false ego for president

Chris Matthews is incensed that Carla Fiorina could say that none of the current candidates for
president or vice-president is qualified to run a corporation. I can understand why he'd be
incensed. His career has been politics.

Many capable people believe that excelling in one area proves their capacity to excel in all areas. This is wildly naive.

If you can be a great physicist, that doesn't mean you can be a great chemist, and vice versa. If you can be great at some area of mathematics, it doesn't mean you can automatically be great at
another. Indeed, the evidence strongly suggests that the cognitive functions required to be good
at Euclidean geometry are not the same as those required to be good at algebra, and in fact few
people in my experience excel at both, or even like both.

There is no good reason for believing that the qualities that make you a good CEO would make you a
good president, and conversely.

Indeed, there's no particularly good reason for believing that if you are a good CEO at company A,
you'll necessarily be even a successful one at company B.

Being a great baseball player doesn't make you a great tennis player, and conversely.

Every game has rules and demands that require a specific kind of capacity, talent, experience,
makeup. The more you excel at any one game, the less likely it is that you would also excel at
another.

This naivete, this blindness that "being smart" in one way translates into being smart in all ways
is the heart of the phenomenon of the false ego. We are not good at what we should be good at, or
what we could be good at, or what we would be good at, or what we must be good at, but only what
we actually are good at. Anything else is self-deception, until it's actually tested.