Leadership Lessons From The Great Books #54 - The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare w/Tom Libby
Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the leadership lessons
from the Great Podcast episode number 54
with our book today. Well, actually our play
today, probably one of the top five most famous pieces
of literature, english literature ever written in
the Western world. The tragedy of
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare.
This is our kickoff to a month long
joust, or shall I say jaunt,
through the through the realm of Shakespeare, through the world of
Shakespeare, through the world of the writings of William
Shakespeare. We'll be covering Macbeth,
or not Macbeth. I'm sorry. No, we'll be doing Macbeth a little bit later on
down the pike. We'll be doing Taming of the Shrew. We'll be doing
Othello and we will be doing my personal favorite
Shakespeare play, King Lear. This is actually follow
up to Julius Caesar. So you should go back and listen
to that episode last year if you'd like
to hear some really trenched analysis on how Shakespeare talked about power
and the lessons that can be learned about power from reading
Julius Caesar, particularly the first
couple of acts. As usual, Hamlet is built
on a five act structure and today we
will be focusing for the most part on
the first couple of acts that are the set up for other things. We'll also
be talking about other things, other events that occur later
on in the play. We'll also be talking about the impact of Hamlet
on a larger cultural stage and of course, the ways
in which we mostly interact with Shakespeare in our time,
which is typically not in a stage play for the vast majority of us,
if we interact with Shakespeare at all, it is going to be through
film. And of course, Tom is a great lover of
film, as am I. I recently watched
this weekend the 1996 version of
The Tragedy of Hamlet starring Kenneth Branaw,
which was also directed by Kenneth Branaw and he played
the titular character, Hamlet.
I'll be starting today from scene two, act One.
Enter Claudius, King of Denmark,
gertrude, the queen counselors Polonius and
his son Laerities Hamlet, and including
Voltemon and Cornelius. And by the way, the version of Hamlet
that I will be reading from the podcast we'll be reading from a couple of
different versions is the Puffin Books version,
an imprint of Penguin Group published
in, let's see here 2011
for the Puffin Young Readers Group. So this is
a version of Shakespeare, a version of Hamlet that is
really targeted towards the modern reader,
right? But we'll also be pulling information from
the folger annotated version of Shakespeare,
which for my money is great because it not only
has all the annotation, has, many of the original terms and words
that have been taken out of Shakespeare to make it easier to read have been
put back in. It also has some very interesting information in it
at the front, including a summary of Hamlet that makes
it a lot easier to kind of get through because we're actually able
to understand as readers what the actual
text is doing. And that textural introduction is
by Barbara Mauett and Paul Worstein. I would encourage
you to check out the Folger Shakespeare versions.
They have The Taming of the Shrew, they have Othello, and these are
really, really good if you need a grounding in Hamlet. And we'll get a
grounding today when we talk about the literary life of William Shakespeare.
All right, back to Hamlet. Scene Two the
castle. By the way, we're going to read this with a flourish
today on the podcast the
King of Denmark. Though yet
of Hamlet our dear brother's death, the memory be green,
and that it is us befitted to bear our hearts in grief
and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe,
yet so far hath discretion fought with nature that we with
wisest sorrow think on him, together with remembrance
of ourselves. Therefore our sometime sister,
now our queen, the imperial jointrist to this warlike
state have we as twer with a defeated joy, with an auspicious
and a drooping eye, with mirth in funeral and with
dearth in marriage in equal scale, weighing delight
and dole taken to wife.
Nor have we herein barred your better wisdoms, which have freely
gone with this fare along. For all, our thanks. Now follows
that you know that young fortnbros holding a weak proposal
of our worth or thinking by our late dear brother's death our
state to be in disjoint and out of frame.
colleagued, with this dream of his advantage, he hath not
failed to pester us with his message importing the surrender of
those lands lost by his father with all bands of law
to our most valiant brother.
So much for him. Now for ourself,
and for this time of meeting, thus much the business is we
have here writ to Norway, uncle of young Fortnbros,
who, impotent and bedrid, scarcely hears of his
nephew's purpose to suppress his further gain herein that
the levees, the lists and full proportions are all made out of his subject.
And we here despatch you, good Cornelius, and you,
Voltimon, forbearers of this greeting to old Norway,
giving to you no further personal power to business with
the king more than the scope of these delighted articles
allow. Farewell, and let your haste commend
your duty, Cornelius of Voldemort.
In that and all things, we shall show our duty. The king,
no doubt. We doubt it nothing. Heartily farewell.
Exit, voltamond and Cornelius.
And now, layer TS. What's the news with you? You told
us of some suit. What is it? Laerties? You cannot speak of reason to
the Dane and lose your voice. What, withoutst now beg Laurities,
that shalt now be my offer, not thy asking. The head
is not more native to the heart, the hand more instrumental to
the mouth than is the throne of Denmark to thy father. What wast
thou have lairdees lairdees, my dreadlord,
your leave and favor to return to France, from whence,
though willingly I came to Denmark to show my duty in your coronation.
Yet now I must confess, that duty done, my thoughts and wishes
bend again toward France and bow them to your gracious
leave and pardon the king.
Have you your father's leave? What says Polonius?
Polonius he hath, my lord, rung from me
my slow leave by laborsome petition.
And at last upon his will I sealed my hard consent.
I do beseech you, give him leave to go.
The King take thy fare. Hour laerties
time be thine and thy best graces spend
it at thy will. But now,
my cousin Hamlet, and my son,
by the way, hamlet then speaks aside for
his first words in the play. In this act,
a very famous line, a little more kin
and less than kind,
the events of Hamlet set the stage
for tragedy and the events before Hamlet
set the stage for tragedy written
roughly 400 years ago. And if
you go and read the Wikipedia article cobbled together from a collection
of other stories, hamlet is the story of the Prince of Denmark.
And Denmark sits in an interesting spot in northern
Europe. During the early
to the mid part of the
17th century, when Shakespeare was writing, there were many wars
going on. There had been the explosion of the Protestant Reformation,
beginning with Martin Luther in the 15th
century. And this had caused a tidal wave of problems in
Europe, a tidal wave of people moving, a tidal wave
of people engaged in warfare. You had the English,
you had the Spanish, you had the French seeking to maintain dominion on
the continent. You had minor
entities like the Norwegians and the Danes
seeking to fight each other and of course,
not unique to our time, the looming
power of Russia, and, of course, the disunited
Germany always in the background.
This was a time of great struggle. And Shakespeare was writing this story,
this powerful tale of revenge with a backdrop,
the context of this great struggle behind him.
There are many drivers in this play, and Hamlet is one of
the most notorious plays that Shakespeare ever wrote other than
Macbeth. It's his most well known. And yet
there are things that people miss about Hamlet. We understand.
Well, I shouldn't say we understand. There's an old joke that Isaac Asimov
used to tell where a woman walked up to him and said back in the
1960s, I don't know what all this talk is about Hamlet.
It's just a bunch of quotations linked together.
That's how powerful this play is. That's how deeply it has embedded
itself in the Western consciousness. I'm going to say quotes
today that you are going to recognize to thine own self be
true more than kin and less than kind. I'm going
to say other quotes and you're going to recognize them. But they've
been decontextualized from Hamlet they
now have gone on to serve other means.
I think Shakespeare would approve for
leaders. There's a lot to learn from Hamlet and just in that
beginning set up there, how does a king conduct himself in
the court after he has potentially usurped
the throne and taken on the wife
of the man he may have murdered?
This is great power politics, kids. And great power
politics occurs not just between great powers
and not just between great corporations or great states,
but it also takes place between great families and in
great communities. Power is the one thing that
we have not really talked about too deeply on this podcast,
because it's the one thing that everybody knows about but that
no one can define. Kind of like air and
power runs through Hamlet.
Well, like a lightning bolt through a storm
clouded sky. Of course,
we have Tom Libby on today to talk about this. The last
time he read Hamlet was when he was in high school.
I had more hair than.
We all had more hair than.
And so he's going to shake off the dust of some of that
high school knowledge, some of that high school remembrance,
and he's going to talk with us about the impact of Hamlet on leaders,
what leaders can take from this play.
And we're going to dip in, as I said, much of the information in Hamlet
is front loaded here in the first three acts. Much of the
good stuff is front loaded in the first three acts before Hamlet
descends into frailty deception and madness.
And we're not going to trace all of that today because we would have a
five hour long podcast. Instead, we're going to just touch on the beginning
pieces. So, Tom,
remembering back to Hamlet in high school, right, and thinking
about your own life and thinking
about also the many different versions of Hamlet that there are floating around. There's a
lot of different things to pull from. Let's start with something basic.
What do you think William Shakespeare was chasing here with Hamlet?
What did he want to tell people? Because we've had tragedy ever since the Greeks
figured out that that was one of the three main types of
stories, right? Tragedy, comedy,
and then, of course, there's the love story, right. There's the
romance, right. And by the way, Shakespeare, of course, covered all
three of these, right? Comedy with the Taming of the Shrew.
Sometimes they covered all three in one play.
Exactly right. I'm trying to keep it simple for folks.
Romance in Midsummer Night's Dream and of course, straight tragedy
in plays like Hamlet and Macbeth and King Lear and Othello.
And by the way, that's reflected in the full title of Hamlet,
which is the tragedy of Hamlet,
Prince of Denmark. So what do
you think Shakespeare was trying to chase here? For those of us listening
to the podcast today.
I think part of it at its most fundamental core was a lesson in
self preservation. Okay. If you think about the queen, I mean, the main
character, obviously, Hamlet, I think he has his
own version of self preservation when he starts talking to the ghost, his father's
ghost and stuff like that, and he's going down this rabbit hole
of what we would today consider probably mental illness. Whereas back
in the day, I'm not 100% convinced they
understood what mental illness even was.
And that might have been like the idea of, oh, my God,
maybe he really does talk to the spirits or whatever. Right.
He's really seeing his father's ghost or whatnot. And today we would have been like,
oh, let's put him on some Jurassic banner.
Let's dope that kid up, because we can't have
him talking. Yeah, you're right. But in the
same sense, regardless of that, I think there are lots
of ways that you can look at Hamlet and say when
you are faced with some semblance of again,
to your point, whether it's tragedy or some sort of life altering event
that self preservation is going to take precedence in you,
which is where you can think of and the dynamics of power matter.
