Could Cluelessness be our true superpower?

Just like Jesus said about the poor, Cluelessness will always be with us, more feature than bug. What sort of person writes a book entitled Cluelessness? What kind of person reads that book? Maybe both author and reader qualify as fools. There never were Cluelessness experts, and no serious secrets about it, either. The mysterious thing about Cluelessness might be that there’s rarely any mystery about its presence. We instinctively know when it’s here, or else we don’t. Either sense qualifies us as Clueless. I contend that Cluelessness is not half the problem our inability to cope with its presence becomes. It might be wiser to accept Cluelessness when we notice it in others and in ourselves, rather than engaging in endless arguments over who’s more or less, why, and thereby failing to resolve anything. Cluelessness might be a dilemma vanquished by acceptance rather than omniscience or advice. This is a book of personal discovery, an extended exposé in which I out myself as Clueless to enable others to more fully out themselves. I might inadvertently dispense tiny bits of good advice here, just as anyone might, but I wrote this book to serve as a useful portrait of someone attempting to more fully acknowledge his Cluelessness as his primary means for coping with it. If you’re weary of expending your energy carping about others’ Cluelessnesses while failing to permanently fix them or yourself, join me. How much more Clueless might we become together?

David A. Schmaltz is the author of the best-selling The Blind Men and the Elephant, Mastering Project Work (Berrett-Koehler, 2003), and the founder of True North, pgs, a boutique consulting firm that taught an adolescent Silicon Valley how their projects were actually managed. He lives overlooking the center of his universe in Walla Walla, Washington, with his wife, Amy Schwab, The Muse. Cover illustration by D. Wilder Schmaltz