Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Buford Finsterwald

Buford Finsterwald

I never cease to be amazed by the diversity of people attracted to this site. I won’t go into a great deal of detail because I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. I have the ability to be scathing however I have many years experience at reigning in my impulse to lash out at times. I used to even think I was smarter than the average bear until I met a guy named Buford Finsterwald.

I was instructing at the Command and General Staff College around the mid 80’s in a program to teach young staff officers how to write and communicate effectively. The classes consisted of about 12 students and a faciliator….the program of instruction included quantitative skills, briefing, memo writing and a whole lot else thrown in.

Anyway I had but a superficial understanding of the quant skills (i.e.Regression Analysis, PERT Charts etc) and when I sometimes got in over my head, Buford would smile and that was my cue to turn the class over to him. He would stand up and give the most clear cut and lucid explanation a person could ever imagine.….I mean it was almost like he was telepathic because when the light came on in his mind it began lighting up all the minds around him.

He had been at the top of his class at West Point and along with everything else he was a superb athlete and when we played volleyball he could put the ball away from any position on the court. The guy had spent his whole life waiting for those around him to catch up and he was the most brilliant human being I ever met.

There was just one slight problem….his human skills sucked. He was so good at everything that he didn’t need the assistance of anyone around him. Up to the company level he understood every job and could do them all better than anyone else but he reached a point one day where the scope of life just got too big for his considerable abilities to manage and he had no real experience dealing outside the reference of his own intellect…in other words he was unable to network effectively….He had gotten into trouble at his previous assignment and while I got him through that scrape I often wondered if there was any real hope for him. I never found out but I always wished him the best. He wrote once that he named a son after me...imagine that.

The reason I bring this up is because we all reach a point where the complexity of the world becomes so great that we have to involve others. The ability to network and bring the best out of those around us becomes more important than the power of our chicken poop little bio processors. Because of this there is an often overlooked fact of life that many of those who enjoy success in our education system become flashes in the pan. Its nice to be smart I suppose, but our creator was careful not to put too much into the person of any one individual. He chose to make mankind a distributed bunch of processors rather that a single huge mainframe.

Do you suppose that was a lesson learned from a huge miscalculation somewhere well beyond the distant recollection of all memory. I think the big bang was loud enough to awaken God and it should tell us the importance of investing in others rather than a single minded focus on ourselves.