Small hassles and extra steps can sharply reduce action.
More quotesMy missed deadline had context: the brief changed, the software died and three people discovered “urgent” at 4.47pm.
Your missed deadline revealed character.
Funny, that.
We carry CCTV footage of our own circumstances and a single blurry photograph of everyone else’s. Then we confidently label the photograph. Lazy. Difficult. Disengaged. Low intent. An adjective is wonderfully economical: one word can dispose of a human being and absolve an entire system.
The Castro experiment makes the stupidity impossible to miss. Readers were explicitly told a coin toss assigned the argument. They still treated the argument as a window into the writer’s private beliefs. The situation was printed on the tin. The mind opened a different tin.
Businesses do this all day. A shopper abandons checkout after the card form loops: “uncommitted”. A new employee stays silent in a meeting full of unexplained history: “lacks initiative”. A customer calls twice because the first answer was useless: “high maintenance”. Conveniently, the label always lands on the person with least power to redesign the conditions.
Worse, labels compound. Give the “unreliable” employee smaller jobs and less trust, then admire the thin record as confirmation. Hide the phone number, call the people who persevere “demanding”, and use their behaviour to justify hiding it better.
Character exists, obviously. But one act in one badly observed situation is not a personality test. It is barely a receipt.
Before writing the adjective, write the conditions. If that ruins the diagnosis, the diagnosis was probably bollocks.