In that case. Right. One thing I always thought
I'll ask you the question because I've never really been able to ask anybody
else this, but I always thought it was interesting that Shakespeare writing
as an English person writing about the
Danish throne, did they not have
the same sequence of hierarchy meaning
when his father died? Wouldn't he just become king?
I didn't understand that part of it. But again,
I was thinking about this in the sense of corporate
structure, right. When there's some sort of hostile takeover and you're maintaining
some of the higher leadership, and their version of
self preservation comes in when some new leadership takes over with power,
there's some structured dynamics there that kind of can
translate into the corporate world. But I never understood why an English
person was writing about the Danish throne, especially back then, where it's not
like they had the BBC online. They couldn't possibly know what
was going on that quickly. Well,
I think there's a couple of different things. That's a great question. I think there's
a couple of different things here. So Hamlet has
influenced other think about modern television shows.
Okay, so Sons of Anarchy is
basically Hamlet with motorcycle gangs.
By the way, the guy's father dies,
the mom who was the wife, unmarried with children. I can't
remember her name now. Katie Segal. Thank you. Yes. Katie Segal
is running around in biker outfit.
She's got the queen role, and then you've got the new head of the biker
gang, and you've got, you know, the kid coming along who's whose
father died under mysterious circumstances. That's Hamlet. That's the whole set up right there.
Yeah. The show succession.
Succession was the one that would popped into my brain about the corporate takeover.
Yeah, right. That's just hamlet, but the father's not dead yet.
Right. It's almost like the father's already a ghost
to them, though, if you think about it from that perspective. Yeah, I get it.
But exactly. Now, as far as the story
of Hamlet and great power politics in Europe in the 17th century,
the answer to your question and I think this is the genuine answer the answer
to your question is the speed of communication,
from their perspective, was fast.
True. So the printing press in
the, you know, the late 15th century, the printing press, I mean,
Gutenberg was running around disassembling that thing and putting it back
together, trying to prevent people from copying his work between,
like, 14 what was it? 14, roughly?
1460, 514, 75 to the end
of the century. Right. Martin Luther comes along at the beginning
of the 15 hundreds, I mean, nails his 95 theses in
1500 to the door of the Wittenberg Church. People get a hold
of that, they use the printing press to print that out, and it spreads like
wildfire across Europe. So I think we have to contextualize
your question in the context of, for their time,
the printing press was the Internet. Yeah, true.
Okay. Shakespeare would have had access to all of that information,
plus he would have had access to all of the old Greek
and Roman history. So sophocles aristophanes as plays
that were being copied and recopied, or that
had been copied and recopied, and now we're being on the printing press and spreading
around all over like wildfire. Right. And by the way, wildfire for them meant
instead of getting information in a month and a half,
you got information in a week. Yeah. Right. I know for us that
seems like, what, a week? But, like,
you go from a month and a half to a week. Please, we'll take
it. Where do I sign up? There's no friction there. Right.
Because you can make faster decisions.
They would be, and I hold to this always, they would be stunned
by the speed with which we get information. For sure. Oh, my God. They'd be
blown away. Shakespeare couldn't work now. He'd be on Twitter all the time, couldn't get
any work done. Give me
a collection of quotes, a.
Long string of tweets scratching
his head, trying to figure out, how do I turn this into something?
Is there anything here? Is this anything? So in
answer to your question, shakespeare would have known about Danish great power politics
from his perspective, literally, instantly.
Now, at that time that's the time, if I remember correctly,
of Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I?
Yes. Elizabeth I. So she was running around doing
dealing with the Scots, so she was
dealing with Scotland and William of Orange and of course,
the perennial enemy, the French. For them, from their
perspective in England, anything going on in Denmark was
subordinate to anything going on with France. Sure. And so I get
the sense and this is my best guess answer. And of course, if you have
a better answer, you can email me on the podcast and give us a better
answer. But my best guess sense,
with what I know of the history there and how things click
together with the information and other things, my best guess in answer to your question
is he wrote it to keep himself out of trouble,
just like most creatives do. He wrote it to keep himself out of
trouble because if he had written about what
was going on in the great power politics of England, that would have been too
close to the bone. Yeah. He had been beheaded.
Right, exactly. Forget it. Like his head be on a pike.
You could either have your head on a stick or you can keep tweeting,
I got you. And I think that's, for me,
anyway, that's the easiest answer. Now, there may be more complicated things. If you
go and look at the Wikipedia article on Hamlet, there's a lot of
good analysis there. I've skimmed through a little bit of that,
and that's probably the closest encyclopedic analysis of
Hamlet. But I'm thinking about how creatives create
at human nature right. And how they deal with leadership
and power. So there's that.
The other thing is,
if you're in a great power environment,
and this is my thought, if you're a leader in a great power environment,
you don't want too many people on the edges popping off about what
you're doing. You want to keep as much of that information on the down low
as possible. You want to make it look like we're big,
we're strong, we're bad,
leave us alone. But internally,
oh, internally, you could be a mess. Yeah, internally you
could have some mess. And you see this in the court of the court of
the king. This is why I start off with the king, so he ascends to
the uncle ascends to the throne. But it's
already a mess. It's a mess even before he shows up, because you've got the
King of Norway, who has no control over his
nephew, and his nephew just killed well,
just killed the Danish
king. Right. So you've got that deceit already
starting to sort of flow through the power politics of the system.
And then you've got the dynamic of Hamlet and his
buddies horatio
oh, gosh, the other guy's name. I can't remember his name right now. But you
got him sort of bringing that dynamic along.
And of course, Hamlet is being driven by personal revenge,
which is a question I would want to ask you. So should
a leader be driven by personal revenge?
And I'm not saying is it right or wrong, I'm saying should that be a
motivator?
Whether it should or shouldn't be, I'm not sure the
real answer to that, but it
can be. Whether it is or whether it should or shouldn't
be, I don't know.
Because sometimes if
the revenge is against. We'll just keep
it in the literary sense, right? Yes. If the personal vendetta
is against evil and the outcome ends up being good over
triumphs over evil, then what's so wrong with it, right?
Like, who cares? But if it's the vice versa,
are we talking about Star Wars here?
Another tragedy.
But in seriousness. And again, I'll try to bring it back to
some sort of corporate environment where maybe
you have a son or a daughter that thinks the dad should
retire and they figure out a way that they take
over that company. And then you have a sibling that just trying to look out
for the dad. And they kind of have this personal vendetta against the siblings
now because they just made dad retire.
I don't know. Is there justification there? I don't know how old the guy is.
So, I mean, maybe we should have killed him in act three
instead of. Well, okay,
so this gets to something else. This is another Pandora's box,
right? So every time we open every time you make
one point, then we're going to open up another we're going to open up another
door here. And this is the door.
Succession is hard,
and the thing that makes it hard is people don't want to give up power.
Absolutely. I think of the William
Shatner song that he recorded on the album has been,
by the way, one of the greatest spoken word albums in the history of spoken
word albums. Go check it out. It's on Amazon. Audible Music.
You can go get it. I'm a big fan of William Shatner spoken word
albums. Big fan,
and I'll leave it at that. But one of the better songs that
he records on there is this song called You'll Have Time,
and one of the lines in the song is,
you're going to die.
Everybody is going to die. Matter of
fact, by the time you hear this song, I might be dead.
Hopes Singers
average people, or how Fight Club put
it back in the day on a long enough timeline, everybody's survival drops to zero.
But people don't think they're going to die all the way up to the end.
They're going to be like, really? I got to go.
And as a species, we're infatuated with immortality.
That's why we keep coming up with vampires and all these
whatever. We always find a way to make us live forever.
For some reason, we're infatuated with it. Well, or Project Calico
over there with Google, they're coming up doing a dealing nonsense with transhumanism and all
that kind of stuff. They're trying to make that thing real. Yeah,
right. I don't know.
But back to your point, though, with the whole power and succession.
I always found it fascinating that especially in
the royalty part of it, that you quote, unquote, name a successor almost
at birth, right? So you have this kids born, you're like,
oh, that's going to be my successor. Then you have three more kids and you're
like, oh, God, dang it. So and so would have been a better
leader, but I already named a successor, so I can't do anything about it.
That never really settled well in my brain. Well,
that's because fundamentally,
as a person with an American mindset, that drives
us crazy. But there's another tension
in there, right? So the tension is between
picking someone who might or might not be qualified and you have no
idea because they're full of promise. Like, when you're six, you have promise.
That's all you've got. You just got sheaths of promise ahead of you.
Like wheat, right? Less so when you're 35,
you got less promise ahead of you when you're. 35, especially if you're 35 still
living in your parents basement, right? Exactly.
The decay rate starts to kick in at a certain point. It used to
be in our culture, the decay rate kicked in right around 18. Now it kicks
in right around 35. I mean, if you're a 40 year old person,
man or woman, you're that last weirdo at the end of
the party like that no one wants to talk to. Okay,
that's one tension. The other tension is on there
is the idea that we
want to pick the person that has the most merit and the most competency.
I just did a shorts episode about this short, number 73.
You can go back and listen to it, or you can go listen if you
want, if you're listening.
But that idea of being competent and I'm not talking
about merit, although we link merit and competency together,
that idea that someone would be good at
the basics of something which and you're talking about royalty or being in
a corporation, that's the basics of management,
that's the basics of leadership. And that they're somehow going to just sort of
get this competency through. Osmosis is
what has driven much of American business culture for the last my
God, I mean, 120 years. Probably like Henry Ford
thought his son was going to be perfectly competent and be a carbon copy of
him, and his son had zero interest in being. Any of that true
specifically to me. So I recently just had a conversation about
this, and I don't understand why people do this, why companies
do this. But for me personally, like in sales, right,
you'll take that number one salesperson, and you'll promote them to a
sales manager or some sort of sales leadership role because they're
the best, and then they fail, and they don't
understand why they fail, right, because you never
looked at the other stuff. You just look at the fact, yes, they can
sell your product or service or whatever, and they might be the best at it,
but can they teach other people how to do it? Are there
other factors that you're not looking at, like design and implementation
of strategy? If they're not doing that,
what makes you think they can run a sales team oftentimes,
again, not to talk about personal accomplishment or whatever, and I know we
do that a little bit here, but I was a regional VP of sales for
a company that I had something like, I think 60 or
70 people underneath me. And they were all some management levels. And so there
was two different management levels before they got to me. And I oftentimes
found myself promoting the number two or number three guy
or girl into that next manager role because,
yes, they were able to maintain their quota, but they exhibited
so much other traits like that were leadership
traits and I was always questioned until a
year after they were promoted and they're wildly successful. And then I
was like, oh, though you might know what you're doing.
Well, it's because we don't have a good my
God, this is great to talk about. And then we'll go back to
Hamlet here in a minute. But this is a great point that I
think bears fleshing out a little bit the
things that no, not even that systems,
right, demand a certain level of competency.
So for instance, if I am building a
bridge, I want you
to be really good at math,
regardless of your gender, regardless of
your race, regardless of your socioeconomic background, regardless of
your national origin, I don't care who you worship, I don't care who
you marry and make an intimate life with. I don't care about
any of that. I care that
you are good at math.
I care that you know that two things plus
two things equals four things all
of the time, no matter where we are on infinitum
mazatov into your health.
Right? Like that's all I care about. I don't care about anything else.
Right? Once we get past that,
though, this is the problem. Once we get past
judging being good on that, we have very little,
very few metrics for success for all of that
other stuff. And this is why when I
do trainings on emotional intelligence, I spend
two of the first 6 hours just convincing people that emotional
intelligence actually exists. Yeah, right,
because people are so because
of the industrial revolution system that we built,
even though we're in the backwash of it,
there's still enough people around who remember that all you
had to do to be competent was be good at the core things.
And that other stuff, while nice, wasn't interesting.
Well, unfortunately, we've reached a spot where due to the successes of
industrialization I've been saying this for years. The successes of industrialization we
are now at a spot where that core thing that
you had to be good at, that two plus two equals four, can be done
faster or better by other people, other places, or it can be done by a
large language model or an algorithm somewhere. Goodbye. It's gone.
And so the core has come out of the apple. And now
people are looking at that, at the rest of the apple, go, and I don't
know what to do with this. And that's a
problem. And the people who know what to do with the rest of the apple,
those people will succeed. And everybody else who's flummoxed or befuddled
by it, unfortunately, you're probably going to have to get universal basic income because
you're not going to know what to do.
Tragically. And by the way, there's so many apples, by the way,
to push the analogy just a little bit further, there's so many apples where the
core is just being taken out. So it's not just building a bridge,
right? It's sales, it's marketing.
It's the kind of stuff I do with content creation. Like, I'm seeing all the
stuff happen with AI and content creation, AI driven podcasts,
AI driven videos, AI this, AI driven marketing, all this stuff,
right? And at the end of the day,
that's just hollowing out the core thing from marketing, or hollowing out
the core thing from creating content, or hollowing out the core thing from creating a
podcast. But if I could do the best thing that I could do with
the rest of that apple, then I don't care. Go ahead, hollow out all day.
There's no fear there, right? But for the people who really need that
core to exist, like you were talking about, if they don't meet their sales
quota, that's the core of the apple. And all of a sudden that goes away.
People don't know what to do. I agree. I agree with that for
sure. And the person who judges that and has a good sense
of that will succeed as a leader and
will succeed even as an advisor to leaders,
which Hamlet would have done well to have an advisor,
particularly when he ran into this
fellow. So, returning to Hamlet, speaking of
Hamlet's mental illness, returning to Hamlet still
in act one, scene five,
enter Ghost and Hamlet at
the battlements. That's where this conversation, this interaction
is going to happen. Hamlet whither
wilt thou lead me? Speak, I'll go no further.
Ghost mark me. Hamlet I will.
Ghost my hours almost come when I to
sulphurous and tormenting flames must render up myself. By the
way, there's a concept of heaven and hell there. Hamlet alas,
poor ghost. Ghost pity me not,
but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold.
Hamlet speak, I am bound to hear. Ghost so
art thou to revenge when thou shalt hear. By the way, that's the swearing
that's the binding together. People really believed
in that stuff back in the day. Anyway, back to Hamlet.
What? Ghost now, here we go.
Here's the motivating moment in the play.
I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term
to walk the night and for the day confined to fast and fires to
the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt
and purged away. But that I am
forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house. I could a tale
unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul freeze thy
young blood make thy two eyes like stars start
from their spheres thy knotted in combined locks apart
and each particular hair to stand and end like quills upon
the fearful porpentine. But this eternal
blazen must not be to ears of flesh and blood.
List, O, list if
thou hast ever thy dear father love hamlet
o God. Ghost revenge his foul and most
unnatural murder. Hamlet murder?
Ghost murder most foul,
as in the best it is, but this most foul,
strange and unnatural. Hamlet haste
we an oath that I, with wings as swift as meditation or the
thoughts of love may sweep to my revenge. Ghost I find
thee apt and duller shalt thou be than the fat weed
that roots itself in ease on Lathe wharf without
now not stir us this. Now. Hamlet here tis
given out that, sleeping in my orchard, a serpent stung me.
So the whole ear of Denmark is by a forged
process of my death rankly abused. But no,
thou noble youth, the serpent that did sing thy father's
life now wears his crown.
Hamlet o my prophetic soul. My uncle
a ghost. A, that incestuous, that adultered beast
with witchcraft of his wits, with traitorous gifts o wicked
witting gifts that have the power so to seduce one to
his shameful lust the will of my most seeming virtuous
queen. O hamlet what a falling off was there.
From me whose love was that of dignity that it went hand
in hand even with the vow I made to her in marriage and to decline
upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor to those of mine.
But virtue, as it never will be moved through the
ludinous court it in a shape of heaven so lust
though to a radiant angel linked will satiate itself
in a celestial bed and prey on garbage.
But soft. Methinks I sent to the morning air brief let me be.
Sleeping within my orchard my custom always of the afternoon upon
my secure hour thy uncle stole with juice of curse at Hobana
a vial. And in the porches of my ears did poor the leprous
distillment whose effect holds such an enmity with blood of man
that swift as quicksilver courses through the natural gates and alleys
of the body and with sudden vigor doth it possessed incurred like eager
droppings into milk and thine and wholesome blood.
So did it mine and a most instant tetter barked about
most lazar like with vial and loathsome crust
all my smooth body. Thus was I, sleeping,
by a brother's hand of life, of crown, of queen at once despatched
cut off even the blossoms of my sin unhousled,
disappointed, unannounced, nor reckoning made but sent to my account with
all my imperfections on my head. O horrible.
O horrible. O horrible. Most horrible.
If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not. Let not
the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest.
But howsomeever thou pursuest this act, taint not thy mind, or let
thy soul contrive against thy mother ought leave her
to heaven and to those thorns, and in her bosom
lodge to prick and sting her. Fare thee
well at once. The glow worm shows the maiden
to be near and gins to pale his unaffectual
fire. The dew do remember
me.
I warned you I was going to do that. I have no issue. I have
no problem. As a matter of fact, I actually kind of like the escalation.
I don't know if you realize you do that, but you
start off and then you escalate, and then you got this peak and
valley sort of anyway. That'S how you got to read Shakespeare. That's how you got
to read it. That's how you got to hear it in your head.
This is early modern English. This is the crossover
from English that Chaucer wrote in English
that was closer to what we understand as English.
And now we're in post late modern English.
We're like, well, we say a lot of like and he's all and
she's all and they're all and this all yeah. So we're
in a totally different we're in a totally different space. 600 years from now,
they'll be looking at our stuff going, what does this all mean? Yeah, what are
they talking about? Why do they keep saying, like, what. Are they liking what?
I like, I don't understand what's this like thing?
No, but, you know, it's interesting listening to that back,
because I think sometimes we lose. I think
there's a reason that we get enthralled with movies and television and
theater, right? Because somebody else acting it out gives you
the ability to allow your mind to wander while they're acting
it out. When you are the one reading it. You can't do that. Right?
Right. It has to be literal,
literary. It has to be verbatim. There's no real creative
thoughts to get. I was thinking about this as you were reading this, going there's
a couple of things. Again, if you're looking at this from several different factors,
right? Okay. Was he mentally ill or was
it that he physically observed something that
he didn't recognize at the time, and now his brain is interpreting it for
him? There you go. Right. So he's not mentally ill, but something
happened to his dad. He saw somebody carry the poison.
He saw something that it didn't trigger in his brain until
he had this episode with the ghost. And the
ghost is his internal being telling
him he saw something that wasn't right in the world. Right. Or maybe
it is truly the ghost. I don't know. I'm just saying, maybe it is truly
the ghost, and the ghost is saying, hey, be careful, son, because you're next.
Like, if they're going to kill me. You got to watch out
for yourself. Well, and the ghost talks about damnation right. The ghost
talks about going to hell. So that's Christian elements,
because Shakespeare, unlike Spencer, who wrote
Fairy, Queen and other ones, was very much interested in reinterpreting
the Dionosian aspects of Christianity back into the
Apollonian aspects of literature. And there was a line about
the queen in there, supposedly.
I forget how he worded it, but I should have wrote it down.
I'll even go here. So I was thinking about because I highlighted
a bunch of this, but he talks about the death,
obviously the poison being poured into his ear.
Taint not thy mind. Here it is. Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul
contrive against thy mother ought.
Don't take revenge against your mother. Right. Leave her
to heaven and to those thorns and in her bosom lodge.
Leave her to her guilt, to prick and sting her.
He's basically saying she was part of it, but she didn't
do it. She knew about it, but she didn't stop
it, and she knew about like she's okay with it to let her I'm just
thinking, like, so or is
he truly just mentally ill and made all this stuff up in his brain to
justify the fact that he hates the fact that his uncle is now his dad?
Right?
Well, let's be
real. True mental illness, right?
Creating this stuff in his own brain because he's justifying his hatred for
his new king.
This is that Abalone and Christianity showing
back up, right? Shakespeare is making a judgment here about
killing your brother and marrying
his wife. He uses the word incest
here. Right? It's incestuous, right? Right. It's incestuous.
And this is something that makes
us kind of in the modern world, at least up until I would say the
last I think it probably started 15 years
ago, but I would say within the last five years, we've become a little more
well, I won't say we certain aspects of our culture.
I'll frame it that way. If you look at
the headlines of The New York
Post or you look at writings that are written by
researchers that are published in The New York Times,
you weirdly now have respectable people saying that incest
is not a bad thing.
