Would I be filthy rich if I were rather more horrible?

What makes some people highly effective in business and in life is a willingness to engage in conflict, says Rob Long.

I was with a screenwriter friend the other night, and she was complaining about another person. After a long and vivid description of this person’s manifest faults, I had only one question.

“Do I know her?” I asked.

“No,” my friend said. “She’s a horrible person.”

“What does that have to do with it?” I asked. “I’ve been in show business for 25 years. I know a lot of horrible people.”

Which isn’t really true. Well, the 25 years part is true, unfortunately, but the horrible person part isn’t. I don’t really know a lot of horrible people. In fact, I’m not sure there really are all that many horrible people.

Yes, the usual suspects are always on the list – Hitler, Pol Pot, the people who design most computer printers – but actual horrible people? Evil characters roaming around? I’m not so sure.

Yes, there are temperamental types. And yes, there are plenty of insecure bullies around the world. Every office has at least a couple of terrified executives who make everyone else feel miserable.

But when those folks calm down, they often turn out to be decent people. I didn’t say “good people”, you’ll notice. I said “decent”.

Most of the horrible types we all encounter fit somewhere on the scale between the truly evil (that’s Pol Pot at one end) and the occasionally irritating (that’s the guy who parks too close to your car in the car park).

We all have our own personal standards, but I find that most of the people that others call “horrible” are in fact somewhere in between.

But maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just a hopeless optimist who always looks for the good in people.

What I’ve noticed over the years, though, is that what makes some people highly effective in business and in life is a willingness to engage in conflict.

They’re the ones who bristle and shout and disagree and get into protracted and doomed arguments, who often cross the line between being decisive and becoming unhinged rage machines.

They’re also the people who live in big houses and drive expensive cars and, in general, have a lot more money and success than those of us who are conflict averse.

In Hollywood, being successful and being “horrible” are frequently intersecting traits.

The rest of us run at the first sign of trouble. We don’t like a lot of shouting and temper displays. We seek to mute and muffle our disagreements, or, when faced with an emerging area of noisy and ugly conflict, we resort to a kind of stony-faced passive-aggressive shutdown. With a half-smile, half-grimace locked into place, our eyes go dead and our minds leave the location and we soar over the city, to a place where there’s a little treat waiting for us – a delicious piece of chocolate, perhaps, or a frothy cappuccino – and we sit quietly in our imaginations enjoying the solitude until an echoing voice calls us back to the present moment, where the conflict is winding down and the shouting has stopped.

I mean, that’s what I do. It’s not something I plan. It happens automatically. Once, when faced with a particularly temperamental movie star, I’m told I sat for almost an hour with a dreamy and absent look on my face as the star screamed about a few script revisions. I have zero memory of it.

I sometimes wonder if I’m handicapped by my reflexive avoidance of real discord. How much more money would I have, how many houses and cars and fat bank accounts might I possess, if I were a little more horrible?

This is a business, unfortunately, in which films get shot and television shows get produced despite an almost insurmountable institutional need to stop all forward progress.

Studios and networks are filled to the rim with people whose sole occupation is to say “no”. So the kind of person who charges into conflict, who yells a bit, who behaves irrationally and thoughtlessly, maybe that’s exactly the kind of person we need.

“You’re an idiot,” my friend said, when I explained this. “That’s just the kind of stupid stuff you always say and no one ever calls you on it.”

My friend went on to enumerate the ways in which my theory on conflict was idiotic. I mean, I think she did. I didn’t hear it all. I was soaring over the city towards a piece of chocolate.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl