ACT I: THE FOUNDATION — Setting the stage
"People are shit."
Not as an insult — as a design spec. Our brains play tricks on us. What we see is full of hallucinations. What we hear is post-processed signals. We're imperfect by design, and that's before we even get to ego, bias, and self-interest.
According to Wikipedia, "An axiom is a proposition considered 'self-evident' and accepted without requiring prior demonstration."
This phrase, as offensive as it may seem, represents an axiom for me. It's the starting point and endpoint of any situation or discussion, and despite its offensive nature, it shouldn't be a problem. On the contrary, it should be a window to solutions.
If anyone is still reading this, it's more than important to clarify that the first one who's shit here is me. And for me, this is neither news nor something uncomfortable or problematic. The problem is not accepting it, not facing it, and not learning from it.
At the slightest criticism, people typically "shut down," close all their doors and windows, and focus on deflecting the criticism — as if it were harmful to their health.
Companies and organizations are, among other things, a group of people who, as such, are permanently exposed to making mistakes. The fundamental point behind many of the topics I'm going to develop is this: as long as we don't accept that we make mistakes, that sometimes "we're shit," we're not going anywhere.
This axiom applies to everyone — whether you're at the top or the bottom of the org chart.
The Taleb Connection
The axiom isn't cynicism. It's the prerequisite for everything else.
"How much you truly 'believe' in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game (2018), Prologue
Read it backward: the people who can't risk being wrong don't actually believe anything. They're protecting an image. The "shut down at criticism" pattern described above is exactly that — the inability to put one's self-image at risk in front of evidence. Years before Skin in the Game gave the phrase a label, the axiom was already pointing at the same thing: if you can't admit you're shit too, you don't have a position. You have a costume.
The bit about this applying "whether you're at the top or the bottom" is the load-bearing line. The axiom fails the moment one rank exempts itself.
This article was translated from the 2012 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration — clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.