Why Successful People are so Boring

There's a really good article in The Guardian today by Gabby Hinsliff.

Her subject is successful career women, but in my experience it could just as easily apply to successful business men:

It was only after a panellist cheerily remarked one year that the price of having four kids and a successful business is having zero cultural hinterland – no hobbies, no opinions on the hit Sunday night drama you didn’t have time to watch, no time or energy to read anything more challenging than a glossy magazine – that the penny dropped. Looking at what successful people do is only half the picture. It’s what they don’t do, in order to fit in all the impressive stuff, that’s revealing.

Zero cultural hinterland - that's exactly right, and explains just how mind numbingly boring many successful people are, and how narrow and focussed they have to be.

Great Essay on Donald Trump

It looks almost certain that the American electorate (poor sods) will get an appalling choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I loathe Hillary Clinton, but she's not as dangerous as Donald Trump.

Here's great essay by Andrew Sullivan, a writer and commentator I've admired for years, on Donald Trump and the threat he poses to America and the world.

It's rammed full of thought provoking stuff - here are a few selected quotes:

This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living...

The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.

This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought.