Hard-Earned Business Lessons

"But I have a right to say that because we believe in free speech?" Have you ever heard a defense like that? Chances are this was when that person had just said something offensive - unwittingly or not. We hear so much about "free speech" in the media as it relates to the US specifically but I also want to recognize that this argument has been around for a long, long time now. I think there are some important, practical distinctions that we should make here which further help us understand this argument and its place in our society. First off, there is no such thing as free speech - at least not in the way that people think that "free speech" is free speech. People want and understand free speech to be a license to say whatever the hell you want with zero consequences. You won't lose your job, you won't lose any relationship you have, you'll get just as much service as you did before, and so on. But that's not practical and is not in effect...

Most of us have been fans of things at one point in our life or another. It may have been (and probably was) a sports team or it could have been a brand. It could have been a person, celebrity, or even just a company itself. We all have our experiences with fandom and I'll own that a lot of it can be very positive. But there are a couple of very negative points to fandom, particularly in the past ten years or so, that I feel must make us reject the call of fandom. First off, have you ever heard the saying of how you should never meet your heroes? That obviously wouldn't apply to every single human (side note: for the love of god people need to stop using "not all" arguments for so many damn reasons), but I do think that it applies to a lot of people who you might have grown up idolizing. "Ignorance is bliss" is another saying that I think carries a lot of truth and I don't mean this in the "what they don't know can't hurt them sense" (b...