Winning by Letting you Win
CFO
Welcome to Examining Competence. Thank you for reading. Before you get too far, I suggest you start from the first article if you’re joining us for the first time. Think of them more as chapters.
Following this timeline, we’re still in my early undergraduate years.
Not surprisingly, living in an Honors dorm, there were many nascent competent and Competent people. But this time I’d like to tell you about someone who always played at a higher level. He didn’t actually live in our dorm. A mutual friend, Aziz, met him during orientation and latched onto him. Aziz introduced him to me by saying there was someone I absolutely had to meet because he looked just like me (I will never allow Aziz to live that down, mostly because it’s eerily true). Aziz will be joining us in occasional vignettes. He was (is?) one of my closest college friends, and he introduced me to another, my could-be-a-lost-twin, Chris. We never called him Chris though because we had one or two of those, we called him CFO (pronounced sea-foe), short for “Chris from Ogg.” Ogg Hall being the tower dorm across from Sellery Hall where the rest of us lived.
Let me tell you why CFO is one of the best examples of Competence I know. To give a bit of background, CFO comes from a family of teachers, and he is a high school math teacher. By all accounts, a highly respected, successful, ingenious math teacher. His students are lucky to have him. I’m guessing his method involves teaching them math, really well, without the students realizing that’s what’s happening. Like they wake up at the end of the year knowing a lot of math and having worked really industriously at it, but they thought they were starting a business, or playing games, or building things in a makerspace.
What I’m saying is that while CFO is implicitly trustworthy, and honest, it is never a good idea to trust your sense of reality around him. That may be because CFO also comes from a family of carnies. His Dad during summers travelled with a carnival, operating an arcade, and CFO and his siblings did too. CFO has since branched out into different sorts of booths. He knows the entire business of a carnival and all of the ways it operates.
CFO has a brilliant ability to make life fun by crafting others’ perceptions. Suffice it to say that it’s fortunate for us all that CFO is inclined to the good, the “making life better for others” because if he wasn’t he would definitely be Jeff Bezos, or just full-on Lex Luthor, and we don’t need more of those.
So let me use CFO as an example of “the whole package” in a more concrete way. I’ll review a few of the specific competencies we’ve discussed so far and tell you how CFO has them locked:
Competent People strike while the iron is hot
CFO doesn’t need anything mundane like a “job.” His Magic: The Gathering holdings alone likely rival the GNP of a small country. CFO sees opportunities at the right moment (though admittedly the “moment” for Magic is now generations long, he was in quite early and saw the potential. CFO is usually the first to spot a trend and introduce others to it.) CFO’s instincts are second to none about when to hop on an opportunity.
Competent people notice when others need help, and they help effectively.
Though CFO cultivates a persona of detached good humor, he cares deeply about people. On a number of occasions I’ve had the chance to spot him quietly solving problems others of us were oblivious to. He’s also an astute judge of when something is “off” with a person. I’m sure he’s honed that instinct playing all sorts of games, and the aforementioned summers as a carnie, and maybe teaching volatile teenagers. But he employs that insight with targeted, effective bits of subtle helping. Usually with a layer or two that somehow makes the help-ee feel as if they’re the ones doing CFO a favor. If you “play” life a level or so below CFO you spend your time around him vaguely aware that something is going on and not at all sure what it is. But it’s always good, so it’s easier to just go with it.
Competent people will give you something to do.
CFO puts a twist on this. Whenever we, his friends, appeared to be at loose ends, CFO would fill that time. Often with a new game we had to try. Sometimes with bits of information, or a place we might want to go. He himself is a “never idle” sort of person, and he incentivizes the people around him to share his interests. Unlike people who have perseverant interests that you’d rather they just stop talking about, CFO makes you want to know more about his interests. He gets people to try things. Games, math, shows or movies, ideas. You come out better for being around him.
Competent People bring energy to their work
CFO conveys a sense of alive-ness that he applies to whatever he’s doing. As if nothing is actually tedious to him. I guarantee that his students would rate him as their most energetic and enthusiastic (how could anyone think math is that much fun?!) teacher. I probably shouldn’t say this because the next time I play with him he will have changed it, but one of CFO’s “tells” when playing games is a discernible drop in energy. As if he’s trying not to be noticed while concealing something. Unfortunately it could be something bad or something good. Could be a bluff, could be the board-game equivalent of a straight flush. Hard to say. And conversely he sometimes uses misdirection instead which puts out more energy. He plays most games a level or three above me, which is saying something, but it’s easy to see him bringing “energy” to what he does.
