go. She was right. To be honest, after The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, I have felt like Disney Star Wars has something to prove to me. The good news is that I just needed a good seat so they could show me the proof.

Favreau and Filoni earned real goodwill with the first two seasons of The Mandalorian on Disney+. They took a franchise that had lost its footing and reminded everyone what Star Wars could feel like when the people making it cared about character. Season three was uneven. The show spread itself thin and lost the intimacy that made the early episodes work. But the foundation they built was solid. I walked in with that history in mind.

The movie delivers. However, if you read the critical reception, you'd think that was somehow a problem.

The complaints run together after a while. Too simple. Low stakes. Doesn't advance the larger story. My answer to each: that was the design. This film wasn't built to carry franchise weight. It was built to spend two hours with characters audiences already love and give those characters something worth doing. Judging it against The Empire Strikes Back is like penalizing a relief pitcher for not throwing nine innings. He came in, threw strikes, and did the job he was asked to do.

The sequel trilogy is worth a brief detour, because the contrast matters. Those three films were genuinely trying to move the story forward, to land a forty-year franchise, to satisfy an impossible set of competing demands. Together they felt like a franchise committee that couldn't agree on a direction. The seams showed badly. The Mandalorian & Grogu carries none of that. It knows what it is.

Pedro Pascal plays Din Djarin with the same constrained warmth that made the first two seasons work. Favreau pushed him further here, and the physicality shows. Where Din Djarin operates from stillness and economy, the Hutt Twins fill every room they're in. Jabba's cousins, massive and imperious, they operate from a palace on Nal Hutta with the casual cruelty of people who have never once doubted their own importance. Their scheme is a double-cross layered inside a favor. They send Mando to rescue Rotta while planning to have him deliver the boy straight into a trap. When that unravels, they don't rage. They pivot to humiliation, forcing Din's helmet off in front of his captors because they know exactly what it costs him. It's a deliberate act, and it hits harder knowing that Season 3 was largely about Din redeeming himself for a previous helmet removal. That's smart villain writing. They're not just obstacles. They understand their enemy well enough to hurt him in the right place.

Favreau built the entire film for the largest available screen, designing shots using an Apple Vision Pro app that simulated the full IMAX aspect ratio on set. It shows. AT-ATs on an ice planet. A gladiator pit on Nal Hutta. Over half the film expands to fill the IMAX frame, and those are the sequences that justify the trip to the theater. Then there's Sigourney Weaver. She plays Colonel Ward, a former Rebel Alliance fighter pilot now operating inside the New Republic, and she hadn't even watched the show before Favreau called. She watched it, fell in love with it, and signed on. That matters. Weaver built her career on the best science fiction has produced: Alien, Avatar, Galaxy Quest. Serious actors don't attach themselves to projects they don't believe in. Favreau knew exactly what her presence would signal. When someone with that résumé shows up in your Star Wars movie, it tells the audience that the people making it are trying to get things right.

The part that stayed with me came in the second act, when Mando is poisoned, and Grogu takes over.

Three seasons of television, four if you count The Book of Boba Fett, built on one dynamic: the Mandalorian protects the child. Din Djarin finds Grogu, loses him, gets him back, and spends most of the series putting himself between that small green creature and everything trying to harm him. Then Mando takes a wound from a Dragonsnake and tells Grogu to leave. Grogu doesn't. He stays behind, hides his father, and goes looking for a remedy on his own, finding it through a stranger willing to help. When the roles reverse, and Grogu has to show up, to act, to refuse the order to go, the film earns something no plot mechanic could manufacture. Favreau and Filoni built toward that moment across two seasons. The movie is where it lands.

Grogu's growth doesn't feel sudden. It feels accumulated. He's been learning slowly over years of storytelling. The second act isn't a twist. It's a recognition. You're watching a character arrive somewhere he's been heading for a long time.

There's something familiar in that feeling. Pride mixed with surprise when someone you've watched grow up handles a hard moment without being asked. The relationship between Din Djarin and Grogu has always been built on a sense of parenthood more than anything else. When Grogu refuses to leave, you recognize something true: you don't raise someone and then get to be surprised when they show up.

Any parent watching that second act knows exactly what Favreau is reaching for. You spend years being the one who protects. Then the child grows into someone who protects back. Judge a thing for what it set out to do. That's always been my rule. But this film reminded me it applies to people too. Not an accident. That's the whole point of raising someone.

