• Alan Weiss's The Uncomfortable Truth®

  • By: Alan Weiss
  • Podcast

Alan Weiss's The Uncomfortable Truth®

By: Alan Weiss
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  • Summary

  • Alan Weiss's The Uncomfortable Truth® is a weekly broadcast from “The Rock Star of Consulting,” Alan Weiss, who holds forth with his best (and often most contrarian) ideas about society, culture, business, and personal growth. His 60+ books in 12 languages, and his travels to, and work in, 50 countries contribute to a fascinating and often belief-challenging 20 minutes that might just change your next 20 years.
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Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • Relativism

    Relativism
    Nov 27 2024
    Relativism holds that knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture, society, and/or historical context and are not absolute. I’m not so sure (nor are a lot of other people). Let me speak of relativism today. There is an old Monty Python skit where a one-legged man auditions for a theatrical role as Tarzan. After some awkward movements, the people in the dark of the theater say, “Thanks, we’ll get back to you.” The man plaintively asks, “Do I have a chance at all of being considered?” “Well,” answers a producer, “I supposed we would come to you first before a man with no legs at all.” In Rhode Island, there are two public schools that stand out among all the others in terms of grade-point averages, performance on standardized tests, and admission to colleges. They are hailed as the avatars. Yet neither is in the top 100 of such schools nationally. A great many high school all-stars can’t make the team in college, and most college all-stars never make the pros. Some people snidely point out that a Chrysler or a Genesis looks just like a Bentley. Perhaps, until you place them next to a Bentley. A Campbell’s soup can painting or a banana taped to a canvas might go at an auction for seven figures, but they’re ludicrously considered against the Mona Lisa, The Nightwatch, The Scream, or Guernica. We tend to lose perspective if we don’t open our vistas, widen our interests, travel to new places, and gain new friends. You may well, rightfully, enjoy the view from a ski chalet, but the Grand Canyon is hard to describe adequately once you’ve been there in person. While I was trying to hide at a party, a college professor’s wife mentioned to me that her husband had published four books over 12 years. “That’s impressive,” I offered, looking for an escape route. “Impressive?!” she repeated in a stentorian voice, “It’s more than that! How many people do you know who have done that?”
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    4 mins
  • Letters and Columns

    Letters and Columns
    Nov 18 2024
    The post-mortems from those who did not back the winner in this presidential election seem to be two-fold. On one hand, we have a group of insightful people asking, “What did we do wrong, and how can we improve?” On the other, we have people whose heads are exploding in vitriol and venom. The latter’s basic premises are that those who voted for the winner were fooled, are ignorant and poorly educated, and are “f…ing” morons. The amount of profanity seems to be in direct proportion to the lack of an intelligent argument. The overwhelming number of people who didn’t vote for the Democratic candidate are not misogynistic, racist, or any other epithet. They just did not prefer that candidate. Perhaps “woke is broke.” Perhaps the price of consumer goods, the lack of any cogent immigration policy, and persistent, independent polls indicating that Americans didn’t like the direction of the country shouldn’t have been ignored. There’s too much arrogance around, too much self-illusion that one’s opinion is more than an opinion; it is the “moral high ground.” Maybe. Or maybe it’s something we experienced when we were young and won a game fair and square, but the other side complained that we won the game by cheating. We called them “sore losers.”
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    7 mins
  • Friends

    Friends
    Nov 12 2024
    We all need friends, but not the same ones! Friends need to evolve as we grow, mature, and change. Marshall Goldsmith and I wrote Lifestorming together, and we somewhat disagreed on this, but he wrote the terrific book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, so I think this applies to friends, as well! Your spouse is your best friend? That’s a cop-out. You need people who will push back, tell you the truth, mourn with you, and celebrate with you. I’d prefer an honest critic to a lying friend. We don’t need our egos protected, we need to grow. Long-time friends can poison you with their poverty mentality, “guilting” you about your spending, habits, or lifestyle. They can insist on the same places and the same experiences “for old time’s sake.” “When it’s cold,” said Hemingway, “home is where you go, and they have to take you in.” Fair enough. But with friends, they don’t have to take you in, but they choose to do so. Have you been to school reunions? If so, you’ve found that people are basically the same as they were X years ago, with very few exceptions. It’s nice, perhaps, to see them again, but you’ve outgrown them.
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    6 mins

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