It’s time for some mental model homework.
It isn’t often that I read a news story that causes me to grieve. Yet, that is exactly what is happening with the revelations coming out about General Petraeus, the disgraced CIA director and former military commander who had to resign after it was revealed he cheated on his wife of 37-years with a married biographer named Paula Broadwell.
You can undo an entire career, and a lifetime of work, reputation, trust, and respect, in a moment.
The actors may have changed but this story is as ancient as humanity itself. There are so many victims involved, all of which could have been avoided. It’s so much unnecessary suffering – emotionally, professionally, reputationally, and financially.
There is a huge lesson for those of you who want to be more successful. We’ll get to that in a moment. For now, let’s start with Broadwell. According to The New York Times, she “was the valedictorian of her high school class and homecoming queen, a fitness champion at West Point with a graduate degree from Harvard, and a model for a machine gun manufacturer.” She’s published books, she is married, she apparently has two kids.
Here is a woman who is brilliant, attractive, driven, successful, intelligent, dedicated, productive, and above average in both talent and execution. Yet, for the rest of her life, right or wrong, she will always be “that whore”. There is no escaping it. Whenever she is hired, or in a meeting with someone, it will be in the back of their minds. The parents and teachers of her children’s friends know about it, and are talking about it at home, humiliating her kids and her husband. Her male coworkers are less likely to respect her for her work and her female coworkers are less likely to trust her. There is no winning here.
Then you have David Petraeus, who showed himself to have a complete lack of integrity and, perhaps worse, humiliated his wife of nearly four decades, who has been at his side since he was a nobody. At his confirmation hearing to head the CIA, his wife sits mere seats from his mistress, so that now she has to look back at the single most important career advancement her spouse ever enjoyed and know what was going on, right there in the photographs. His sins don’t stop there. The lack of judgment was so great that he allegedly sent “thousands” of inappropriate emails including topics such as having “sex under a desk”.
[mainbodyad]Every day, you are depositing trust into your reputation bank. When people expect much out of you, you need to live up to it. No one cares that Charlie Sheen is supposedly banging hookers and prostitutes because he makes no pretense about it and he isn’t hurting anyone else. What people hate is hypocrisy and betrayal. Civilization is wired that way because on a genetic level, we are social creatures and this leads to long-term reproductive success. We wouldn’t want someone to do those things to us so the empathy and mirror neurons in our brains activate when we see it done to someone else.
This is what I mean when I say be consistently “not stupid”, to borrow a phrase. You can undo an entire career, and a lifetime of work, reputation, trust, and respect, in a moment.
For those of you who study mental models, an assignment: Figure out the answer to this question: David Petraeus made the situation much worse than it otherwise would have been by resigning. Had he, instead, refused to resign and issued a statement saying, “I screwed up. I gave into temptation. My wife and I are going to try to work through this but the state of our marriage is, frankly, no one else’s business. The fact I can’t keep it in my pants doesn’t affect my professional judgment, it just means I failed, like countless men before me, and all I can do is try to be better in the future.”, the situation would have probably gone away, in time. Why is that? There are several mental models that would have made this the case. If you can identify them, you will be much further along the journey to utilizing the approach in your own life.
Reader Comments (10)
Comments are presented chronologically, with replies indented beneath the comments to which they respond.
Gilvus
November 11, 2012
Horns and halo is the mental model, though I don't know how much of a difference owning up would've made with the general public. Despite his accomplishments, Petraeus wasn't the highest-profile guy in the media. Not unknown, but not a front-page persona either. This scandal is pretty much the only thing the average U.S. resident will remember him for.
Hell, even people who WERE well-known and highly esteemed (Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, and the Governator comes to mind) by the general public have had their images permanently tarnished by a single indiscretion. Or multiple indiscretions, in Tiger's case.
peterpatch79
November 11, 2012
2 things.
1.
"David Petraeus made the situation much worse than it otherwise would have been by resigning. "
@Joshua: Do you believe that Petraeus should not have resigned or are you just using this as tool to teach mental models, there is definately some social proof (it happens to lots of other people) model happening in there.
2. When I hear the name "Paula Bradwell" I will probably be thinking about how much more appropriate and meaningful her Petraeus biography titled "All in" is now that the truth is out. 🙂
TheLonelyHumanist
November 11, 2012
We are a polgynous species. This behavior is normal. He is the great Gen. Petraeus and whoever he is married to is not Wonderwoman. Our cultures have evolved non-normal expectations ("the Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak," sound familiar?). The General's marriage is none of our business. Newt Gingrich had no problem using Clinton's infidelity to his political advantage and then gusting his offense that his own infidelity would be a political issue. Interestingly, millions agreed with him both times.
