Competent Elites are More Alive

<i>An intermediate stratum, above the ordinary scientist but below the ordinary CEO, is that of, say, partners at a non-big-name venture capital firm. The way their aura feels to me, is that they can hold up one end of an interesting conversation, but they don't sound very original, and they don't sparkle with extra life force.</i><p>Unadulterated pap. No, seriously..."strata"..."aura"..."feels"..."interesting conversation"..."life force". It's like Oprah trying to differentiate the class system within modern business.

Maybe it's true, maybe not, but the one thing I remember (though not the reference) is reading that a study had found no statistical correlation between executive pay and the performance of the company. So my impression was that at least at the highest levels of compensation, executive pay is being set by other mechanisms, ie everyone bidding for the same people.<p>Btw, blogging about worrying about whether you are as smart as famously smart people seems self-absorbed and insecure to me... What do I get out of reading that?

The quality needed to operate without a manager above you is not competence.<p>It's <i>courage</i>.

Should be retitled "Giddy Journalist Fascinated by Evening With the Wealthy".<p>Did no one tell him about the E in the punch?

<a href="http://paulgraham.com/boss.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/boss.html</a> - PG on the same topic

The OP speculates that few people are capable of 'functioning without recourse', and that those who do so can make it at the executive level, and so seem more alive.<p>There's an alternative pathway. Perhaps, put in a position of responsibility, which most people in modern society seem to have managed to avoid, the situation draws liveliness and performance out of you? PG seems to have witnessed that transformation. I would guess that it's a greater effect than selection.<p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/boss.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/boss.html</a>

Most people who go to Davos are pretty mellow. It seems like if your looking for high energy people who are intelligent and plucky, your local YPO chapter is indeed probably the peak of the curve.

Other research, which I can't dig up at the moment, tells us that wealthier people are happier. So other things being equal, having more money than you can possibly spend should take a few worries off. Not sure this required a research grant to figure out, but ok.<p>So, I guess the only real add this post provides is that some wealthy people are happier and also some of them are smart and interesting. ok. I've met Steve Jurvetson before and also found him to be smart and interesting. I just didn't blog about it ;).

This seems to be essentially the same observation that Paul Graham made in his essay comparing founder hackers to employee hackers. <a href="http://paulgraham.com/boss.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/boss.html</a>

What a coincidence! I'm competent and elite, and I feel pretty alive. This article just reinforces with what I've known all my life.

How does this compare to the concept of "self-actualization"? Is this more cocky/elitist?

Yawn. So the OP writes a long post in order to show us that, based on an <i>extremely</i> biased sample, not everyone at the top of society is a blithering idiot.<p>If he really thinks there's "cream at the top", he should try hanging around real estate moguls and health insurance executives. That'll bring him back to the reality wherein shit, in fact, floats. VCs and hedge fund managers are nothing special compared to serious tech entrepreneurs and hackers, but compared to business executives as a whole, they're 99th-percentile, easily.<p>In any case, I think the reason the world is fucked up has more to do with ill-intended competent people than stupid, incompetent people. The Bushes and Palins may be genuinely stupid, but behind them are Cheneys, Roves, Romneys and Erik Princes-- thoroughly intelligent and competent, and even more thoroughly evil. The failure of U.S. society, for example, is not the result of error or entropy, but of plunder and malevolence. To blame it on "idiots in suits" is to inaccurate, in any case; the "suits" who excel in mainstream corporate America are neither intellectual nor curious people, but they have a fierce political/sycophantic intelligence that very few people can match.