And I know you're laughing. By the way, those of you who are listening,
not watching this on video. When you watch the video, you'll see top crack up
when I say this, but I've seen this already. I'm seeing the
beginnings of this. I'm also seeing the beginnings of a whole bunch of other different
things, like polyamory and polygamy starting to come back into
the conversation, which is, well, really interesting.
I take the position I'll just be fully transparent on this. When you open the
door to one thing, there is a slippery slope. That's why it's called a slope,
and that's why it's slippery. Anyway,
let me just chime in on this one, too, because I have a different philosophy.
To each his own. You can do whatever you want. I just know me,
I have a hard enough time keeping one woman happy. There's no way I'm going
to keep multiple happy. I wouldn't even try even if I was interested in it.
Why would I even attempt it? I'd have even less hair than I have
right now. Okay,
we're going to put that we're going to park that over there for just a
minute. I just wouldn't do it.
Anyway, my point about incest, though, is this.
Shakespeare had to make a point about culture
in his time and quite frankly, among the royals,
among the powerful. And you see this in shows like,
I mean, most notably Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones
as a show on HBO. The book goes even
more detail, by the way. So if you read the book, it's even more okay.
It goes off a cliff even harder. Oh, I'm sure.
So royalty, people in power have
utilized, have leveraged incestuous relationships for
centuries. And Shakespeare is making a value
judgment about this. He's saying this
is not good. This is not going to end well.
I mean, yeah, okay, you kill
your brother, you marry his wife. His wife may turn
out to be your cousin or may
turn out to be your aunt, or may turn out to be
your sister. And by the way,
biologically, by the way, Americans just want to point
this out, not immune from this.
The Roosevelts, Eleanor and Franklin
were, if I remember correctly. And listeners, again, this is one of those other details
you can correct me on second or third cousins.
I thought it was second as well. Yeah, second cousins. So Americans
are not far away from this either. Keeping it
in the family among powerful people is a thing.
But this is also something, and we talked about this on the podcast, both in
shorts episodes and when we talked about Mrs. Dalloway. So the episode on Mrs.
Dalloway where you mentioned this, I also mentioned it a little bit in
play it as it lays this month. That was out earlier this year.
You may want to go back and listen to both of those episodes as I
fleshed out this idea I'm about to drop on you now. But this is
a luxury belief. Incest as
a method of maintaining, quote, unquote, purity and bloodlines is
an idea that is fine for the elites, but it doesn't work
for the rest of us.
And I shouldn't say fine for the elites because it's not even really fine for
them. Shakespeare would say it's not fine for them. It's not fine for anyone if
we're actually behaving like we're supposed to be behaving.
However, elites are often captured, and this is
an idea from Rob Henderson, the writer and researcher, Rob Henderson,
who has articulated it really, really well in our time. And it's this idea that
there are certain beliefs that elite people carry that have no consequence to
them. So the belief that you can marry your sister and
it doesn't matter, everything will just keep going just fine,
or the belief that you can flirt
with certain ideologies and even adopt them and
even adapt them to your life. And by the way, it doesn't have anything
to do with anybody else, and it's fine. Except the problem is
the elites that adopt those luxury ideas set the boundaries of culture for
everybody else. They are the ones
that, at a practical level, show us what is approved and
what is not. And when they pull up all the boundaries,
and when they pull up all the fence posts and set them on fire in
the middle of the field, you got a real problem in your culture.
And I think Shakespeare was hinting at some of that here with the ghost and
using the voice of the ghost to make that cultural critique.
What would he say? Now,
when we think about the events of Hamblin, when we think about William Shakespeare
as a writer, we have to
sort of go into a little bit
of how this is actually put
together. And I want to pull some interesting pieces from
the Folger Shakespeare Libraries edition of Shakespeare.
Not the one we're directly reading from, but another one that I have here available
sitting next to me. And it's the textual introduction by Barbara Mowat
and Paul Worstein. And I want to point out a
couple of things that they point out here as we talk about a little bit
about the literary life of William Shakespeare.
Many ordinary readers assume that there is a single text
for the plays what Shakespeare wrote. But Shakespeare's plays
were not published the way modern novels or plays are published today, as a single
authoritative text. In some cases, the plays have come down to us
in multiple published versions presented by various quattros
and by the great collection put together by his colleagues in 1623
called the First Folio. There are, for example,
three very different versions of Hamlet, which is interesting,
two of King Lear, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet,
and others. Editors chose which version to use as their
base text and then amended that text with words,
lines or speech prefixes from the other versions that,
in their judgment, make for a better or more accurate text.
And by the way, pause here for just a second. They were writing
for people who would read out loud. So the
idea of reading silently and we've never really sort of brought this up on this
podcast, but this is a good time and I need to bring this up.
The idea of reading silently and keeping the words in your head is something
that only really occurred, or began to occur in
the space of humanity and in human civilization in
the late right around the late 19th century.
For the vast majority of literate history. People would
read out loud because there was no television, there was no radio.
The voice was the way you read this, right. It was the way you
experienced the text. And so Tom was
talking about my voice going up and down and those kinds of things. Everybody did
that. And the levels of the talent to which
you had to be able to bring to that would either bore your audience
sitting around a roaring fire at 07:00 at night, or it
would entrance your audience and keep them up long after the
embers of the fire had died down. So what you're saying is what I used
to do with my kids was just embedded naturally
into me. When I used to read bedtime stories to my kids, I used to
make up voices and characters all the time because I didn't
want them to get bored with me just reading the text right out of the
book. Oh, yeah. My wife calls it a clown show. I put on a clown
show for my kids. Oh, yeah.
Absolutely. And this is why,
when I read the Bible, I like the King James version of the Bible.
I like the thieves and thou's and the Verily's, and I put on the oh,
what's his name? God from
that movie, the black fella. You know who I'm talking about? Yeah.
Morgan Freeman yeah. For me,
he's the voice of God. He played the best God ever. I don't know.
I don't know anyone's going to argue with that. Even God
gives four stars to Morgan Freeman approach.
That's it. That's it.
But I'll read it in the Morgan Freeman voice. Right,
but you had to do that. You had to capture your readers.
You had to capture your listeners attention. Right.
And of course, the more intimate the writing, the smaller
the voice. Right. So a Jane Austin book would be read in a different sort
of contextual voice in a home than Shakespeare.
Plus, people did go not
only the middle class and the upper class, but also the lower class did
experience Shakespeare's plays live.
So they had some conception coming
down through the generations into the 17th,
18th, and 19th century of what it should. Quote, unquote,
sound like and not unlike today.
Shakespeare himself had input into that. Absolutely. He would
see his plays being performed and say, no, that needs to be in this tone
or that needs to be in this light. You're supposed to have a smile on
your face when you say that. Or you know what I mean? Right. Not unlike
the writers of today, you write
the book or you write that. Now you're a consultant on the film.
It's the same idea. That concept has not drifted.
No, well, and it really can't drift,
because if it did,
I think what you would see is
a collapse of cognition and I'm going to use
a big term there, but a collapse of cognition, of the
written word itself. This is one of the things that worries me
about, and this is one of the reasons why I do the podcast. It's not
just for leaders, this podcast, although it is,
but it's also to read a book out loud,
right. To revisit some of that. Because your
brain does need more than just the internalization
of the words. Well, and I guess in what little snippet that we just
spoke about, again, translate it back into corporate.
Right. Being a leader, if you're going to write a strategic
plan, that does not mean you can drop in the lapse of your subordinates
and walk away. You need to be able to
drop your written word into the lapse and then
mold it as it goes. Because you don't want them interpreting it the wrong
way. Exactly. You don't want them going down the wrong path too
far that you have to then jerk them back versus lead them back.
Right. I guess in the same sense,
even writing corporate documents
in corporate doctrine, you still have to, as a leader, still have to do the
same thing that we're talking about these writers doing well. And you see this
in the last few years. When Bezos was at Amazon,
he got so frustrated with engineers
overusing PowerPoint. PowerPoint is not a presentation tool.
He was like, Get rid of that crab. You come in here with a pencil
or a marker and a whiteboard and get after it. If you
can't explain what you're doing in the concepts here verbally
from the top of your head and get
that into other people's brains. If you need the crutch
of PowerPoint behind you,
you don't know your job. To go back to
something that we mentioned earlier, you're not competent.
It's one of the core competencies, because we
can find anybody to do the engineering thing. We can't
find anybody, just anybody to do the engineering
and the presenting thing. And so I think we forget some of
that in our time, and that's why we do the
podcast in the way that we do it.
Back to the textual introduction here, there's a couple of other points I
want to jump off of here, other editorial
decisions. And I want to talk a little about editorial decisions, too, because this is
very important with Shakespeare. Other editorial decisions involve choices about
whether an unfamiliar word could be understood in light of other writings of
that period or whether it should be changed.
Decisions about words that made it into Shakespeare's text by accident
through 400 years of printings and misprinting,
and even decisions based on cultural preferences and taste.
When the Moby text was created, for example, it was deemed improper and indecent
for Miranda to chastise Taliban for having attempted
to rape her. See the Tempest, act one, scene two.
Abhorred slave, which any prince of goodness wilt not thou take,
be capable of all ill. I pitied thee all. Shakespeare's editors at
the time. All Shakespeare editors at the time took the speech away from her,
meaning Miranda, and gave it to her father prospero,
because it was more decent for the father to talk about the rape than
about Miranda to talk about her own rape. In The Tempest,
the editors of the Moby Shakespeare produced their text long before scholars
fully understood the proper grounds on which to make the thousands of decisions
that Shakespeare editors face. Now, I want to pause there because they're going
to make a point about Othello and Henry V and Hamblin. I don't want to
get quite into that just yet. There's an important idea there,
and we don't often talk about editorial decisions on
this podcast in our texts,
but tying it back into leadership, leaders make editorial decisions.
We editorialize all the time.
We, in our minds,
curate and sort through and
validate and choose what to pay attention to and what to
reject. Like, I was recently in a well,
not recently, I am currently in a
negotiation, and I'll leave it at that. I cannot go into details
because it's a private negotiation, so I won't go into
details about it. But it's a pretty significant one involving a significant
sum of money and ideas
of value around the
object being negotiated over and what the value is
either way, right?
In order to do that negotiation, I'm going to edit.
And nobody thinks that that's weird, by the way. Everybody does the same thing.
It's only weird when you point it out. The editing is happening.