Joshua Kennon
November 12, 2012
Replying to TheLonelyHumanist
Intellectually, I know you are correct. It's hard for me to accept because I am one of those men who have the heart of a swan - you find the love of your life, end up together forever, and that's it. I can't imagine ever loving or being with anyone else. It's probably just a genetic variation along a distribution curve; might related to how I find it easier to plan long-term with money, too.
Growing up, my parents had marriage "rules" and we absorbed these as kids. One of them was that they would never commit infidelity while married because if it ever reached that point, they would have the respect for their past relationship so that they would file for divorce first. That's what I don't get. If you love someone, you don't cheat on them. If you don't love them, you give them the respect of a divorce.
But, intellectually, again, I know you are right.
On this topic: I have a book you would probably want to read. For years, I had formulated a theory that most of war, conflict, and religion were really just extensions of the genetic desire to reproduce. The first religions were mostly fertility cults and we see that continue today (e.g., the Catholic (institutional level) obsession with reproduction and prohibitions against birth control). This was touched on a bit in the Selfish Gene hit but the entire concept has been in the back of my mind for years, and I notice it all the time.
I was at a bookstore and saw a tome that was based on this exact same theory and yelled in excitement in the middle of the aisles. I haven't made may way through it all because I am in the middle of too many other books right now, but it is on the short list. It is called Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World.
TheLonelyHumanist
November 13, 2012
Replying to Joshua Kennon
Good for you, brother. It strikes me that more than any person I have ever encountered, I think you may have won the genetic lottery. I too, BTW, feel organically compelled to some number of virtues. That is what makes me "Me." Though I am quite certain I could extend my fidelity to more than one wife at the same time. Maintaining several good marriages sounds like a wonderful challenge. That is an impossibility, of course, in our current culture--and for good reason: there would not be enough women to go around--and we know how men behave when there are not enough women to go around. 😉
You believe that the General betrayed a loved one. That is what offends you. Betrayal is universally condemnable. She has my pity as well. But we could just as easily say that she is a victim of the fashions of a society that told her to expect monogamy from a mostly polgynous species. As a possible parallel, much of our society still expects a homosexual to "refrain from their impulses." I feel that, for most men, monogamy is something of a similar challenge.
I appreciate your recommendation. It goeth upon the list. I just finished Ferguson's Civilization: the West and the Rest and am currently listening to the Durant's Lessons of History. Great stuff. Audible.com is now my greatest time management tool. Even driving to work is now an intellectually invigorating process.
http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-West-Rest-Niall-Ferguson/dp/0143122061
http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-History-Will-Durant/dp/143914995X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1352866246&sr=1-1&keywords=durant
Gilvus
November 15, 2012
Replying to TheLonelyHumanist
Hey Humanist, I'm making a series on YouTube about this exact topic. They're informative and entertaining, and I have six episodes up so far. If you're interested, email me at g1lvus-at-yahoo-dot-com and I'll send you the link.
Dheeraj Dadhich
November 27, 2012
Replying to Joshua Kennon
same here man ( for months, rather then years ).
although i have a little doubt ....... when i think ( no please seriously !! ) most of the things run down at the end to 'Darwin's survival ....' ....
considering i am getting same results .. one after another
.... am i using this model way too often ? man with hammer ?
.... is that a symptom of having insufficient models ?
.... or being too impressed by a single !dea ?
Dheeraj Dadhich
November 27, 2012
loss aversion
...... do i need to tell this ?
....... if i tell the people, i will be at loss for sure.
........ if i don't tell people two thing can happen
(i) this thing can come out in media ..... god knows what will happen then
(ii) the thing may not come out ... the story dies with me & Paula.
considering what we do know abt decision making .... he will try to take a bet on (ii) ( i.e loss aversion )
ofcourse not a model alone can explain some thing as complex as human behavior
ALFREDO A ATWATER
April 14, 2013
I don't pay too much attention to those news. I asked myself if General Petraeus was a married woman having an affair with a young guy would it be such a big deal ?
Maybe the audience would be aroused ?
It's just politics.
Orion
May 23, 2014
I don't know if you'll see this but I have been reading a lot of your articles and stumbled across this.
One reason that Gen. Petraeus resigned was because contrary to your statements in this article, his marriage does affect how he does his job because it is against the UCMJ. He could be charged for adultery under the military law and by resigning I believe he avoided a lot of this punishment. Although it may have been less of a scandal I don't think he would have kept his job at the CIA much longer had he not resigned.