Namely, even Sture didn’t honestly believe that he was surrounded by idiots: he was just incapable of communicating with them properly. Of course, at this point, Sture wanted to fetch a shotgun and shoot Thomas (his words), but Thomas wanted to make a pretty important point. “But who hired all these idiots?” he eventually asked Sture, fully aware that it could have been only him and nobody else. Well, when he was 25, he was supposed to interview a 60-year-old CEO by the name of Sture who told him that “he was surrounded by idiots.” The more Thomas thought about this sentence, the less he was able to understand it. Of course, this is not something Erikson believed when he was young when he too “pigeonholed people into two groups-good and sensible people and all the rest, the people who didn’t seem to understand anything at all:” The word “idiot” is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “a foolish or stupid person.”Īs far as Thomas Erikson is concerned, however, an “idiot” is merely someone who has a different behavior profile-and, consequently, style of communication-than the one dubbing him one. He made his name with Surrounded by Idiots in 2014, which has been translated into 40 languages so far and is one of Sweden’s best-selling non-fiction books of the past half-decade.Įrikson’s other two books can be described as sequels to his debut: Surrounded by Psychopaths is a book about manipulation, and the recently published Surrounded by Bad Bosses a book about, well, bad bosses.įind out more at. Thomas Erikson is a Swedish lecturer and author.

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