I'm watching through the episodes of the
Extra History series on Youtube, highly recommend it.
I got up to the episodes about Japan's warring states era, the Sengoku Jidai, and came across a common thing that comes up in these things, which really doesn't make any sense. One of the Oda clan generals, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, started as a peasant, then became a servant of the Oda clan, starting as a sandal bearer for Oda Nobunaga, quickly becoming promoted, eventually becoming one of the top generals of the era.
Now, the thing is, even some fairly serious discussions of his rise seem to overly focus on the sandal-bearer point, for example Extra History here says "he must have been
really good at carrying shoes" to get promoted, and in this example and others, depict him as some goofy guy who's really good at shoe-carrying therefore somehow just lucked into becoming a general. This is plainly silly. Say someone started as a burger-flipper but worked their way up to be Vice President of McDonalds, if you said "wow, you must be
really good at flipping burgers to have made it this far" that would be insulting and ridiculous.
The deeper point here is a common misconception:
people don't understand how promotions work. We have this working conceptual model that
do good at current job = promotion, so when we see someone like Toyotomi Hideyoshi rising from sandal bearer to general, we somehow assume that his ability to arrange shoes was at all relevant to the process. In fact, someone who's the perfect sandal bearer would probably have been low on mental ability but very committed to their role, and would never be promoted. Oda Nobunaga had close contact with all his servants and probably pointed to Toyotomi Hideyoshi and said "this guy: why are we wasting him as a sandal bearer, he's clearly better than that", regardless of how good he was at the current job, which wasn't even relevant.
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Topic: Random thoughts - On the Origins of "I Could Eat A Horse" (Read 219006 times)