What we say matters. It matters where we say it and it matters who we are speaking to and who hears it. A lot of the world around us revolves around opinions and a lot of the value that we see or own comes down to nothing more than perception. Simple attitudes can both create and destroy billions.

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Before I tell you the story of a guy who destroyed his own business with just a few stupid, arrogant, but honest remarks, let me tell you why I think it's relevant and why it made me think about our growing community.

In my humble and uneducated opinion, while you can already call STEEM a real success story, the amount of unrelenting blind optimism sometimes seem unwarranted. So when I see claims that I think are unrealistic, like people claiming that Facebook is failing hard or that we are already close to overtaking them, I don't shy away from criticizing that.

But I sometimes wonder if it should. The only thing that gives crypo value is the fact that there are enough people out there that are perceiving it as valuable and that unbrideled optimision surely plays a part in that. Even if I see it as unreasonable, what's the value of me trying to rain down the parade (if anybody cares about what I have to say anyway). Of course, most of the time I prefer to go with honesty and speak my mind even when it's not the popular opinion.

It goes without saying that this is truly a hypothetical and obscure comments by an obscure account like mine don't and wouldn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but I still want to evaluate if expressing this type of sentiment should be viewed as beneficial or detrimental. Being part of the STEEM ecosystem often feels like being part of a closed community with its own culture and accepted or predominant values. But the reality is that it's absolutely open and transparent and everything we put on the blockchain is out there for anybody to see.

On one hand I want to be honest and vocal about what I think needs improvement or about people having unrealistic expectations, but on the other hand I do want to promote STEEM and I trust that it's going to remain a successful endeavor. And after this possibly unneeded tangent, let me finally tell you the story about how a guy burned billions with just a few words.

Pulling a Ratner

I don't know if you've heard this story, but I hadn't until recently and I found it absolutely fascinating. It's about a guy named Gerald Ratner whose family owned a chain of jewelry stores in the UK. It wasn't a small company, but it had a relatively small market share. He started working form the family business in 1965 and in 1984 become the CEO. He made the stores of the company flashier and the jewelery tackier but also much cheaper which was a tactic that seemed to work so well that he managed to increase the number of stores operated from 150 to more than 2000. His company was now the ugly, tasteless and unapologetic market leader. This was obviously a huge success.

As the CEO and as the true engineer of his company's expansion, Gerald Ratner was viewed as leader and a respected thinker and strategist and as a true marker for his success, he was invited to make a speech for the Institute of Directors at the Royal Albert hall in front of a group of businessmen, investors and journalists. The 1991 speech was going well and since he though the event was kind of private, he allowed himself some whimsical honesty that surely haunts him to this very day. When asked about how his company was able to sell jewelry so cheaply he answered included "Because it's total crap" and even added "cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long" about some of their earrings.

While some of the businessmen there might have cheered happily at the idea of selling total crap to the dumb masses at an awesome markup while gulping up the lion's share of the market, Ratner had forgotten that the event also included journalist. Obviously somebody decided to write about his saucy remarks directed at his own products which became a huge story all over the news. And the customers were kind of offended. They started avoiding the chain like the plague after suddenly become cognizant of its tackiness. And even before they could do that, the shares of the company plummeted and the fiasco cost the Ratner Group £500 million ($800 million). The company slowly faded into oblivion while blaming "a shift in consumer spending habits" and Ratner was left to rebuild his life from the ground up with only a few million bucks left to his name after selling his shares.

Best of all, the Institute of Directors actually have a YouTube channel and they've uploaded Gerald Ratner's fateful speech with his most infamous comment starting around the 3:45 mark. His chuckle and smirk after his "total crap" joke are priceless knowing how things panned out.

Today, he's doing fine, so no need to be too worried about him.

Let's Tie It Back

What Ratner did was criticize his own company publicly which destroyed the trust people had in it. Trust is something quite fickle and while the company had a cheap product to sell, the value of cryptocurrencies is not backed up even by that - just opinion and perception.

Besides me wondering if I should keep my negative-Nancy attitude to myself, I think this story shows how important image and public perception are. Being persuasive, honest or arrogant can actually create or destroy billions in value and it's up to all of us as stake-holders to not only be shaping our community for success, but to be communicating about it in a way that would allow it to be successful. Maybe what seems like delusional optimism to me is the right way to go? What do you think?

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