This is such a good insight, and I want to add a layer to it rather than push back on it.
What Tom's calling desperation, I'd call by a different name: conviction.
Not because desperation is the wrong word for how it feels — it probably is exactly how it feels — but because what's actually driving it isn't scarcity, it's cost.
Desperation usually comes from not having enough of something.
What Tom described sounds more like the discomfort of holding a belief you haven't finished saying yet — the specific kind of urgency that shows up once walking away from an idea costs more than staying uncomfortable and saying it anyway.
That's the exact distinction I've been excavating in my own work — the difference between certainty and conviction, and why only the second one actually moves anybody.
Curious what you'd say: when Tom told you that, did it read to you as fear of being unheard, or something closer to just not being able to not say it anymore?
It was definitely a fear of not being heard. Tom has a certain humanistic point of view which is largely ignored in many industries. He was clearly exasperated that, over decades of beating the drum, his movement was not what he wanted it to be. He certainly has a high degree of conviction about his views!
This is such a good insight, and I want to add a layer to it rather than push back on it.
What Tom's calling desperation, I'd call by a different name: conviction.
Not because desperation is the wrong word for how it feels — it probably is exactly how it feels — but because what's actually driving it isn't scarcity, it's cost.
Desperation usually comes from not having enough of something.
What Tom described sounds more like the discomfort of holding a belief you haven't finished saying yet — the specific kind of urgency that shows up once walking away from an idea costs more than staying uncomfortable and saying it anyway.
That's the exact distinction I've been excavating in my own work — the difference between certainty and conviction, and why only the second one actually moves anybody.
Curious what you'd say: when Tom told you that, did it read to you as fear of being unheard, or something closer to just not being able to not say it anymore?
It was definitely a fear of not being heard. Tom has a certain humanistic point of view which is largely ignored in many industries. He was clearly exasperated that, over decades of beating the drum, his movement was not what he wanted it to be. He certainly has a high degree of conviction about his views!