Is The Mandalorian & Grogu a great film? No. The plot is thin in places, but it doesn't pretend otherwise. However, it's a solid one. The bar was a summer movie that rewards years of investment in these characters. It clears that bar.

For most of the critics who've piled on, that wasn't enough. I think they were judging the wrong thing.

The Mandalorian & Grogu set out to make you care about two characters you already loved, earn a moment of real growth, and send you back into the summer heat feeling like it was worth your afternoon. This blog has always been about showing up: for the people you love, for the stories worth telling, for the moments that matter even when nobody's keeping score. Grogu showed up for his father when it counted. That's the whole point.

Read more of my reviews.

The Principle We Keep Forgetting

Birthdays have a way of making me philosophical, whether I want them to or not. This one, I'm sitting in my office on a Friday, the building is quiet with almost no one here, and I can't shake the feeling that the number on my cake keeps pulling me toward a harder question about the country we're living in right now.

We're in a semiquincentennial year. In less than three months, America turns 250. There are parades being planned, a Navy fleet review scheduled for New York Harbor on the Fourth of July, baseball's All-Star Game booked for Philadelphia, the cradle of the whole thing. The bunting is going up. The speeches are being written. And underneath all of that, if you're paying attention, a harder question keeps trying to get a word in edgewise.

What, exactly, are we celebrating?

On June 4, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood before the graduating class of the United States Naval Academy and said something that, in a different era, might have seemed too obvious to bother saying. He reminded those young officers, men who had deliberately chosen a life of service, that American democracy rested on three things: personal liberty, human rights, and the dignity of man.

Three things. Not a party platform. Not a policy agenda. Three principles that Ike believed were so foundational, so basic (to use his word), that they were the binding matter of our entire civilization.

That quote has been following me around. The third one is what stops me.

The dignity of man.

Liberty gets the speeches. Rights get the lawsuits. But dignity? Dignity just quietly sits there, the least defended of the three, and the one we seem most willing to erode without even noticing we've done it.

What gives that observation its weight is what Eisenhower had actually seen. He commanded armies against a regime that had decided, systematically and with great bureaucratic thoroughness, that certain categories of people did not possess dignity. That those people's lives did not have weight. That their suffering was acceptable, or irrelevant, or frankly useful. He had walked through what that looks like at the end: the liberated camps, the skeletal survivors, the scale of what happens when the dignity of man is removed from the list of non-negotiables. And then he went home, became president, and thirteen years later stood in front of a graduating class and said: remember, this is basic. This is the foundation. Don't lose it. He wasn't being rhetorical. He was being precise. The man had receipts.

I've visited the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, with my daughter. Two self-avowed history nerds on something close to a pilgrimage, en route to Philadelphia, where she was starting medical school. I remember standing in front of a display about Ike's farewell address and feeling the particular weight that comes from being in a place where someone's actual life is laid out in front of you. His letters. His mother's Bible. His uniform. The library sits right there in Eisenhower's hometown, modest and serious, very much like the man it honors.

What struck me then, and what strikes me even more now as this anniversary year unfolds, is the gap between the man and the moment we're living in. Eisenhower was not a perfect president, and he would have been the first to say so. But he understood something that feels almost quaint in the current political climate: that the people on the other side of an argument are still people. That disagreement doesn't require dehumanization. That you can fight hard for what you believe and still, at the end of it, extend the basic courtesy of acknowledging another person's dignity.

I don't think that's where we are right now.

This spring, the United Nations' top human rights official issued a formal warning about what he called the "growing dehumanization" of migrants in the United States. Federal agents are conducting immigration enforcement operations in hospitals, schools, and churches. Parents are detained without information about where they're being held, leaving children at home uncertain whether they'll come back. The UN High Commissioner described his astonishment at the "routine abuse and denigration" that has become, in his words, normal. Amnesty International, preparing for the World Cup that comes to this country in June, characterized what it found here as a "human rights emergency."

I'm not going to turn this into a policy argument. That's not what this is. You can hold a dozen different views on immigration law and enforcement and the proper role of the federal government, and reasonable people do. What you can't do is look at a child wondering where their parent is and conclude that the person who was taken doesn't possess dignity. That their suffering is an acceptable variable in someone else's political equation. Eisenhower had seen that logic carried to its endpoint. That's why he stood up in front of those officers in 1958 and said: remember, this is basic. Don't lose it.