I'm going to curate what I'm going to bring to that negotiation
and what I'm not. I'm going to curate for the other
person what I'm going to allow them to put on me and
what I'm going to imprint on them. And I am going to imprint
on them, except the difference between them and myself
is I'm going to be intentional about what I imprint on them. They're going to
be more reactive to me. And that's sort of how this
negotiation is going. Okay? And dealing with consequences and
living with outcomes is another part of that curation. But that lies
on the other side of the equal sign.
Leaders editorialize all the time.
Leaders curate all the time. Leaders make cultural
and I love how the point was made here in the introduction.
Leaders make cultural preference and taste decisions all the time.
How can we use Hamlet as leaders to understand that
taste decision? Because there's multiple different versions of Hamlet running around,
and I want to talk a little bit about the movies. Now. I watched the
Kenneth Brando version. There's a Mel Gibson version of Hamlet.
There's a version of Hamlet starring Gandalf from
Lord of the Rings. Ian McKellen is a version of Hamlet.
There's a version of Hamlet that your kids have done at school.
Maybe not the whole thing, but at least a couple of acts.
I know that Hamlet has been inserted and we already talked
about succession and kings and Sons of Anarchy but
has been inserted, elements of Hamlet have been inserted into popular culture.
And of course that ties back to the Isaac Azimov joke about strings
of quotes being strung together because it's so ubiquitous,
it's such a ubiquitous tragedy. And yet people don't know what version of Hamlet
they're, they're quoting from. When the ghost says Murder most foul.
That was, I believe, also a title
of an Agatha Christie story. Yes,
this is where you get into. Shakespeare being
almost and this is why we do it on the podcast almost at the foundational
level next to the Bible of Western literature.
When other texts reference your stuff,
you're at the bottom like you're the lodestone,
you're the beginning, you're the root. Right? And of course
Shakespeare would probably say I rooted everything in the Bible. So the Bible lies
at the bottom of all of it in Western literature.
Eastern literature is not structured this way. Eastern literature is structured
very differently. Absolutely. But Western literature
is structured on editorializing taste preference and
of course, what's at the bottom. Right.
What can leaders do with all this information? What's the thing to pull from
this? Yeah, I gave you the hard thing. I just teed it up. I just
gave you the hard thing. Now all you got to do is say dang and
pause for pause for 10 minutes.
I hadn't thought about it that way. And then that's the other word. Instead of
saying dang, thought about it that way. You just pause for
a good 2 minutes while you collect your thoughts and say,
you know what? I have no idea. No idea.
Honestly,
I think part of it if
you yourself you are a leader, Hassan, you yourself have
a core principle that you that is your foundation. But that
does not mean that you can't take drips and drabs and pieces and
parts from other people's leadership skills and qualities
and learn those and use those.
We do it all the time. We talk about guys like Jeff
Bezos and Anthony Robbins and you know, like,
we talk about those types of leaders all the time and how we use certain
parts of it in certain parts of that. I'll give you one better.
Again, I'll just refer directly back to me.
People often ask me as a sales
person, as a sales consultant, do I
lend myself to a certain sales module or
discipline? Meaning do I use the Sandler sales methodology
or the Challenger sales methodology or spin selling?
And my answer is always yes and no. I use
all of them. Because here's the thing. As a salesperson,
my responsibility is to know which one of those sales methodologies
my customer is going to relate to most and then adapt my
selling style to the customer, not the other way around. I'm not going
to pigeonhole a customer into forcefully
eating or choking down a sales methodology which.
By the way, there's one in particular, I'm not going to name it because I
won't discredit or hurt anybody here, but there's one in particular
that if I recognize a salesperson using on me, I will shut them down
in a second because it annoys the piss out of me. It just annoys me
that salespeople use this methodology on people like me.
Not that they use the methodology, because methodology does work in other environments.
It works on other people. It will not work on me. So if you want
to sell me, don't use this, right? So my
philosophy and training and teaching and coaching is I want you to learn all of
them. I want you to be and again,
I really need to learn this phrase better.
Hassan so the original version
of the phrase jack of all trades, right? That whole jack
of all trades, master of none, and all of a sudden, we have interpreted this
as a negative thing. And it was not a negative quote when it first came
out. It was something like, I won't
butcher it, but go look up the quote, jack of all trades, master of none,
look up the original full quote. It essentially says
that the jack of all trades is a better trait to have because you can
pull from multiple sources, you can do multiple things.
So, yeah, I'm okay with being a jack of all trades. I'm okay with my
salespeople knowing and understanding all of these sales philosophies
and all of these sales methodologies because I want them to recognize which
one is going to help them through the sales process better,
faster, whatever, right? I guess that's kind of
what you're thinking. But from a foundational standpoint, your sales
have to come from one thing and one thing only. You have to be
in it to be helpful. You have to
be in it. I tell people all the time, a salesperson should never talk you
into anything. A salesperson should help you buy.
Right? There's a big difference in that. Talking somebody into something
that they don't really need or want or helping them buy something they feel is
going to help them improve their life, make it better, faster,
bigger, whatever they're trying to accomplish.
You're helping them buy something that helps them solve that problem.
You're not talking somebody into buying something.
There's a foundational difference there. And as
long as your foundation is right, then it doesn't matter which sales methodology you use,
as long as your customer gets the end result, right? Well,
and that goes back to this idea that and
you do get it from Hamlet. You get it from Greek
literature, you get it from the Bible,
you get it from modern literature spreading
this out. You get it from interactions between people, even the
smallest interactions at the smallest level. Like, I was talking about
the negotiation I'm going through. You're talking about sales methodologies.
If I'm leading other people on my team. It also applies here.
And it's a point that I made in college years and years and years ago,
and most of my friends did not understand the point that
I was making. And I was a little bit older than them,
but as they have gotten older, they've understood it more. And this
is the point. And this is the point. You're saying Western
culture in general and American
culture in particular are still
results oriented societies. At the end
of the day, we're still results oriented culture. So I think of
I see things on Facebook all the time from people pushing me various
things through, like, NBA memes, right? I'm going to relate this to the
NBA here. And the argument about Jordan versus LeBron
I'm not going to wade into on this podcast. This is not a sports talk
podcast. But there is that argument that is going on.
And one of the things I saw the other day was
somebody who had made a post on Facebook and was randomly retconning
Michael Jordan's entire career to basically say
that without Phil Jackson, he would have been nothing.
And I thought and I did. It's like saying Tom Brady would be nothing without
Bill Belichick. Right.
But this gets to
the idea of results at
the end of it, at the end of LeBron's career,
no matter how much we he may like it or not like it, he's going
to have a certain result at the
end of Kobe's career. He had a result
at the end of Michael Jordan's career. There is a result.
Currently, I think Tom Brady is continuing to remain retired
as of the recording of this podcast. Who knows what may happen in the
future? But as of this recording today, he is currently
remaining retired with a particular result.
Okay? Results matter.
That's all people pay for. People pay for outcomes.
This is really hard for people to wrap their arms around when they
want to use a particular methodology to do something and it doesn't lead to an
outcome that they want. And then they want to blame the outcome, not the methodology.
Right. Or if
you're losing a negotiation, like if I lose a negotiation,
it's because I had a piss poor methodology and
I got the outcome that comes from using a piss poor methodology.
I don't understand why this is well, yes, I do. I understand why this is
hard for people to wrap their arms around. And for leaders, it's important
for leaders to recognize the difference between the doctrine,
the strategy, and the tactics. And I talked about this on Living in the Martial
Way episode that we did last year, the Great Forest, lee Morgan book
where he breaks down, in martial arts
terms, the doctrine, which is sort of his overall philosophy.
Or the methodology, the strategies, which is
what we talk about here. Sort of the mindset that you have to have in
order to implement that philosophy. And then, of course, the thing that everybody
only wants to know about, which is, why don't anybody approach Tom with this
particular selling practice? Because he'll kick you out of the room.
Tactics. Because they're just using tactics. And people just
want to use tactics because they think that that's a shortcut to the outcome.
And there are no shortcuts to outcomes.
Absolutely not.
Back to the book, back to Hamlet.
One other point that I want to make, and then we're going to jump into
Ophelia and Polonius. I want to make a couple of points
there because there are females. You wouldn't think so, but there
are females in Hamlet. Ophelia is
the secondary female character there,
played by Kate Winslet in the Kenneth Branna
film. We didn't really touch on the films. One question about the
films, because you're a film buff. Which is your favorite Hamlet version of
Hamlet on film, or do you have one? I don't think
I really do have one, but I think if I was forced to pick one,
it would probably be the Anne McClellan one. Okay. All right.
And mostly just because out of all the people that have played him, he's probably
my favorite actor of that group of people. That group of
people. But probably no more reason than that.
Well, also, I think I think, and this is
a point we kind of skipped over, but Hamlet in the
play is not
a 35 year old guy. Yeah, right.
That's not the impression that I get even watching
the Kenneth Brando version. I was like, this guy's a little old
to be, like, scheming about your uncle. The whole context
of the play is I
don't know, it works really well if you're, like, 17. Yeah,
I was just going to say that. It should be a teenager. Right? The whole
concept behind what's going on, if it's
not mental illness and it's his subconscious trying to convince himself of
something, right. Works way better if he's a late teen.
Late teens, maybe. Early twenty s you can push it,
maybe. But after 25, forget it.
Yeah, forget it. Get over it. The world sucks. Move along.
You're lucky we didn't ship you off to Norway.
Exactly. Well, and that's the other dynamic here in Hamlet.
So you do get the sense that he's writing
it for an actor that's a little bit younger. And I do know
in Shakespeare's plays, he did use young boys. In many of his plays,
young boys played the female roles. Young boys, obviously,
played the male roles and played the older
character roles as well. And by the way, this wasn't anything
unusual, right? This was something that was just done.
Now, in our time, we object to that because we
associate not necessarily maybe
Hamlet, but some of his more, shall we say,
sexually daring plays like Anthony and Cleopatra is
written with that we just mentioned the
sort of the inappropriateness of the rape of Miranda
by Caliban the Tempest. The entire
plot of Taming of the Shrew was basically turned into ten Things
that I hate about you. And it works there once
you take out the objectionable elements, by the way. So our
modern ears, our modern Protestant
Puritan influenced ears, want to scrub all
that from Shakespeare. And yet, just like a good
artist, he was seeking to integrate all of that in there. Make a judgment about
it, just like the incest piece, and make that integration. Not just you
talked about him watching his own plays and making changes, not just from
what was on the page, but from what was practically being walked out
on the stage. That's how you know he was a true artist.
