Irrationality Can Be Forgiven, Inconsistency Cannot

Irrationality and inconsistency are both generally disliked, but they’re worlds apart when it comes to whether someone can be trusted.

Here’s how a person with irrationality tends to be disliked. If it’s a boss: unreasonable, harassment, impossible targets, plans whose purpose is unclear, “that guy just acts important but doesn’t actually understand anything.” If it’s a subordinate: inefficient, doesn’t follow the boss’s instructions, keeps doing unrelated things, hard to manage.

Here’s how a person with inconsistency tends to be disliked. All talk, no follow-through action. “That guy’s story keeps changing depending on the time and place.” Last week the boss said “make more detailed documentation,” so you made it, and now he says “just give me the bottom line” without even bothering to read it properly.

That’s the general tone.

The word “irrational” is the negation of “rational,” and “rational” literally means being in accordance with “reason” (理). This “reason” might be mathematical logic, physical logic, psychological logic, or some combination of these, depending on the time and situation. It’s actually something very unstable.

The word “inconsistent” is the negation of “consistent,” and being consistent means being coherent throughout. Whether the act or choice is right or wrong, whether it’s useful to society or not — that’s outside the discussion. In other words, this one is actually very simple.

Whether something is irrational depends on your point of view. It’s a famous story that Facebook, for example, started as a service only Harvard students could join. From the standpoint of “increasing users,” that’s clearly irrational, but the result was that it expanded from Harvard to the Ivy League, then further, and eventually became the globally known service it is today. AirBnB didn’t use the internet or social media to find its first hosts — its sales members visited house owners one by one and negotiated in person. There’s no shortage of cases like these, where taking clearly irrational actions in order to scale ended up being exactly what made scaling possible.

In other words, these are only “seemingly irrational.” Internally, the logic actually holds together for the person involved. Other people just can’t quite understand it, or can’t bring themselves to accept it. But in most cases, ignorant critics flatly dismiss situations like this as “irrational.” In other words, when it comes to approaches to problems with unclear answers, matters concerning the future, or unknown challenges, there’s no need to worry about whether other people find it irrational. Frankly, that would be a waste of effort.

Believe in yourself. That’s all.

Inconsistency, on the other hand, is very serious. Your character will be doubted, and no one will trust you. And more often than not, the person who is being inconsistent isn’t aware of their own inconsistency. That’s because they’ve fabricated “consistency” itself inside their own mind. For example, even something inconsistent like “saying different things yesterday and today” might feel consistent to the person involved, in the sense of “I always speak in whichever way maximizes my own gain.” Someone who casually steals other people’s ideas or achievements might also feel, internally, that they’re being consistent — something like “whose achievement it is isn’t the essential issue; the only thing that matters is reliably launching a good service for society.” That possibility can’t be ruled out.

What’s actually happening here is:

a mix-up between “consistency” and “rationality.”

They push through, ignoring their own inconsistency by browbeating it with some plausible-sounding “reason.” Living this way is, naturally, full of contradiction and close to falling apart. People who got promoted but are hated by their subordinates, people who succeeded socially but whose family relationships are a disaster — in most cases, I think they’re simply paying the price for inconsistencies they sowed somewhere along the way. Inconsistency is betrayal, and it’s self-protection. It produces nothing.

Irrationality: fine. Inconsistency: not fine.

And what the world calls innovation mostly lives inside irrationality anyway.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2016/10/87/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.