And yet that's the direction the drift seems to be going, and not just on immigration. Freedom House just recorded the nineteenth consecutive year of global decline in democratic freedom. Politicians now aim the word "enemies" at fellow citizens with increasing ease. People get sorted into categories of the worthy and the unworthy, the real Americans and the not-quite-Americans, with the line shifting depending on who's drawing it that week. We're preparing to celebrate 250 years of a republic built on the proposition that all men are created equal, and the conversation underneath the bunting has a very different character.

Years ago, I lost someone I cared deeply about to a sudden illness. Yoko had been my assistant for nearly a decade: my partner, my protector, my work mom, and my dear friend. When she died without warning, the absence she left was enormous, and one of the things I kept bumping into in the grief was how much of what she gave me was simply the daily, unremarkable gift of being treated with dignity. She saw the whole person, not just the professional. She anticipated what I needed before I knew I needed it. She made room for me to be a complete human being at work, flawed and tired and occasionally very wrong about things. I remember one afternoon, in the middle of a stretch when I was running on empty and short with everyone around me, she set a bottle of Coke Zero on my desk without a word and closed the door on her way out. No commentary. No judgment. Just the quiet signal that she saw what was happening, and it was okay. That's what dignity looks like when it's not performing.

That's a small-scale version of what Eisenhower was describing. Not grand declarations, but the practice of it. The daily decision to treat the people around you as people, not as obstacles or instruments or demographic categories or enemies, but as human beings who possess the same irreducible worth you'd like to think you possess yourself.

When I think about what made Yoko extraordinary, it wasn't that she agreed with me. She didn't, plenty of times. It's that she never let a disagreement become a diminishment. There's a whole leadership philosophy hiding in that sentence, and I've spent years trying to live up to it.

Eisenhower was speaking specifically to officers, men who would spend their careers ordering others into harm's way and, when necessary, being ordered there themselves. The military understands that the person beside you, the person under your command, is not interchangeable. Their life has weight. Their suffering is real. Mission, hierarchy, and discipline are all essential, but they function, at their best, in service of people. Not the other way around.

On this birthday, I think about what I've tried to pass on. Not the obvious lessons, which are easy to name. The quieter ones. The ones I hope stick, even though I'm never quite sure they did.

When Ted was pitching Little League one afternoon and struggling, I walked out to the mound in the wrong mood and said exactly the wrong thing. I was so focused on the performance that I momentarily forgot the person. He knew it. I knew it. We've laughed about it since, but the lesson went in deep, into me more than into him. Parenting teaches you, over and over again, that dignity isn't a reward you hand out when someone has earned it. It's the starting condition. You begin from a place of respect and work from there, through the hard conversations and the disappointments and the long silences and the sudden unexpected moments of grace.

That's what I want my kids to understand, and what I've tried to model, not always successfully. That dignity isn't something you perform for an audience. It's something you practice when no one is watching. When it's inconvenient. When you're losing the argument. When the other person hasn't, by your estimation, done anything to deserve it.

We've become quite skilled, as a culture, at winning arguments. We're much worse at keeping the person intact while we do it. The argument can be correct, and the relationship still irreparably damaged. We announce our commitments to human rights while treating the specific humans before us as props in our own narrative.

Ike's three principles are worth reading in order. Liberty is what we're free to do. Rights are what we're protected from. But dignity is what makes the other two mean anything at all. Without it, liberty becomes license and rights become weapons. Dignity is the premise, the thing you have to believe about a person before any of the rest of it holds.

In three months, we're going to stand in Philadelphia and celebrate 250 years of a country founded on the idea that certain truths are self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed with rights that can't be taken away. That's worth celebrating. It's also worth asking, on a birthday in a semiquincentennial year in a spring that feels more complicated than most, whether we still believe it. Not as a slogan. As a practice. As a daily choice about how we treat the person in front of us, regardless of where they came from or what side of the line they're on.

I drove through Abilene on a hot July afternoon with my daughter, taking photos as memories, and I lingered in the room with Eisenhower's letters longer than she probably wanted to. There's something in those letters, in the care of the language and the attention to the person being addressed, that you don't see much of anymore. A five-star general writing to a grieving mother with the same deliberate respect he'd bring to a letter to a head of state. He called it basic. He was right. It's also, apparently, the hardest thing in the world. 

But it's not nostalgia. It's a standard. One we set for ourselves once, and can set again.

—

"Basic to our democratic civilization are the principles and convictions that have bound us together as a nation. Among these are personal liberty, human rights, and the dignity of man."

— President Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. Naval Academy Commencement, June 4, 1958

The Uncomfortable Truth About Human Stupidity: Why Mom Was Right All Along

A few weeks ago, a former colleague reached out to thank me for serving as a reference for his new position. After the pleasantries, he gently mentioned that he'd noticed I haven't posted anything on my blog in a few months. "Everything okay?" he wrote. "Just busy, or have you run out of things to complain about?"

He had a point. It's been a while. But if I'm being honest, I haven't run out of material—far from it. Life has a way of continuously validating certain uncomfortable truths, and lately I've been thinking a lot about one particular truth that my mother tried to teach me years ago.

Mom used to tell my siblings and me, something to the effect of: If you remember that people are dumb, you will never be disappointed...

That Mom-proverb coupled with one of her other favorites: If common-sense were common, it wouldn't be so valuable...

These Mom-proverbs have always stuck with me. I know she told us those things because she was trying to convey that she believed we were each smart and "above average." While I realize, in some respects, these sentiments are rooted in the Lake Wobegon effect, I've never really forgotten her wisdom. Whether that was dealing with Little League parents who treated six-year-old tee ball like Game 7 of the World Series, bosses who make arbitrary "design" requests, or colleagues who believe that "office transparency" means they have to know everything about everything, Mom's observations have proven remarkably prescient.

What I didn't realize until recently is that my mother had essentially distilled the essence of what Italian economist Carlo M. Cipolla would later formalize in his book "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity." While presented with academic rigor, Cipolla's work arrives at conclusions that would make my Mom nod knowingly.

Why Experience Keeps Proving Mom Right

Cipolla identified five laws that explain why stupidity is both more prevalent and more dangerous than we assume. His insights perfectly capture what I've witnessed throughout many of my career and volunteer experiences.

Early experiments in transportation
Far Side - ©1984 Gary Larson

Cipolla's first law states that we always underestimate the number of stupid people out there. Every time I think I've seen it all, someone proves me wrong. Like the parents who sent me long emails, accusations of favoritism, and ultimatums about pulling their kids from Little League when I was president. Why? Because their 10-year-old only played three innings instead of four in a recreational game. These weren't isolated incidents; these parents were convinced their child's future athletic scholarship was on the line…in Little League. Meanwhile, their kids just wanted to have fun playing baseball, but the parents had transformed what should have been a developmental experience into high-stakes drama that served no one. Mom would have just nodded and said, "What did you expect?"

The second law reveals that stupidity strikes randomly. Intelligence, education, or position don't provide immunity. Consider the university colleague whom I've shown six times in one month how to sum a column of numbers in Excel. Six times, using the same basic function. This isn't about learning curves or complex software; it is about someone who uses spreadsheets daily but refuses to retain the most fundamental operation. Credentials don't protect anyone from poor judgment of lack of effort.

Cipolla's third law cuts to the heart of why stupidity is so destructive: stupid people cause harm to others while gaining nothing themselves, often even hurting themselves in the process. In 2024, this played out perfectly with rural farmers. America's most farming-dependent counties overwhelmingly backed Donald Trump in last year's election; his support averaged 77.7% in America's breadbasket. American farmers were convinced that Trump's policies would protect their economic interests. (Felder, 2024), (Atkinson, 2024) Yet when the new administration began implementing mass deportation policies in early 2025, these same agricultural communities found themselves in crisis. "We are dangerously close to a breaking point," and "Farmers and other employers say they worry their workers will be deported" became common refrains as the very workforce these farmers depended on faced removal. The agricultural sector, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump, now pleads for exemptions from the policies that they helped elect him to implement. Simultaneously harming immigrant communities, damaging their own economic prospects, and undermining the agricultural system that feeds our nation—all while achieving none of their stated goals of economic prosperity. (Chishti & Bush-Joseph, 2025), (Rahman, 2025)

The fourth law warns that reasonable people consistently underestimate the damage that foolish people can cause. We assume rationality will eventually prevail, that obvious problems will self-correct, and that someone will step in before things get too bad. Instead, systems are designed by committee, and processes are implemented that prioritize appearance over function, like fixing font preferences. At the same time, actual problems go unaddressed, and organizations create processes for the 20 percent of exceptional cases rather than optimizing for the 80 percent that matter most. Looking back on my volunteer Little League experience, parents spent countless hours debating rules for edge cases, uniform policies, practice schedules, and "rules loophole" scenarios—while the 80 percent that mattered, like ensuring kids actually learned baseball and had fun, became a theater of adult insecurity, robbing their children of joy and development.