And, oh, by the way, if you didn't know that the movie Ten
Things I Hate About You was a direct interpretation
of the timing of the Shrew. Watch it again, because there's some Shakespearean stuff
that happens in there that is blatantly obvious that they're giving Shakespeare the credit.
Oh, yeah, exactly. Well,
we're going to cover Taming of the Shrew on the podcast, and the person who's
going to come on and talk with us, he's a huge fan of Ten
Things I Hate About You. So we're going to go deep off
into that last piece about
sort of the literary life of William Shakespeare.
Sort of a little part through here, just a side note to note.
So they talk about the Folger library editions and sort of what they've done differently
in their editorial. I'm going to skip a couple of sentences down the
reader of the Folger Shakespeare and go to this piece. And I quote,
the reader of the Folger Shakespeare knows where the text has been altered because editorial
interventions are signaled by square brackets, which is nice,
for example, from Othello, and then it's in square brackets if she and chains of
magic were not bound. Half square brackets, for example,
from Henry V with half square brackets. Blood and
sword and fire to win your right. Or angle brackets, for example,
from Hamlet. Oh, farewell, honest angle brackets,
soldier. Who hath relieved you at any point in the text?
You could hover your cursor over a bracket for more information. Because Folger digital
texts and this is a point that I want to make, are edited in accord
with 21st century knowledge about Shakespeare's texts. The Folger
here provides them to readers, scholars, teachers, actors, directors, and students free of
charge, confident of their quality as texts of the plays, and pleased to be able
to make this contribution to the study and enjoyment of Shakespeare. If you have an
opportunity to get the Folger text, get it, particularly the digital version,
there are sort of some sub things that pop up and
some interesting other dynamics that
are in that text. And I will say this,
obviously, the modern age that we are in does
have a lot of troubles and problems,
don't get me wrong but we do benefit
from being able
to look back over the long course of a millennia of history.
Being able to pull the best parts of that forward and
make some scholarly editorial decisions that
actually benefit us and grow our knowledge.
And to be able to do that without an
ideological lens is the sign of a true scholar.
And so picking up the Folger Shakespeare text
is well worth your time. All right,
back to the book, back to Hamlet. Back to the play.
Hamlet then we go to act two, scene one.
So Polonius and his man Reynaldo are speaking.
I'm going to kind of jump cut away
from Polonius and Ronaldo for a moment but this does
set up the entering of Ophelia.
So let's meet Ophelia. This is sort of the first time we
meet her in Hamlet.
Enter. Ophelia. How now? Ophelia?
What's the matter? This is Polonius. Ophelia oh,
my lord. My lord, I have been so affrighted.
Polonius with what, in the name of God?
Ophelia my lord, as I was sewing in my closet Lord
Hamlet with his doublet all embraced no hat upon his head his stockings,
fouled, unguarded and down give to his ankles
pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other. And with a look
so piteous and purpose as if he had been loosed out of hell to speak
of whores, he comes before me.
Polonius mad for love?
Ophelia my lord, I do not know, but truly I do
fear it. Polonius what said he?
Ophelia he took me by the wrist and held me hard.
Then he goes he to the length of all his arm and with his other
hand thus owes brow he falls to such perusal of my face
as it would draw it. Long stayed he so.
At last, a little shaking of mine arm and thrice his head thus waving up
and down he raised a sigh so piteous and profound as
it did seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being.
With that done, he lets me go. And with his head
over his shoulder turned he seemed to find his way without his eyes
for out of doors he went without their helps and to
the last bended their light on me.
Polonius come, go with me.
I will go see the king. This is the very ecstasy of love
whose violent property fordues itself and leads
the will to desperate undertakings as oft as
any passions under heaven that does afflict our natures.
I am sorry. What, hath you given him
any hard words of late? Ophelia no, my good
lord, but as you did command I did repel his letters and
denied his access to me.
Polonius that hath made him mad. I am
sorry that with better heed and judgment I had not quoted him. I feared he
did but trifle and meant to rack thee. But be shrew my
jealousy. By heaven, it is proper to our age to cast beyond
ourselves and our opinions, as it is common for the younger sort
to lack discretion. Come the we to
the king, this must be known, which, being kept
close, might move more grief to hide than hate to utter love.
Come. Exit Polonius
and Ophelia.
It turns out from
that little clip a couple of things.
Turns out that fathers watching out for their daughters is not a new thing
that's time as old as mine. It also turns out
that women and men,
being mistaken in their communication with
each other is also about his oldest time.
Hamlet comes to Ophelia having just had an interaction with
the ghost of his father, and he's freaked out, he's pale,
he's shattered all the way down unfettered, as they
say, meaning not that his clothes are
undone, but meaning that his emotions are undone. He's exposed
emotionally. Exposed emotionally. Correct.
Vulnerable. Right. Comes to his one true love,
Ophelia, and she misinterprets it as
matrimonial lust or desire
or love or
she is so disturbed by this and not knowing how to accurately interpret
it, she seeks out the wisdom of counsel
of her father. And Polonius, who is doing his own deal with Long Shanks,
decides he's going to use this to get
something that he wants from the king,
the uncle of Hamlet,
and to continue to play power politics with the hand of his
daughter,
almost a tale as old as time.
What shall we do with Ophelia now? As a character,
she's positioned as a foil,
but she's also used as a
tool to move the narrative forward, right? To move
Polonius forward, to move Hamlet forward. She's also used
in the later acts of the play to judge Hamlet. And she's
abandoned, right, both by and this is a feminist
interpretation of Hamlet, by the way. She's abandoned
by both Hamlet to madness, to chasing the
ghost in revenge down a path that she cannot go.
And she's abandoned by the king, who Polonius has entrusted
her to. As the king of Denmark
begins to figure out that Hamlet's up to
something and that he might want to watch his six.
There's always B characters in an organization.
There's always b players. Steve Jobs infamously said that
a players hire A players and B players hire B players.
And he didn't go much further than that. He said the quiet part out loud
back in the day when you weren't supposed to do that.
There's always going to be B and C players in an organization,
and even among A players, there's going to be differentiation,
and there's going
to be tussles in hierarchy, and there's always going to
be those people who are going to get stepped on because they don't understand
the game. They don't understand the hierarchy, and they don't know what's happening
either, that some. Of them allow themselves to get stepped on
because that's also just part of their personality. Correct. And Ophelia
is one of those characters for the
Ophelias who are listening to the podcast, male or
female? I'm agnostic on gender on this. Ophelia is
merely a name to me.
What's some good advice for them because they're the
ones who get jerk back and forth. I know what I would
tell them.
I would tell them you got to get your head in the game because the
game is happening to you whether you want it to happen to you or not.
But many people struggle with hearing that message. So maybe there's a different
way to deliver it or maybe that's not the message. Well, I mean,
quite honestly, I have no problem with that message,
but the clarity of that message might be different to different
people, right? So for example, meaning get your head in the game because the
game is happening around you whether you want it to or not, does not necessarily
mean that you have to change who you are and change your personality. But if
you're going to be again, like we just said a second ago, if you're going
to be the type of person that allows that stepping,
then you need to know, be prepared and
know who you're going to allow to step on and you who you're not and
why and what the outcomes are going to be because of you being stepped on.
If you're okay with the outcome, okay, I get it.
Everybody plays their role, everybody has their part. But if you're going to
be stepped on, to just be stepped on and you have no benefit,
nothing gained out of that stepping, then you're in the
wrong spot. You are the wrong stepping stone. You just need
to move the staircase so that you get some
sort of benefit out of people stepping on you. Again, it takes all kinds,
right. So I'm not suggesting if you're the type of person that is okay with
people stepping on you. I get it. I'm not, but I get it.
I try very hard when I find those people in my
organizations, if I find that person and I recognize that that's the kind of
person that is okay being stepped on, I want to know,
I go out and seek it out myself. What do you hope to gain by
allowing people to step on you? I don't try to change them. I don't try
to change their mentality. I don't try to change their personality. I try to
change their outcome. So I try to look at it and go,
I understand you're being stepped on here. Oh no, it's okay.
Well, if you're going to be stepped on, what do you gain out of this?
What is the benefit of this? Because there are some of those things I heard
a phrase when I was very young that I still believe in today, and it's
be good to people on the way up because you're going to see them on
the way down, right? So that same person that you stepped on to get
higher and higher and higher. When the time comes that you're coming down, they may
be in the same spot, but now all of a sudden, you are lower than
them. So again,
there's always something there has to be an angle, and as long as you
know and understand your angle, I'm okay with you being somebody who gets stepped
on as long as it's not to your detriment.
Well, also to the people doing the stepping. Now, we see this also
in Hamlet, right. So Rosencrantz and Guildenstein, right.
Those two characters were kind of buddies of Hamlet.
They're kind of his advisors, right? They are.
It kind of reminded me a little bit of sort of the advisors
of the king that came after Solomon Raboam
back in Kings. Right. He had advisors around him
who were young, and then he had the wise men. And first he asked the
wise man what he should do of the Kingdom of Judah, I believe it was.
And the wiseman gave him wise counsel. And then he went to his buddies,
and his buddies gave him the council of, like, 21 year olds,
and he took the council of the 21 year olds, and he should have taken
the council of the older men. Thus a
civil war was ignited in Israel. Right. Well,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstein are sort of these
I wouldn't really say comedic, but they walk that line yeah,
they walk that line of kind of comedic, kind of your good time
buddies, right. The buffoons. The buffoons, right. Well,
they're the people who my father would have said back in the day when I
was a kid, he would have asked me the question. I'm sure your father asked
you a variation of this question. Fathers all over ask their kids this
question. If all of your friends jumped off a cliff,
would you jump off of the cliff, too? Now,
the genuine answer to that, if you're like, between ten and 17 is,
yes, of course I would jump yeah,
it seems ridiculous. If they're jumping off the bridge,
there's a reason I'm going to jump with them,
because either they're jumping into water because it's fun, they're being chased
by a bear, so it's life or death. I don't know. There's got to be
something. Anyway. Exactly. And this is a disconnect question because.
You'Re asking it from the perspective of. Oh, I waited, I jumped off that cliff
between ten and 17, and it turned out there were rocks down there.
But you can't tell that to somebody who's between ten and 17. And so
Hamlet's got his buddies, he's got Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
but they're
not structured as people who are getting stepped on.
They're structured as buffoons. They're structured as the clown
in the court. Right. And the clown in the court, and this
is why comedians are worth protecting. The clown
in the court doesn't get stepped on. That's not his
role. Or her role. The role of the Jester is
to point out the fact that no one has any pants on and
to be left alone because that's their job.
Right. You also will have the gesture on
your team. I think a lot of modern organizations, a lot of
modern teams don't know how to spot the gesture. And what worries me
ideologically yes. What worries me ideologically is
we've placed with certain ideological tendencies,
particularly in the and I'll go ahead and say it so Tom doesn't have to,
particularly in the De Ni space, we've taken the
jokesters and we've said, we're going
to ring all the humor out. We're just r. We're going to ring it all
out, and we're going to take that gesture.
We're going to take the Rosencrantz and the Guildenstern. We're going to take the people
who would have you jump off a cliff, and we're going to be like,
no, we're not jumping off a cliff. There's no more cliff jumping going on.
And what's one step further?
Especially again from a corporate environment? We've extended that
beyond the corporate walls. Right. So now those gestures are no longer allowed
to be gestures, even in a social environment, if there's enough of
the corporate people present. Right. So we're extending
it now. So it's not even within the play. It's within the plays.
It's outside of the play that was. Gone into the audience. You're going to
the audience. Yeah, we're going to go in the aisles. Right.
And then the corporate world is the same idea. To your point, we did that,
but we also extended our corporate walls beyond
the building and put it into our personal lives,
which I'm not really sure how much I
like and don't like. There's parts of it that really need to
stop, and then there are other parts of it I get. So it's kind of
weird. Well, I get in a weird space with this. Well, this is a
social negotiation. This is sort of what I get back to.
Right. So I
think of the line from the Devil's Advocate, right? Are we negotiating?
And the answer to that question is, of course we're negotiating. We're always negotiating.
I wonder. And we
will never know the percentages. We will never know. So we just have to speculate.
What are the percentages of the Jesters? What are the percentages of the Ophelias?
What are the percentages of the Uncle King?
What are the percentages of the Hamlets? What are the percentages of
the queen who went along just to go along because
they needed survival? You've got those folks out there, too. Sure.
What are the percentages of the hangers on. What are the percentages of the Horatio
at the beginning who just don't understand what's happening and need to go report that?
I think of Horatio at the beginning who initially
saw the ghost and did not know what they were seeing, and then had to
go report it to hamlet, because they're like, I don't know what we're doing with
this, right? Played infamously by
what's his name from a grumpy year old man,
which was a total surprise in the Kenneth Branna Hamlet that
I just watched recently. What's his name?
Jack or Jack lemon? Jack lemon?
Yeah. Jack Lemon played Horatio, and it was weird seeing
Shakespeare come out of Jack Lemon's mouth. I was like, yeah.
It was a little disconcerting for me at the beginning, and then I just sort
of let my brain go, and I just went with it,
and it works. It's fine. He does his job. He does what he's supposed to
do, moves the narrative
along. But my point is the percentages of those people in society, then they all
have roles to play. Like you said, we need all kinds.
But where are the boundaries? Right? Where where
are the boundaries? Where does the social negotiation say stop,
right? And that is the difference between libertarianism
and libertine philosophies.
And I'm not speaking even though I want to
be very clear, I'm not speaking of this out of
my own personal personality set up, right? So I'm
highly conscientious. I'm kind of moderate on
anxiety and on neuroticism, and I'm
kind of moderate on openness, right?
But I'm high on conscientious duty, and I'm kind of a little bit lower on
empathy than I probably should be. I'm not speaking from that. I want
to be very clear. I absolutely know that the boundaries have to be pushed in
order to have creativity and growth and development and innovation and
what are the boundaries? And so my concern is that in
the social negotiation, we've sort of forgotten how to
ask that question about where the boundaries are. And that's going to be different for
everybody based on their life experience. And I
don't know how you do that dance with 330,000,000 people on a continent.
I don't know how you do it, which is why the creed matters. That's why,
for me, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution matter, because at the end of
the day, what else are you going to appeal to? Those are the things that
matter, right? They've been around 400 years longer than
I've been around. Okay, let's just use that. But that's
where I come down. I'm a partisan for that. So as many know
who have listened to the podcast,
one last question about Ophelia. Before we move into
act three here, I want to make a point.
I'm going to give Hamlet another go here, and then
we're going to wrap up. We've been talking about him for a while as
the play begins to open up, right?
We get Hamlet and the three of the players, and I'm
not really clear on what the role of the players is, and maybe some folks
can help me out with them, can help me out with that. But as we
go into the third act of Hamlet, one of the. Things that we begin to
realize is there's a lot of build up to what
he's eventually going to do. There's a lot of tugging him along
and pulling him along and sort of drawing
him in to a dynamic that he's not really comfortable
with. You would think that a person who recognizes
that his father is dead and his ghost has spoken to him,
you would think that he'd jump right to revenge. Like, I'm going to go walk
into the throne room and I'm going to kill the king right away.
Right. And that's not what happens. But again, it's a slow build up. Five year
old would do it. Right. We keep saying this should be a 17 year old,
because that's not what they would do anyway. Go ahead.
Right. No, that's right. Well, if you're going to kill the
king, you do it in the court in front of everybody and
you don't miss. By the way, I got that bit of knowledge from The Wire.
Great show. If you have an opportunity to watch it. If you're going to king
to kill the king, you kilo in this court and you don't miss.
You make sure you don't miss. Gangs of New York was also infamous for this.
Yes. And unfortunately, DiCaprio missed because Daniel De
Lewis, you can't kill that guy. Ultimate villain
of villains, by the way, would have been a much better king. I would love
to see Shakespeare come out of Daniel Day Lewis's mouth. Oh, that would be cool,
actually. Yeah, I agree. Oh, my gosh. Wouldn't that be amazing?
A little chill right there. You're just thinking about it,
and then you have some CW actor to be Hamlet,
and then you just got to put him in scenes with Daniel Day Lewis,
and Daniel Lewis just eat. He'll just eat the scenery and the kid will
just be scared. And you'll get the actual dynamic of Hamlet there.
The question becomes,
if you're a leader and you don't quite know where
the social negotiation is going or where the sale is going or what the outcome
is going to be, and you are wandering through
looking for where the build up is, how do you maintain patience?
This is the thing I think Shakespeare is doing with Hamlet. He's showing
how the build up happens because he wants his audience to be
patient. He doesn't want the payoff to come immediately. Like you
said, that's something that an immature person would want, is the payoff to come
immediately. But a mature writer like Shakespeare knows.
No, the thing is in the build up,
how do leaders deal with the build up?
Well, here's the thing.
This is a very loaded question, only because
we've already talked about how our society today is very
results driven, right? Right. We rely on
them, we bank on them. If it's not for results,
it doesn't happen, so to speak. Right. I don't know how much
we are afforded patients never mind whether the
corporate wants it or not. I don't know how much we're afforded
it, in a sense. Right. So I
think there are other roles outside of my world that
deserve more patience than sales.
Right.
This, to me, I find fascinating in one sense.
And you talked about the dei earlier, so I'm going to make a comment
here where I have never in my career worried
about the age,
race, color, sex, gender.
None of that mattered. I looked at did you hit your quota
or not? Right. And if you didn't hit your
quota that month, did we support you the
same way we would support everybody else? If that answer
is yes, then you're fired. Right. I could fire somebody
strictly based on very calculated things.
It had zero to do with color,
race, sex, whatever.
Right. All those other extra things that we.
Now take sales out of, it secretarial
people, administrative people.
Yeah. That's different. Right? It's very different.
Where does that line draw? I'm fortunate I've never had to deal with that.
I've always been dealing with sales and. Marketing people, where I had clear
ROI, clear numbers, KPIs are very clear. It's clear
you either are valuable to us or you're not. That's it.
Well, that's where I worry, like in sales and marketing,
if the large language model algorithms are truly the thing
that we're going to move towards, which it looks like we are. Yeah.
And sales will be immune to some of this, more so
than marketing, which is already kind of 90% down the rabbit
hole. Forget it. Yeah. I was even talking
with people, some of my internal marketing folks today in my organization, and we
were just like, okay, well, we've already got automation working on this one part,
so let's just translate this over here, over to here, over to here, over to
here. Mainly, my ego is
kind of done with it now. I don't need to be at the core of
it. So now that I don't need to be at the core of it,
now that my ego is done, okay, let's just go. And it's
90%. I'm just go. And with that being said,
at the end of the day, people still buy from people on the
sales end. So you can automate the
blast of emails all day. Sure. And you
can automate the webinar, and you can even automate the
phone call, but you can't automate the signing
on the dotted line. Right. So sales
will be immune to this for a while.
However, at a certain point, I would tell you, Tom, I think you're going
to get caught. I think sales and marketing is going to get caught in particular
sales, because that's sort of the last bastion
of resistance for the Jester. That's the last bastion of
resistance for the
round peg that won't go into the square hole. They can hide in sales
and totalizing
approaches to ideology don't allow anything outside
of that, outside of that system. I already don't
think we're immune to that social pressure, though,
that gesture pressure. I don't think we're immune to that at all. I really
do think because, again,
you could be the number one salesperson in the company. If you do
something that is outside of that social norm far enough,
you're fired anyway. That's already done. Yeah.
But the social norm sort of has expand a
little bit more for sales. Not as much as you might think. Okay,
all right. Not as much as you might think. I think that,
again, I'm going to take my client out to dinner or I'm
going to take my team my team hit 120% a quarter, so I'm going to
take my team out for a couple of drinks. Sure. That social environment
still holds. If somebody says something of that, you're getting reported
back to the office. There's people in trouble now
where there is a little leeway to
your point is somebody
could say something we'll use the word the term off color because people just know
what that means, right? Yeah. If it's
the amount of off color.
Is a little bit broader, the shading is
a little bit okay. Yeah. Because you might have that number one sales rep,
she says something that's a little inappropriate, you get
pulled aside and go, eight, calm that down a little, and they go,
okay, sorry,
you're right to a degree of but it's not as broad
as you might think. I would say in the last five years
it's been tightening much, much more than
the 15 years before that. Wow, okay. But it really
is there. Right. And I'm not exclusively in sales. I mean, I know sales for
what I do, but I'm not exclusively in that space broadly.
And so I know for what I do it's always been
tight. It always is because kind of the
nature of leadership development, that's kind of the nature of conflict management
or negotiation, if you're selling those types of products,
you better be buttoned down like you just better be because there's
certain areas of confidentiality
that if you show up as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
people aren't going to trust you. He's going to be like, yeah,
I don't know if what I'm saying is going to wind up coming out your
mouth later on. So you got to kind of
move away from that. You got to be more Polonious than Rosencrantz and Guildensterne,
quite frankly. People don't
always wrap it's sometimes hard
for people to wrap their arms around that idea. But in
general, I would have thought that sales would have been a little bit more immune
to it because there's just some of the funky things I see on the edges
and on the corners. But maybe you're right. Maybe things are totalizing all the way
out. And my thought on
that is you wind up at the end with sales that is
denuded of personality.
Well, that's a struggle I argue with.
You can have personality and you can tell those same jokes.
Clean it up.
I wouldn't try to change somebody's personality,
but again,
an off color comment. Sure. Could you make
it a little bit less off color? Most of them,
yes, most of them can be does it also go
with. The product you're selling? Because this is the other dynamic. Is that the
core remember I was talking about the core of the apple, right? Yeah. So at
the core of the apple of sales is, quite frankly, no one who's in sales
wants to admit this, but it's true. It's what you're selling
just as much as how you sell it. Sure.
If I'm selling furniture, I'll just use this as an example.
If I'm selling furniture in a sort of warehouse
furniture style situation, I'm getting paid
commission off of how many beds I move in a week.
I'm selling furniture. Like, there's really no call
for me to be weirdo about selling furniture. There's really
no call. Right. Customers going to come in, they're already going to know what they
want. My job is to facilitate. I mean, I bought furniture from salespeople at one
of these warehouse places. Quite frankly, they didn't sell me anything.
They just showed up with a bunch of paperwork. And I know their title is
Salesperson, but they weren't selling me anything. Okay. Whereas that
process will work maybe with furniture and cars
and maybe potentially computer hardware.
But when you're talking about things that are more ephemeral
right, like air ideas,
content, books, movies, software, in your case,
right. It's a little more loosey goosey.
Right. Or is that, again, another space of shades?
Right. Maybe I'm conflating too
many things together, which I'll be all admit, maybe I am.
It's a bit of an oversimplification, for sure. Okay.
I actually think your analogy or your example of
the selling furniture lends to being
you have to be more conscious of what you say. You have to bite the
tongue more. Think about it. Me and my wife go
in and we're going to look for a couch, and the sales guy is like,
that old school. Like, how could you imagine what you could do on this couch?
Right? Yeah. Okay. It could lead to a lot of things that you shouldn't say.
Right, right. Yeah. This is true. But they don't because they've
been trained, and they're trained to sell the furniture,
whatever. Right. And in software, you don't have those types of
opportunities. Right.
You're usually talking. So here's the other thing. This is really where
I tell people to be the most careful. It's in the rapport
building part that you have to be careful not in when you're selling the
product or service, when you're selling the ones and zeros of software
or you're selling the HVAC
job or whatever that is, it's not about the actual sale
that you need to be careful about what you're saying. It's in the rapport building
phase where you're trying to make connections
on an external level, or you're trying to
talk about their life, their kids, their house, whatever, and you're trying to make
that connection. You're building that bond of trust with them.
That's where you run the danger of saying something that is really
not appropriate and you're going to go but again so here's
the thing. In really good sales trainers that I have known
in my past, and one of the rules of thumb that
I use, you can build this is exactly what I was
talking about to you earlier. There's no reason that you have
to use all of those personal things to build rapport.
You can build rapport on a professional basis.
You can use your profession to build the
rapport, not the personal stuff.
To me, if the personal stuff comes, it should come after
when you're maintaining and you're building relationship,
not rapport. Got it? Again. And that's a
very trained thing that doesn't come inherently. You have to
be taught when you're building rapport, the rapport should be based on
the fundamental relationship that's in front of you, not the relationship you want
to build later. Right. To keep that customer
coming back over and over again is when you start extending
it beyond those. And by the way, if you cannot read the room in
that scenario, you shouldn't be in sales if
you're going to color outside the lines after you get to that
point. Once you do get to that personal point, if you're going to color outside
the lines, you better damn well know how far outside lines you can
go. And if you don't, if you can't judge that, you probably
shouldn't be in sales in the first place.
I'm thinking of something that no, I'm thinking of a sales conversation
that I was recently privy to and I'll
bring it up later with Tom and we'll discuss if we could bring it up
on the podcast in a future episode. Because it relates exactly to
what Tom just said about coloring outside the lines.
And I think that that's a fundamental distinction with the difference that Tom has just
brought up. That's hugely important for leaders to understand because leaders are salespeople.
That is one of the fundamental things. Actually, it's in my book. It's in chapter
five. Leaders should study sales and marketing. You need to study
the techniques of sales and marketing doesn't mean you have to be a
sales manager or a sales lead. It doesn't mean you have to be
the CMO. It means you have to know the techniques
and the tactics and the skill sets and be able to
apply those across a wide variety
of people in a leadership context. Because the thing you are selling is
yourself and your leadership.
That's fundamental to your success as a leader.
And you're right building rapport, tom's right building rapport, coloring outside
the lines, learning who people are you
can't be an ophelia in that situation.
All right, back to the play. Last jog round the corner.
Going to let Hamlet here have the last word. He's going to talk a little
bit about ophelia. This is now act three,
scene one. King comes in,
talks with king and queen come in. They talk with Rosencrantz and Gilgen,
Stern and Polonius. And the
king then sends for Hamlet.
And,
well, they kind of listen to Hamlet kind of walking up the
pathway, sort of thinking out loud.
Let's be privy to some of Hamlet's internal structure
here a little bit in act three, scene one.
Hamlet to be, or not to be,
that is the question. Whether it is nobler in
the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
or to take arms against a sea of troubles and
by opposing end them.
To die, to sleep, no more. And by sleep to say
we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is
heir to tis consummation devoutly to be wished.
To die, to sleep, to sleep, per chance to dream.
Hey, there's the rub. For in that
sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled
off this mortal coil must give us pause.
There's the respect and makes calamity of
so long life. For who would bear
the whips and scorns of time, the oppressors wrong, the proud man's consumer,
the pangs of despise, the love, the laws delay, the incidents of
office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes
when he himself might his quietest make with a bare
bodkin? Who would fardells bear to grunt and
sweat under a weary life but that the dread of something
after death, the undiscovered country from whose born
no traveler returns puzzle the will and makes us rather
bear those ills we have than fly
to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
And thus the native hue of resolution is sickled or with
the pale cast of thought and enterprises of great pitch and
moment with this regard their currents turn awry and
to lose the name of action soft you now, the Pharaoh.
Feela, nymph, in thy orisins
be all my sins remembered.
Probably the most iconic monologue right of any
piece of literature. As soon as you started saying
it, I was like, oh, I actually remember this. We had to memorize this
in school. I actually remembered most of it, not all of it, but I was
like, wow. I didn't realize how embedded
that was. It's deep in there, Tommy.
It's in the system. I thought
that that was a good spot to stop at.
Yeah, because that is the question.
To be or not to be.
Is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune? Is it nobler in the mind to
suffer the slings and arrows of having
your career or the
boundaries of social approbation coming in. Is that noble?
Yeah. I picture this in the corporate world of somebody going, should I
quit my job and go work for that one?
That's the thing. Should I just deal with this? Am I better?
Am I safer? Am I more here and doing what I'm doing?
Or should I quit my job and. Go take that risk to sleep
per chance to dream?
I'm going to dream about what's over there in that startup dream about,
like, Scrooge McDuck, like jumping into a billion dollars worth of
coins and swimming around if any of you watch Ducktails back in the day,
you know who Scrooge McDuck is and swimming around in those. And if you didn't,
you should. Exactly. That's right. It was a great series.
For in that sleep of death what death? Physical death, material death,
emotional death. For in that sleep of death,
professional death, professional death, what Dreams
May come. By the way, that's another great title to a movie that had
Robin Williams and John Travolta in Back in the Day, where Robin Williams
dies and goes to heaven or someplace. For in that
sleep of death, what dreams may come. When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
whose mortal coil? The mortal coil of Hamlet. Mortal coil of
your job, the mortal coil of that room, of that
remote structure you might be in right now, that hybrid structure where
you got to go to the office a couple of days out of the week
and you're not getting anything out of it. Look,
Johnny Paycheck, put it a little bit more simply in the 1970s,
take this job and shove it, because I ain't working here no more.
And of course, in 2020 and I would argue
we're still underneath the royal of this people are figuring
out that they don't need to tolerate tolerate
what they don't need to tolerate. And I think this is the other thing you're
probably picking up on, Tom, in the larger cultural zeitgeist. I think a
lot of people are picking up on it, but they don't know how to put
a thumb on it. They don't know how to define it. It's that sense
that things are in tumult, that we are like Hamlet walking
into a room and muttering to ourselves
because we don't know which way to go. For leaders,
I think obviously we should read Shakespeare. Obviously, I believe that.
I believe that you should go back to the roots and
figure out what is happening there at the root. But also
I think you should really understand
the nature of all of these
kinds of cultural admonitions that
are being made in this play because they're actually human admonitions.
So Hamlet performed in Beijing is the same as
Hamlet performed in Nigeria, which is the same as Hamlet
performed in Rio de Janeiro, and it's the same as Hamlet
performed in Tokyo. These are human things.
Right? And the more closer we can get to
our own humanity through Shakespeare, the better it will be for leaders.
Tom, you got anything to say before we sign off? Any way to round this
off? No, I think not. Really.
I mean, I almost always have something to say, as you probably already know.
No, but I think we covered a lot coming into this.
I was like every other, as usual and
I have done, I'm like, what the hell does you know, does you know,
does this have to do with leadership? But we always figure out a way,
right? And we always figure out a way to interpret something in there. So,
yeah, I think it was pretty cool. I was a little impressed
with you on this episode there. Well, and we were
kind of flying blind a little bit. Just so you all know, this is a
little inside baseball. I didn't write a script for this episode today,
so if you hated this. Episode, it was because we were just winging it.
We were just winging it. We winged the whole thing. It's because we were winging
it. That's right.
And with that, that's it for us.
We're out.
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