Tag: behavior

It has become a common belief that, to prove his competence on a talk show, a journalist must put the interviewee on the spot, confront him, expose him, and highlight his flaws and contradictions. A competent journalist, therefore, must masterfully play the role of accuser. If, for example, a journalist thinks a little differently and believes that his role is simply to try to draw out the best and most interesting aspects of the interviewee, allowing himself to take a back seat to the topic that should take center stage, he must be reborn in another era, for there is no room for such an approach in today’s journalism. A talk show exists to provoke clashes, interruptions, and leading questions. And the interviewee is there so that the audience can either acquit or condemn him.

He who puts himself in the public eye and achieves some measure of success can be certain of the following: there will undoubtedly be a bad day, a day when, for whatever reason, he shows weakness, fails, or simply provokes a negative reaction. On that day, detractors will emerge from every corner, in far greater numbers than he imagines. The chorus will give the impression of unanimity; whatever they say will sound like common sense. His image, therefore, will suffer a blow, and for a moment no one will remember what he has done or who he is. It will, of course, be a thoroughly unpleasant experience; but publicity means having to go through it, and those who endure it without losing their balance emerge stronger.

Just as one cannot escape envy or unwanted enmities, one cannot avoid instant and fatal antipathies. It is truly intolerable: the futility of these experiences is glaringly obvious; an ordinary man would do anything, would give up almost everything to avoid them. But he has no such option. The prince of this world has his own plans, and he forces him to live them out constantly, no matter how much he hates them or how hard he tries to evade them. He will wake up happy, on one of those days when life seems to flow smoothly, under control, and pleasantly, and then everything will turn sour with that unnecessary encounter. The devil laughs…

No matter how well-versed an investor is in financial literature, he will only truly understand what a crisis is when he experiences it—when, with all his resources fully allocated to financial assets, a crisis breaks out. Before that, no matter how much he knows, it amounts to very little. Afterward, he can finally say he has been baptized as an investor. And so it is on countless other occasions. Sometimes, the nature of an experience can only be grasped when the blood boils and the heart races: it is only by suffering it that one can grasp its power.