Competent People do Too Many Things
CFO has a more than full-time job, and he does extra things (leading student teams and the like), he is also far more involved in in board gaming, CCG competitions, and RPG games than others are likely aware. He’s a Twitch streamer (@seafoe, highly recommend). He also consumes a great deal of media of all kinds. Find any movie, show, meme, etc, and it’s a safe bet that CFO found it first and knows all about it. I suspect he’s another person with a time turner. Guaranteed that if a time-turner does exist, CFO has figured out how to acquire one.
Competent People Make Others Successful (draw out the best in others)
Any number of his students are better and more successful people, who went to their college of choice, and had the foundation to do well at math and other subjects because of CFO. But as a friend, I can attest that all of CFOs friends are also better for knowing him. In a purely mercenary way (an appropriate way to evaluate CFO), you could think of him as someone who might start a pyramid scheme. But unlike every single other pyramid scheme, it would be one that benefits all participants. He’s in no way opposed to profit for himself, quite the reverse. But while he’s sourcing boxes of early Magic expansions for himself from all over the Midwest or beyond, he’s seeing to it that his friends could buy in too, and then he’d help us turn them over if we wanted to sell. CFO wants for others to enjoy the things he enjoys and to benefit from those things. If that improves the market or bumps up a collaborative purchase to a discount level, or gains him “points” of some sort, it also makes friends happy, engaged, and ultimately better off. (Several of us may have a chunk of our retirement in our college Magic collections.)
For a not-Magic example, take a certain always-in-demand Con in San Francisco. CFO figured out before any of us how to get tickets, and properly gamed everything else about attending. He wouldn’t enjoy going alone, so he frequently uses companion tickets he’s accumulated to bring someone who couldn’t otherwise go. If you have an interest, CFO is engaged in that too. It may not be his particular fandom, but you couldn’t tell from his evident interest. (Back to Magic, if you’ve ever wondered why it’s so hard to get particular Craw Wurms to complete certain collections, it’s because I own most of them, courtesy of CFO’s efforts. They will never be on the market, so don’t bother trying.)
Competent people care deeply about others.
See above. At this point, no one is a public school teacher unless they care deeply about others, or have some sort of serious problem. CFO is the former.
We’ve talked about a few other competencies in previous articles, but I’ll stop with those. CFO can make things happen with almost supernatural effectiveness. When I talk about “force multipliers” he’s an example of that. On our Great Midwest Trivia team, he’s one of our top-tier searchers, but the whole team is more effective during the times he plays. Any group with CFO in it will be more effective to a greater degree than “one more person” (even an excellent one) could account for.
CFO is someone who could do just about anything, and he chooses to do what he enjoys, what he’s good at, and what he’s particularly useful to others (and himself) doing. There is nothing about CFO’s life that he didn’t carefully arrange. So CFO is also an example of what I described in an early article. Competent people don’t always choose to do higher profile work or work that pays more (most would agree that someone with a college degree can do better financially in almost any career besides teaching).
Competent people will find their niche, and not much will dislodge them from it. Could CFO have operated the Fed? Yes. Yes he could have. Could he have been an entrepreneur, a hedge fund manager, banker, day trader, or an actual “CFO?” of course. But enjoying life is very important to him, and he does the things he enjoys. People say that the “pay gap” is because women don’t choose to do ambitious jobs. First of all I think that’s horse hockey, but if any part of that is true I think it’s not “women” per se, I think it’s competent and Competent people finding their niche and telling the world to stick their terrible “ambitious” jobs where the sun don’t shine.
That’s a lot of ideas we’ve wandered through today, but I’d like to end with a specific new idea that is emblematic of CFO. Competent people know that life is not a zero sum game. Certainly some GAMES are zero-sum games, and CFO will first teach you those games, make sure you are thoroughly attached to them, and then he will trounce you at those games for eternity. But life is not zero-sum, and CFO is brilliant at making sure that everyone around him wins in some way, whether they realize it or not.