“Really got this wrong man.”

It took me 2.9 years and 1,227 posts to get to the point of offending someone so much that they semi-publicly said, “that’s it, I’m outta here.” I actually take the comment to be a sign of (very slow) progress.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I’m cheery about this. My initial reaction, seeing as how it’s the only comment on that post, was that, wow, maybe I really did go way overboard. And then I remembered, yes, of course I went way overboard – that was the whole point of the 701 word sentence, so if it actually caused someone so much angst that they are never going to visit this blog again and they are going to semi-publicly say so (rather than quietly disappearing as is more typical), then, hey, my words might not be completely benign, which in a perverted way is kind of flattering seeing as how I am some random dude writing on blogspot.com.

One of the things that has surprised me the most about this blog and continues to surprise me to this day is the lack of vitriolic feedback. The ratio of positive or neutral comments (or emails or hallway conversations) to negative ones is like 180 to 1. That’s not the same as saying that people typically agree with me; people disagree with me all the time (when they can tell what point I am trying to make) but rarely in a way that they seem offended or upset about it.

I’ve secretly been kind of waiting for a “that’s it, I’m outta here” comment to happen so that I had an occasion to state a theory: It’s my assumption/belief that if you are not offending people then either (1) you are occupying an intellectual territory too safe to be interesting or (2) you haven’t earned enough status points to be taken seriously. I hope I don’t need to explain that; it should explain itself.

While I don’t want to offend people for the sake of offending them (typically), I’d like to be interesting and I’d like to be taken somewhat seriously, so I see offending people as an inevitable consequence of that goal.

Now in this particular case I was not putting forward any controversial ideas so probably didn’t “offend” so much as “bore to death” or just “look really, really lame seemingly trying to write like a good writer,” but, hey, one step at a time, right?

The point: GET MAD AT ME DANG IT, and don’t be bashful about showing it.

The more important point: It’s up to me to make that happen by (1) occupying unsafe (≈ interesting) intellectual territory and (2) presenting the ideas in a way that warrants taking them seriously.