Cipolla's fifth law delivers the stark conclusion: stupid people are the most dangerous because their actions are both harmful and unpredictable. You can understand and work around people who act out of greed or malice; their motivations make sense, even if you disagree with them. However, the truly dangerous person is the one whose decisions follow no logical pattern you can anticipate or counter. They're not trying to gain an advantage; they're just creating chaos while everyone else tries to make sense of senseless behavior. Like the executive who insisted I drop everything to change fonts on thirty reports because "that's the font he prefers reading internal reports in." Not because the data was wrong, not because the formatting was unclear, just because he had a font preference. Meanwhile, I'm trying to find and fix actual data errors, but font aesthetics have become the urgent priority. There's no rational framework for predicting when someone will prioritize arbitrary preferences over actual problems — you just have to build systems robust enough to survive the inevitable disruption.

The Digital Amplification Effect

What makes these laws particularly relevant today is how our interconnected world amplifies stupidity's reach. Social media platforms reward engagement over accuracy, creating perfect conditions for Cipolla's predictions to manifest at scale. Misinformation spreads faster than corrections, conspiracy theories find fertile ground in confirmation bias, and complex problems get reduced to soundbites that satisfy our need for simple answers to complicated questions.

The rapid spread of obviously false information during major news events demonstrates how we consistently underestimate both the number of people who will believe nonsense and their ability to influence others. Mom's wisdom about disappointment becomes prophetic. If you expect rational responses to obvious facts, you'll be let down every single time.

Living with the Reality

I don't mean to be cynical or misanthropic. Acknowledging the prevalence of stupidity isn't about looking down on others, and indeed, I have fallen into this very trap on occasion. Instead, understanding the phenomena is about managing expectations and preparing for reality. When I remember Mom's advice, I'm less likely to be blindsided by poor decisions in group settings, more likely to build redundancy into my plans, and better equipped to respond constructively when things go sideways.

My goal isn't to make you jaded, but to have you become realistic. By accepting that stupidity is not just common but predictable, we can all design systems that account for it, we can communicate in ways that minimize its impact, and maintain our own sanity when confronted with its inevitable manifestations.

Mom helped prepare me, my brother, and my sisters for a world where critical thinking is rare, good intentions don't guarantee good outcomes, and the phrase "I can't believe they did that" loses its power to shock. She wanted us to be ready to be wise, not bitter, not cynical.

Turns out she was teaching us Cipolla's laws decades before I'd ever heard of them. Sometimes the most profound truths come wrapped in the simplest packages, delivered by the people who love us most and want us to be prepared for the world as it actually is, not as we wish it were.

Common sense really isn't all that common. And if you remember that people act dumb, you really will never be disappointed.

You'll just be prepared. Thanks, Mom!

---

References:

• Atkinson, M. (2024, November 7). "Rural America sent Trump back to the White House. Flip in Clarendon County helps explain why." Post and Courier. Link
• Chishti, M. & Bush-Joseph, K. (2025, April 25). "In First 100 Days, Trump 2.0 Has Dramatically Reshaped the U.S. Immigration System, but Is Not Meeting Mass Deportation Aims." Migration Information Source. Link
• Felder, B. (2024, November 13). GRAPHIC: "Trump support grew in America’s top farming counties despite first-term trade war." Investigate Midwest. Link
• Rahman, B. (2025, April 29). "Trump’s mass deportations are pushing US farms to breaking point." Newsweek. Link

The Light for Which Many Have Died

Memorial Day 2025

I always return to Memorial Day not only as a moment of remembrance, but as a reminder of responsibility. If you've read my earlier reflections on the quiet lessons of cemeteries, the fraying threads of our civic fabric, or the unfinished work we inherit as citizens, you know I believe history isn't just something we study; it's something we carry. Memorial Day forces me to stop scrolling and actually think. Not just about the dead, but about what I'm doing with what they left me. Am I building something worth their sacrifice? When I vote, when I speak up, when I choose how to spend an ordinary Tuesday - am I honoring what they died for, or am I just coasting?

