Life lessons from The Men Who Stare at Goats

On my birthday a couple of years ago, Jenn and I went out to see The Men Who Stare at Goats, which had just come out. Now that movies are $13 a pop, we see a lot more of them on DVD than in the theater, but I was taken by the title of this one, and the tagline: “No Goats. No Glory.”

The movie is pretty loopy, but it contains some grains of genuine wisdom. Here’s Lyn Cassady, the US Army psyops officer played by George Clooney:

“Bob, have you ever heard of optimum trajectory? Your life is like a river and if you are aiming for a goal that is not your destiny, you will always be swimming against the current. Young guy who wants to be a stock car driver—it’s not going to happen. Little Anne Frank wants to be a high school teacher—tough titty, Anne, it’s not your destiny. But you will go on to move the hearts and minds of millions. Find out what your destiny is and the river will carry you.”

There’s a lot of truth in that. Euell Gibbons wanted to be a novelist, but his book was gradually taken over by detailed accounts of wild foods and how to prepare them. Before long he had written Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Alexander Graham Bell thought the telephone would be used mainly to listen to music (and there is a wonderful description in Proust of the narrator listening to an opera on the new device). Avon’s Skin So Soft was intended to, well, make your skin soft, but someone discovered that it also made an excellent insect repellent. Rather than bury that fact, Avon started running commercials promoting it for that use.

Letting the river carry you is just another way of saying: Listen to the customer. Promote the uses and the benefits that are important to the customer, not to you. Because when it comes to the customer and her problems, she is smarter than you are.