I want to share a musing on The Apprentice. But only because it ties together nicely with a personal reflection I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

I’m still amazed at how similar main elements of The Apprentice rival every day life. The Apprentice was all about simplicity. I’m not talking about the tasks, but the way producers boiled contestants down and the subsequent editing. I’ve said before that the editing is basically an extreme caricature of each of the contestants. Fittingly, here’s a simple categorization of the editing:

1) The first category of edits was the painting of an extremely flattering portrait, “earned” because the contestant survived until the end of the show. And as we can all figure out, if you make it to the end of the show, the editors have to make you look as favorable as possible or the credibility of the show gets called into question. Here are most (if not all) mistakes, backstabbing, and ugly moments are totally glossed over or ignored.

2) The next category would be assassination. If a contestant has some notable accomplishments, but is fired (this is a gameshow after all), the editors work overtime. Given that editors can’t make the “trinity of facts” go away,

There are only three things that the editors can’t change (no matter how much they’d like to):
1) who the project manager was
2) which team won or lost
3) who got fired

they set to work marginalizing a contestants involvements in facts 1&2 when faced with having to present number 3 and portraying it as justified.

3) The last category of editing is very gentle. You get a decent flavor for who the person is, but their mistakes, and personality is simply amplified. And this is where I merge into my own personal reflection. In this category a person is simplified. They’re made to personify one (maybe, two) adjectives.

What’s interesting to me is that we do this every day. We boil other people down into one or two words. And more specifically, we try and get them into a box. In some cases, it’s probably justified. Some people are so dominated by a few characteristics that labeling is appropriate. In the case that I want to talk about, I think we do it to protect our self-esteem.

Say we find someone who we think is really funny. Their humor skills can’t be denied since everyone is cracking up. Now let’s say that we like to think that we’re pretty funny as well, and feel a touch of insecurity that they’re funnier then we are. We then reduce them to the “funny guy”, and think of them as someone who is funny but doesn’t have grace. Or is funny but not smart. We often try to fit other people into these cramped little boxes, so that their skills, personality, or whatever it is, doesn’t threaten or “diminish” our sense of specialness.

I’ve noticed that this simplification/rationalization/boxification creeps into my head every now and again. And once I noticed this, I listened more carefully to other people. And I noticed we all do it. I frequently see someone talented at something, and then see other people pay them a complement, and then loop back to themselves with some subtle (well, how subtle depends on the person) self-compliment. Their implication is usually pretty clear– it’s nice that you can do that…congratulations! But here’s what I can do, and you can’t.

I’ve re-read this and I don’t know that it makes sense. But in an effort to blog more, I’m not going to edit. So I’m hitting publish.