There is a quiet place in the heart of Philadelphia, bracketed by trees and hemmed in by the rhythm of the city. Washington Square was once a burial ground, then a grazing field, later a parade ground, ultimately holding, beneath its grass, the remains of thousands of unnamed soldiers who fought for the fragile, radical idea of American independence.

No headstones. No names. Just grass and the weight of knowing they're down there.

The flame flickers above them, and carved into stone are words that won't leave me alone: 

"Freedom is a light for which many men have died in darkness."

That line has settled in my head this year. It feels like a whisper from the past, growing louder as the headlines grow noisier.

These men died in obscurity, in suffering, in the confusion and chaos of a war that had not yet produced a nation. They died not for a flag or a president or a party, but for an idea, half-born, fragile, and still unproven: that people could govern themselves.

They did not live to see if it would work. They gave their lives for a future they could not claim, only imagine.

We are that future.

And the question we must ask this Memorial Day is not merely, "Do we remember them?" but rather, "Are we worthy of them?"

Because freedom's light still burns, but it flickers.

In recent months, I've felt it dim in the distance, dulled by cynicism, selfishness, and a national attention span grown brittle. We argue more than we understand. We scroll more than we serve. We mock before we mourn. I'm as guilty as anyone. I check my phone for election updates the way I used to check baseball scores. We treat politics like some kind of reality show, who's winning, who's losing, who said what stupid thing today. My dad did it, my neighbors do it, I do it. But when I stood in that square, looking at that flame, it hit me: those guys didn't bleed out in some field so we could turn their gift into cable news drama. They died for something more challenging and less exciting: the daily grind of citizens actually governing themselves.

History doesn't just happen; we write it, one vote, one conversation, one choice at a time. It is written by hands like ours, in ballot booths and classrooms, in boardrooms and around kitchen tables. The soldiers in Washington Square died without knowing who would take up the work. That task was left to us.

George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address, reminded the country:

“The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and success.”

It was true then. It remains true now.

This Memorial Day, we are called not only to decorate graves, but to defend ideals. To honor the dead not just with flags and flowers, but with action, with civic learning, civil dialogue, and a renewed belief that our shared work is still unfinished and still worth doing.

Because if freedom is a light, then we must be its keepers.

And if others have died in darkness to bring us this light, let us not extinguish it with our indifference. Let us carry it forward, however imperfectly, however urgently, so that future generations might look back and say:

They remembered.

They were worthy.

Washing Clothes, Reading History, and Rethinking the Constitution (REVIEW)

The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789
by Joseph J. Ellis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I moved from Boise to Syracuse, I figured I'd run into a few bumps, unpacking chaos, hunting down new grocery stores, and learning to live with colder, wetter weather. What I didn't see coming was life without a washer and dryer. My trusty electric dryer, after years of faithfully tumbling load after load, turned out to be useless in a place that runs almost entirely on natural gas. Now it's stuck in a storage unit across town, probably wondering what it did to deserve exile, which is how, one Saturday, I ended up at the local laundromat—basket of dirty clothes in hand and a faint whiff of nostalgia in the air.

After jockeying for a dryer and realizing I'd forgotten both my Bounce sheets and my earbuds (rookie mistake), I did what any self-respecting person without a podcast would do: I wandered around the laundromat. That's when I stumbled upon a weathered Little Free Library tucked beside the soda machine. Most of the offerings were exactly what you'd expect: Go Dog Go!, a few romance novels missing their covers, and Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul. But sandwiched between them was something unexpected: The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution by Joseph J. Ellis. I have no idea if someone meant to leave it there or if a cat lover just happened to be into the Founding Fathers, but I grabbed it. As my clothes tumbled around me, I found myself drawn into a story about revolution and the struggle to keep a country together when everything's falling apart.

In The Quartet, Ellis turns his considerable talents to the underexplored period between the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a stretch of time often glossed over in high school textbooks. His thesis is simple but profound: that the actual founding of the United States as a unified nation happened not in 1776, but between 1783 and 1789. And it wasn't the result of some grand inevitability, but of the determined efforts of four key figures, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, who understood that liberty without structure was a recipe for collapse.

I studied The Federalist Papers and read Ketcham's The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates in college and have always considered myself fairly well-versed in the mechanics of the Constitutional Convention. I'll admit, I've tried dropping "Publius" into regular conversation a few times. Most people have no clue what I'm talking about. My friends just look at me like I dropped some random professor name at a cookout.

