Do You Dare to Be Great?
How to be great, David French on He Gets Us, non-Christian evangelicals and more in this week's roundup
In 2006, investor Howard Marks posted a memo called “Dare to Be Great”:
This just in: you can’t take the same actions as everyone else and expect to outperform. The search for superior results as to lead to the unusual, perhaps even the idiosyncratic….Unusual success cannot lie in doing the obvious.
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Non-consensus ideas have to be lonely. By definition, non-consensus ideas that are popular, widely held, or intuitively obvious are an oxymoron. Thus such ideas are uncomfortable; non-conformists don’t enjoy the warmth that comes from being at the center of the herd. Further, unconventional ideas often appear imprudent.
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Contrarian investing, which is akin to unconventional investing, has been behind many of the greatest successes. But that’s not the same as saying all contrarian decisions are successful. As with conventionality, you should not aim for contrarianism for its own sake, but only when the reasons are good and the actions of the crowd look particularly foolish.
In 2014, he issued another memo on the same topic:
The real thing is whether you dare to do the things that are necessary in order to be great. Are you willing to be different, and are you willing to be wrong? In order to have a chance at great results, you have to be open to being both.
Michael Porter, the godfather of strategy at Harvard Business School said similarly, “Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.”
And aimilar sentiments were expressed by Peter Thiel in From Zero to One:
Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
Not everyone can or wants to be great. But for those of you who do, you have to dare to be different. Do you have what it takes?
David French on He Gets Us
David French wrote a column on the He Gets Us campaign that basically agrees with my take that they intended to publicly criticize conservative evangelicals in front of the biggest secular audience there is.
But all the right-wing anger at the ad may offer a hint as to its true target. Far from making a stealth case for Christian nationalism, the ads are making a rather blatant case to Christians that perhaps Jesus would not play the culture-warrior role they imagine. This is especially true of the Super Bowl ad, which refers to a story known primarily to Christians.
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Ryan Burge has another fascinating post on the rise of the non-Christian evangelical. Apparently even non-Christians apply the label to themselves, particularly if they are Republicans. Here’s a very interesting chart.
Burge’s stuff is definitely worth reading.
New Content and Media Mentions
I was a guest on Afternoons with Bill Arnold and on the More to the Story podcast talking about Life in the Negative World.
I was mentioned by the Capital Research Center, the European Conservative, the Federalist, and American Reformer.
In my podcast this week, I posted my interview from two years ago with Brad Vermurlen about his excellent book Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle Over American Evangelicalism.
Paid subscribers can read the transcript.
I also wrote an essay about why we should reject vice.
I've been a fan of Howard Marks' newsletters for a long time. I think Marks strives to be a pure rationalist. He works to identify and eliminate his biases and to be explicit about the models he uses to make investment decisions. That kind of empiricism can be extended to all areas of life. I found Marks especially useful during the chaotic early days of Covid even though I strenuously disagree with some of his conclusions. I think the Church would benefit if Christian leaders were more analytical and less emotional and impulsive in the way they think about current issues.
I thought about this a bit more and want to narrow down my critique. It's related to my first comment, but a bit more focused on why I'm frusttrated by French's comments.
In hite opinion piece, French focuses on the social imperative of how Christians ought to act toward others and misses that the concern over the He Gets Us campaign isn't what Christian love may look like but the Christ behind the Christian.
It's extremely rare for me to meet a Christian who thinks we ought not to love our neighbors and our enemies. If I'm asked why I'm kind to others whom I believe are living in sin, my answer is not "Jesus preached a Gospel of Unconditional Love."
It's not that I want to see an Ad that depicts someone "hammering" a sinner caught in sin, but French paints Ad opposition in this light. He says we should be demonstrating the fruit of a converted life with our lives. This much is generally true, but who "spoke" in this commercial? It was the He Gets Us campaign, and they "explained" the actions with a false Christ behind the actions. This is the point of Samuel Sey's article and French zeroes in on a single sentence talking about the idea that the message would not be simply "Jesus loves you no matter what you do."
Again, the Ad "spoke" about Jesus telling *us*: "This is what Jesus would do, and why aren't you doing it?" Christians, who are otherwise living quiet lives (unlike French, who tells us the kind of Christian he is) have a right to criticize a message that is trying to publically "correct" the Jesus they believe in.