Prime Directive
Hollywood and motivational speakers have a short time to convince us of a story. One of them is to boil people down to their essence — the one thing that drives them. Their purpose, their “Raison d’être”. What spurred me into thinking about this was searching into what ever happened to the RoboCop movies.
The first RoboCop movie is a classic and a big influence of future action movies. It’s the big budge film with amazing quips:
- Dead alive, you’re coming with me
- You have fifteen seconds to comply
- Serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law.
The last item was RoboCop’s “prime directive”. Now, there was another where he wasn’t allowed to harm employees of the company that manufactured him, resulting in another quip that will be a spoiler.
People are fluid. Their wants and desires are affected by their environment and emotional states. While movies and preachers love the hard-nosed singular focused entrepreneur and leader, people who operate like that tend not to function well with others and are likely to be frustrated in their quests. The best case scenario is that they stumble into environments where other individuals are synergistically fanatical or desperate. This can sometimes lead to positive outcomes, sometimes not, e.g. Jonestown, Guyana, and Waco, Texas.
What we really have are tendencies and preferences that affect our decision making. Many personality assessments try to gauge these tendencies to help us find a direction in life — “oh, you’re an x, you should become a fire fighter” — but the best practice is the one that’s the most difficult. It’s slowing down, thinking, and being aware of how are thoughts form, what are our triggers, and what are natural responses are to them.