Ellis's book hit me differently, though. It felt messy and urgent in a way history books usually don't. No sanitized founding fathers nonsense. Just these guys scrambling around, making deals, staying up too late arguing about whether any of this would actually work. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jay: they weren't just standing around making grand speeches in some stuffy Philadelphia room. They were making deals, twisting arms, probably losing sleep, and doing whatever it took to convince a bunch of stubborn states to actually stick together instead of going their separate ways.

Ellis doesn't present these men as statues in a park. They're human: brilliant, flawed, and sometimes just plain stubborn, wrestling with the chaos of post-war America. Washington's steady presence and self-control become political weapons in their own right. Hamilton brings sharp financial thinking and a gift for verbal fireworks to the push for federal authority. Madison, the grinder of the group, is everywhere: crafting the Virginia Plan, pounding out the Federalist Papers, and shaping the Constitution's bones. And Jay, who usually gets the least fanfare, turns out to be the glue guy, quietly brokering peace, building trust, and lending the whole project legitimacy.

The unnerving part? It all feels too familiar. The stuff Ellis writes about sounds way too familiar. Political gridlock, sketchy alliances, everyone freaking out about big government taking over. You could swap out a few names and publish these stories in today's news. Yeah, people yell louder now (thanks, internet), but we're still having the exact same arguments: Should states call their own shots or should Washington be in charge? Do we go with what sounds good or what actually works? It's the same old fight between big ideas and the ugly reality of trying to run anything. Ellis doesn't sugarcoat it: our system wasn't built for speed or comfort. It was built for haggling, horse-trading, and keeping the whole messy thing from collapsing.

In the long run (and this was probably Madison's most creative insight), the multiple ambiguities embedded in the Constitution made it an inherently "living" document. For it was designed not to offer clear answers…but instead to provide a political arena in which arguments about those contested issues could continue in a deliberate fashion. (Ellis, p.174)

The whole idea that the Constitution wasn't supposed to be some set-in-stone rule book really hits different these days. Madison and the others knew people would keep arguing about what it all means, and that was the point. They built the argument on purpose. Which feels relevant when every big issue we face comes down to how you read the thing and whether anyone's willing to actually talk to people they disagree with.

What I loved about Ellis's book is how straightforward it is. Ellis cuts through the heroic glow that usually surrounds the Constitution's origin story and shows us the mess underneath. This wasn't the nation locking arms in perfect agreement. It was a bruising campaign waged by a stubborn minority convinced the American experiment needed sturdier bones if it was going to make it. On paper, the Articles of Confederation had a certain nobility. In practice, they left the country broke, politically unsteady, ignored on the world stage, and hanging together by a thread. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay saw what plenty of others didn't want to admit: the revolution hadn't tied up the story with a neat bow. It had kicked off a brand-new chapter, one that promised to be just as messy as the last.

Ellis walks us through the Philadelphia Convention, the state ratification battles, and the artful persuasion that made unity possible. He brings a historian's rigor to the narrative but writes with the accessibility of someone who wants his work to be read on park benches, in coffee shops, and yes, even in laundromats. His focus on character-driven storytelling makes the political feel personal, which is a good reminder that it always has been.

Reading this book while I was dealing with my own move and starting over made me think about how much work it takes to build anything that's going to last. Whether you're trying to make a new place feel like home, fit into a community, or keep a whole country from falling apart. Moving to a new city and starting over in a dozen different ways, I felt an unexpected connection to the story of four men trying to stitch together a brand-new country from a jumble of states that didn't always trust (or even like) each other. The whole thing reminded me that reinventing anything, whether it's a country or just yourself, takes more than big ideas. You need patience. You need to stick with it when things get messy. And you have to be willing to face some truths that make you squirm a little.

What Ellis really gets at in The Quartet is the idea of second chances. Not just for America back then, but for what America could be, or can be again. He shows how those founding principles we all learned about in school are only as strong as the people willing to fight for them. And honestly, given how chaotic our politics feel right now, there is something reassuring about reading how messy things were back then, too. The United States made it through that chaos, so perhaps we can figure out the current moment as well. Ultimately, it simply takes people willing to do the actual work instead of just yelling at each other.

If you come across The Quartet somewhere, maybe at one of those Little Free Libraries or on a shelf at your bookstore, pick it up. You'll walk away with more than just some historical facts. You might even remember why any of this stuff matters in the first place.

Read more of my reviews